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Dancing around the Bride

January 10, 2013 by 4 Comments
Dancing Cunningham, October 26. Front (L to R): Melissa Toogood, John Hinrichs, Emma Desjardins. Rear: Marcie Munnerlyn, Brandon Collwes. Photo: Constance Mensh

“May I have the next dance, Marcel?”  “But of course, John!”  “Thank you. By the way, Bob and Jap hope to have a chance too. Merce, of course, is already leaping about somewhere.”  Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp, the stunning exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through January 21), affirms the close artistic and personal connections among John Cage (1912-1992), Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008); Cage was Cunningham’s … [Read more...]

01/10/13 11:48 AM | filed under: mixed media |

Re Winterbranch: The Comment That Grew

November 7, 2012 by 3 Comments
Winterbranch in 1971 performance. Carolyn Brown leaping. Photo: James Klosty

If you happened to read “East to West to East,” my Arts Journal response to Benjamin Millepied’s new company, L.A. Dance Project, soon after I posted it on October 29 (which was shortly before I lost power and connectivity), you will find some small but crucial changes in the early November updates. They occur in my passage about the lighting for the group’s staging of Merce Cunningham’s 1964 Winterbranch. I and a number of others remember a 1965 New York State Theater performance of this radical masterwork in which something that … [Read more...]

11/7/12 9:39 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

Walking With Merce

December 11, 2011 by 7 Comments
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Roaratorio. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

So long, Roaratorio. Goodbye, Biped. Farewell, Second Hand. And Pond Way, Split Sides, Rainforest, it’s been great to know you. Pardon the tears. New Yorkers may see scraps from these works in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Events at the Park Avenue Armory on the last days of 2011. Then silence and stillness. Or, as Cunningham’s longtime collaborator, composer John Cage, might remind us, a silence filled with the sounds of life going on and a stillness fraught with beautiful remembered motion. As the two-year MCDC Legacy Tour … [Read more...]

12/11/11 6:40 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

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