This program presents four dances, one on film and three performed live. Each is an arrangement of material drawn from larger works choreographed by Merce Cunningham, offering an opportunity to revisit and reimagine iconic work spanning five decades. This is the third in a series of “In Conversation” programs co-produced by Baryshnikov Arts and the Merce Cunningham Trust.
Beach Birds: A New Arrangement is a film of an adaptation of Cunningham’s Beach Birds (1991) performed at Rockaway Beach in August 2023 as part of Sasha Okshteyn’s Beach Sessions Dance Series. Directed and edited by Alex Munro, the film captures a cast of eleven dancers performing Cunningham’s iconic movement on the rocks and shoreline. The dancers wear costumes after the original design by Marsha Skinner. Arranged and staged by Patricia Lent and Rashaun Mitchell, this work was developed in part during a residency at Baryshnikov Arts.
Signals with Loops, arranged and staged by Jean Freebury and Patricia Lent, combines two solos from Signals (1970) with excerpts from Loops (1971), a solo Cunningham described as “an Event for one.” Sienna Blaw performs the Signals solo originally danced by Cunningham, and Eve Jacobs performs the Signals solo originally danced by Susana Hayman-Chaffey. The original music for Signals, entitled First Week of June, was a collaborative work by John Cage, Gordon Mumma, and David Tudor. The recordings used for this performance were made in 1994 for White Oak Dance Project’s production of Signals. For that production, Mikhail Baryshnikov danced Merce Cunningham’s solo.
XOVER: Duet for Six is a new arrangement of the central duet from XOVER (2007), the final Cage/Cunningham/Rauschenberg collaboration. The duet, originally danced by Jules Cunningham & Daniel Madoff, and Emma Desjardins & Brandon Collwes, is performed here by six dancers in a new arrangement by Collwes. Anaïs Maviel performs an original composition. The costumes reference the white unitards designed by Rauschenberg. XOVER: Duet for Six was developed in part during an artist residency at Baryshnikov Arts.
Suite for Two (1958) is an arrangement of three solos and one duet from the dance Suite for Five (1956). Cunningham made this arrangement for Carolyn Brown and himself for a concert at the University of Pittsburgh in 1958. Suite for Two was subsequently performed on two European tours made by Cunningham, Brown, John Cage, and David Tudor in 1958 and 1960. Chalvar Monteiro dances two solos entitled “At Random” and “Stillness,” Jacquelin Harris dances “A Meander,” a new solo made for Carolyn Brown for the 1958 arrangement. The dance concludes with a duet entitled “Extended Moment.” Renowned pianist Adam Tendler plays John Cage’s Music for Piano. Suite for Two was staged for Harris & Monteiro by Andrea Weber.
All details are subject to change.
Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) was a celebrated dancer and choreographer renowned for his groundbreaking work, his lifelong passion for innovation, and his profound influence on generations of dancemakers and artists. Born in Centralia, Washington, he attended the Cornish School in Seattle where he was introduced to the work of Martha Graham and met the composer John Cage who would become his closest collaborator and life partner. In 1939, Cunningham began a six-year tenure as a soloist in the Graham company, and soon began presenting his own choreography most notably on joint music and dance concerts with Cage. In the summer of 1953, during a teaching residency at Black Mountain College, Cunningham formed a dance company to explore his innovative ideas. Over the course of his seventy-year career he choreographed 180 dances including such iconic works as Suite for Five, Summerspace, RainForest, Sounddance, Pictures, Beach Birds, BIPED, and Ocean. He also presented nearly 800 Events in museums, gymnasiums, outdoor stages and theaters, beginning in 1964 with the Museum Event No. 1 at the Museum des 20.Jahrhunderts. Cunningham premiered his final work, Nearly Ninety, on his ninetieth birthday. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company remained in continuous operation until its closure in 2011, giving nearly three thousand performances in over forty countries.
In collaboration with John Cage, Cunningham proposed a series of radical ideas including the separation of music and dance, the use of chance operations, and novel ways to utilize film and technology. He collaborated with such renowned artists and composers as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and Takehisa Kosugi. Cunningham earned some of the highest honors bestowed in the arts including a MacArthur Fellowship (1985), a Kennedy Center Honor (1985), a Laurence Olivier Award (1985), the National Medal of Arts (1990), and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (2005). In 2004, he was named Officier of the Legion d’Honneur. Today Cunningham’s work continues to be performed by professional and student dancers worldwide, and Cunningham Technique® is taught in countless studios and educational institutions.
John Cage (1912–1992) was a singularly inventive and highly influential American composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist. Throughout his career, he departed from the pragmatism of precise musical notation and circumscribed ways of performance. His principal contribution to the history of music is his systematic establishment of the principle of indeterminacy by adapting Zen Buddhist practices to composition and performance. His aesthetic of chance produced a unique body of “once-only” works, any two performances of which can never be quite the same.
Cage’s mature works did not originate in psychology, motive, drama, or literature, but, rather, were just sounds, free of judgments about their musicality, free of fixed relations, and free of memory and taste. His most enduring composition, influenced by Robert Rauschenberg’s all-black and all-white paintings, is the radically tacet 4’33” (1952), during which no sounds are intentionally produced.
