Of the five
principal works I have written for dance, two are in a
humorous vein: “The Race of Life,” written
for Doris Humphrey, and “Opus 51,” for
Charles Weidman. The problem was to capture the kind of
comedy involved, the particular area of the human
dilemma. In addition, “The Race of Life”
(based on drawings by James Thurber) had a story and
definite characters, while Opus 51 had neither. In both
works I had to discover the serious musical stance from
which humor could be achieved….
”Opus 51,”
lacking story or characters, was almost pure comedy, if
there is such a thing. In it Weidman achieved a kind of
collage. No attempt was made to create situations leading
to a comic “point.” Instead, we were shown
unrelated actions strung together, the ultimate
expression of the absurd….Weidman, using illogical
sequences of action, succeeded in making us laugh by
treating these sequences as seriously as if they were the
normal course of events. In this rearrangement of
reality, we sensed that reality was perhaps just another
arrangement, and we enjoyed the upsetting of the proper
order of things.
The music for both these
dances was written after the dance was composed, although
not after the entire work was finished. I would write a
section as each new part of the dance was completed. In
composing for choreography there is the problem of
developing a musical structure and continuity. I was able
to do this by not composing for individual moments or
patterns, but by sensing the impulse that moved the
dancer.
–Vivian Fine, Dance Perspectives, v. 16,
1963