Audio and Video:
David Tudor's
Ocean
(1994)


Davies / Ocean still frame
 
David Tudor's Ocean is a six-channel, six-monitor video portrait by Molly Davies of David Tudor performing Ocean with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Amsterdam in 1994. Three monitors show three consecutive performances of Ocean, while three more show Tudor's process of setting up. This excerpt shows part of one of the three performances. Conceived and planned by John Cage and Cunningham, the concert version of Ocean consisted of Tudor's electronic score, performed with a fellow musician, John D.S. Adams, an orchestral score by Andrew Culver, and choreography by Cunningham. Davies's called her installation a "six monitor meditation on the elaborate tableau of electronic music-making, in relation to the parallel dance making of Cunningham's Ocean."

Davies started making experimental films in the late 1960s in New York City. She is known for her multimedia performance pieces produced in collaboration with Tudor, Cage, Lou Harrison, Alvin Curran, and other avant-garde artists.