The legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) returns to the Hudson Valley one last time before it disbands at the conclusion of its final world tour in December. The Legacy Tour of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company includes Suite for Five, Antic Meet, and Sounddance. The performances will also feature live experimental music from members of Sonic Combine, the Captiva-based trio famous for their work with Rauschenberg. Audience members will have the opportunity to move freely throughout the performance space and to experience the performance from every angle and perspective.
- A post-performance Q&A session with Robert Swinston, director of choreography, and David Vaughan, company archivist, will conclude the evening and provide further insight into the work of this American master.
- The first is of course the dance; the second the decor (costumes and scenery) the third, the music.
- Notes Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, “The Wexner Center is enormously proud to launch The Legacy Tour celebrating Cunningham’s extraordinary, lifelong contribution to the evolution of contemporary dance and creative expression.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company: The Legacy Tour
Here, once again, before our ears and in our ears, three arts-conceived separately and only converging in the theater–will combine, as if they were made for one another. “Sounddance” is Merce Cunningham’s iconic work, and now, this week, it will be performed for the last time in a theater where it has been at home before, in the nation’s capital. In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sound-dance, and therinofter you’re in the unbewised again…. ACCESSIBILITY We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully.
A master class in Cunningham technique, taught by a Cunningham company member, will take place at Ohio State’s Department of Dance for Ohio State dance students and invited local dancers. A post-performance Q&A session with Robert Swinston, director of choreography, and David Vaughan, company archivist, will conclude the evening and provide further insight into the work of this American master. At the conclusion of the world tour, the company will disband permanently, closing an important chapter in this country’s creative legacy. Special thanks to the Thendara Foundation for its support of these performances. The explosive Sounddance (1975) closes the program, with David Tudor’s powerful score in perfect accord with the vigorous, fast-paced dance for the full company.
The Company has mounted these signature site-specific choreographic collages in unusual locations around the world throughout its nearly 60-year history, including two previous engagements in the Armory’s Drill Hall, a 1983 performance and the 2009 public memorial for the legendary dancer and choreographer. The company danced at Jacob’s Pillow in the afternoon, and in the evening, as thunder cracked open the sky, he took his last breath. This was the last dance performed in his lifetime, on the very day he died. (It fills you up, and you send it back.) They applaud the dancers, the musicians. AT ITS END, the dance winds itself back, and one after another, the dancers are sucked–or ushered–back into the void from which they emerged. About, among other things, beginning a dance company; and beginning a dance.
In conjunction with the MCDC performance, the Wexner Center presents artist Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event film project. Promotional support is provided by 90.5 FM WCBE. Merce Cunningham Dance Company is presented with major support from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Visit for additional information. Showcasing two pieces spanning Cunningham’s rich career, the evening draws from the master’s early work and later choreography.
Chris Komar danced in the original and later revived it, the dance surging back to life as his own was winding down, destroyed by AIDS. On Christmas Eve, the company will fly home to give its final performances–three last days at the Park Avenue Armory. Next week, the company returns to New York, for performances at The Brooklyn Academy of Music. You don’t have to look far into this occasion to see that this last performance of this dance is ripe with metaphor.
- “He has taught us something new and powerful about how to dance and how to live.” —Mikhail Baryshnikov, on the late Merce Cunningham
- It’s almost like a circle they make because they’ve come at this from different angles, and instead of it being aligned, where it starts here and goes this way, it does something where it completes itself.
- About, among other things, beginning a dance company; and beginning a dance.
- Special thanks to the Thendara Foundation for its support of these performances.
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The Merce Cunningham Dance Company returns to New York City—its home since its founding in 1953—for six historic final performances at the Armory, culminating a two-year farewell Legacy Tour that brought the Company to more than 50 destinations worldwide. Discover the Armory’s creativity-based arts education programs All quotations from Mondays with Merce ©Nancy Dalva.Photographs courtesy of The Merce Cunningham Trust.Parts of this essay were first published by Alexandra Tomalonis in “DanceViewTimes.”©Nancy Dalva As the Kennedy Center audience cheered, his company took two brief curtain calls, and the lights came with the house still in tumult. At his last “Sounddance” in Washington, Cunningham stayed in the wings, timing the dance with his stop watch as usual, and watching it with his eagle eye. Then applause roars forth, and people surge to their feet, for “Sounddance” is an efficient and exciting energy transfer device.
Wexner Center Presents First Performance of Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour
The Plan also provides for the creation of digital “Dance Capsules” that will bring Cunningham’s work to life for future generations of dancers, scholars, and members of the public. Following Cunningham’s death in July 2009, the Foundation implemented the multifaceted plan, which includes the celebratory two-year Legacy Tour, and supports career transition for the dancers, musicians, and staff who have invested their time and creative efforts into the realization of Cunningham’s vision. The stage teems with life, life, life–dancers caught up in constant complex lifts, spins, shifts, re-groupings, convulsive couplings and triplings. But in Washington, the very last month in the life of a company that began in 1953 starts with the piece that sums it all up. Performing arts programs and events also receive support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members, as well as from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
It is a significant role, for this dancer–first Cunningham, now Swinston–is a master of ceremonies. Out of the center of the backdrop spins a lone figure. He spoke beautiful French, he was honored by the French, he is revered by the French, his company is received in Paris as nowhere else; but this does not preclude a certain impatience with regimentation and protocol. He had just returned from Paris, where he staged “Un Jour ou Deux” on the Paris Opera Ballet, and home in his own studio, with his own company, he experienced a relief from the many exasperating exactions of working with the French. You can, in a sense, visit him in this dance.
The iconic Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) returns to the Arsht Center December 2-4, 2010, with the Legacy Tour, a performance installation that pays homage to the ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary collaboration between Cunningham and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. STG is the 501 (c)(3) non-profit arts organization that operates the historic Paramount, Moore and Neptune Theatres in Seattle, Washington. Centralia, WA native, known as one of the world’s most preeminent dancer/choreographers. The Legacy Tour is the world’s final chance to see the company perform as trained by Cunningham. If drowning brought me further visions of all this choreography, I’d die content.” “They say that a drowning man’s past life flashes before his eyes.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) will embark upon The Legacy Tour, a final two-year international tour that will commence on Friday, February 12 at 8 pm at the Wexner Center’s Mershon Auditorium. “He has taught us something new and powerful about how to dance and how to live.” —Mikhail Baryshnikov, on the late Merce Cunningham The center is closed December 22 through January 2.
In this comedic work, Rauschenberg’s witty costumes come back to life with Cunningham’s vaudeville-like choreography and a playful composition by Cage that makes generous use of multiple forms of notation and different types of music making. The class is recommended for intermediate/advanced dancers, and limited to 30 participants; registration is necessary. What makes the return of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company a wonderful opportunity for the community is the outreach and educational events scheduled throughout the company’s engagement at the Arsht Center. The audience https://astronaut-game-app.com/ will literally move just inches from the dancers! Arsham will transform the stage with three large, multi-level sets where all 14 dancers will perform simultaneously.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company
The performance is not intended to be a seated event, though some chairs will be available. This performance is approximately 50 minutes with no intermission. This momentous engagement marks the final opportunity for audiences to experience first-hand the work of Merce Cunningham as performed by the Company he personally trained and to celebrate Cunningham’s lifetime of creative achievement with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company before it disbands.
David Behrman
You don’t have to know any of this to see the dance, of course, and I don’t think about it –though sometimes it all comes to me unbidden– mostly when I see it I am in it. They both danced with Komar, they both worked with him, they are both Cunningham technique pedagogues of the highest order. At that revival’s first performance, Cunningham came out on stage during the curtain calls with Komar at his side, and the two took a bow together, holding hands, both wearing suits. “Sounddance” is one of the very greatest of dances. There is not, has not been, and won’t ever be another Cunningham dance with a greater unity of impression than this one, the elements joining in a felicitous and exponential explosion. The first is of course the dance; the second the decor (costumes and scenery) the third, the music.
MCDC’s engagement at Bard provides an extraordinary opportunity to see Cunningham’s choreography performed by the last dancers he personally trained, in a program that illuminates his groundbreaking collaborations with his life partner, John Cage, and artist Robert Rauschenberg. Dean spent three days in the fall of 2008 filming Cunningham and his dancers developing an “Event” (the company’s term for a performance composed of movement phrases from past works) in a former Ford assembly plant on the waterfront in the Bay Area. Exclusive to the Miami engagement, dancers will wear original Rauschenberg costumes for every performance.
It’s almost like a circle they make because they’ve come at this from different angles, and instead of it being aligned, where it starts here and goes this way, it does something where it completes itself. Looking at it now, you can see where the dance came from, and where, in the sense of its echoes in later work–it went. It all feels fast, but if you watch “Sounddance” in silence, without the driving force of the score, you will see that there is slow within fast, and fast within slow. It is also a dance that functions, as do so many of Cunningham’s nature studies, on both the microscopic and the macrocosmic levels. This is–and there are works that can be read just the same way in the repertories of other choreographers–a dance about dance, and about dancing.
Merce Cunningham
Major support forthe Wexner Center’s 2009–10 performing arts season is generously provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Their reflections of Cunningham’s artistic legacy are also posted online at (Covey’s here and Eliot’s here). As an institution that itself commissions, supports, and presents multidisciplinary work—and having awarded the 1993 Wexner Prize to Merce Cunningham and John Cage— the Wex is a fitting venue at which to inaugurate this two- year tribute tour.” Notes Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, “The Wexner Center is enormously proud to launch The Legacy Tour celebrating Cunningham’s extraordinary, lifelong contribution to the evolution of contemporary dance and creative expression. The Legacy Tour will be audiences’ last opportunity to see Cunningham works performed by the superb dancers he personally trained. Sounddance (1975)Choreography by Merce CunninghamMusic by David Tudor, ToneburstDécor and costumes by Mark Lancaster
