MC⁹
Charles Atlas

MC⁹ (2012) is a 9-channel synchronized video work with sound, featuring clips from 21 collaborative works between filmmaker Charles Atlas and choreographer Merce Cunningham. This immersive installation encompasses the entire forty-year collaborative working relationship between these two visionary artists. Together Atlas and Cunningham developed a radical new way of incorporating the camera into live performance, which they referred to as “media dances.” Rather than using it as a static recording device, they allowed the camera to play an active part in the choreography.

In MC⁹, Atlas revisits and reconfigures scenes from such well-known media dances Fractions (1978), Locale (1980), Channels/Inserts (1981), and Ocean (2011) – along with video from other projects on which they worked together. Atlas’ idiosyncratic approach to editing – interspersing existing footage with graphics, numbers, and color fields – weaves the temporality of the individual screens and monitors into an overall experience of movement, sound, and framing.


Charles Atlas (b.1949) is one of the premier interpreters of dance, theater and performance on video. Working in film, video, installation, theater and performance for over four decades, he has created works for screen, stage, gallery, and television. A pioneer in the development of media-dance, he has expanded this genre into an original new form, inventive pastiches of narrative and fictional modes with performance documentary. (Source: EAI)