THAT’S WHAT EVERYONE CALLS HIM. It doesn’t seem improper, we just do it. Merce’s work, Merce’s studio, Merce’s dancers, Merce’s performances. Christened Mercier Philip Cunningham, known as Merce. Why? Because the name so suits him, suggesting, as it does, both the element mercury-quicksilver, changeable, unpredictable-and the god Mercury, fleet-footed messenger from Olympus. Second, fans (and… Continue reading M E R C E
Gordon Mumma, composer in conversation
“I would have to say we were very good friends, all the way through.”
The only way to
Merce Cunningham
do it is to do it
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
Merce Cunningham
THE LEGACY TOUR: THE LAST “SOUNDDANCE”
In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sound-dance, and therinofter you’re in the unbewised again…. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake DECEMBER 2011, THE KENNEDY CENTER “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… Continue reading THE LEGACY TOUR: THE LAST “SOUNDDANCE”
CHANCES ARE / “SPLIT SIDES”
The very first performances of Merce Cunningham’s “Split Sides” were at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it returned during the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour, each night occasioning a series of dice tosses to select among the many possible combinations of set, costumes, music, lights, and choreography. Here is a diary of those… Continue reading CHANCES ARE / “SPLIT SIDES”
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: REMEMBERING JOHN CAGE
Merce Cunningham, with photography from James Klosty He was a man with a mind which was constantly alert to almost everything around him. Very-sharp tongued is wrong-but very bright. He worked constantly”…. Constantly composing or doing art work or answering letters, or writing books. It was simply what he did. And he may have said… Continue reading MERCE CUNNINGHAM: REMEMBERING JOHN CAGE
ON CHANGE
“I look forward to change. If I can make something that I’ve always done one way and then suddenly, for some reason, by accident or whatever it becomes something different, I’m delighted. It gives one a different experience.” Merce Cunningham
CHOREOGRAPHER AMONG THE PAINTERS
Dance is a visual art. Merce Cunningham Robert Rauschenberg: Express at the Beaubourg, Paris IN THIS grey scale canvas we see images surrounding the dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Images of what? Racehorses with jockeys; men rappelling down a cliff; some harmonious and beautiful naked bodies; something that looks like a an underwater… Continue reading CHOREOGRAPHER AMONG THE PAINTERS
OCEAN, a conversation with Merce Cunningham
“Could you make a dance in the round?” John Cage asked Merce Cunningham before the James Joyce/John Cage Festival in Zurich, in June 1991. Cage had in mind a dance performed in the middle of a circular space, surrounded by the audience and then musicians, in concentric circles. There being no suitable venue at the… Continue reading OCEAN, a conversation with Merce Cunningham
A LAST QUESTION
The sky crackled with lightning that night, the air rattled with thunder, and Merce Cunningham joined with the elements so natural to him: the earth, the sky, the water, and the air. Those birds he drew! They could fly as he once could and as, until his last two weeks, he set his dancers to… Continue reading A LAST QUESTION
THE LAST INTERVIEW
Note: Merce Cunningham sat with me for nineteen formal interviews over the last two years of his life. This is the last twenty minutes, unedited, of the last conversation for Mondays with Merce. While I had never intended to include myself in the series, I am off camera here, to allow for the back and… Continue reading THE LAST INTERVIEW
THE I CHING AND ME: Merce Cunningham in conversation
An interview from March 1988, published in Dance Magazine. CLICK FOR PDF OF INTERVIEW
THE ANGLE OF INCIDENT
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Joyce Theater, December 2004 The things in the story are symbols, as it were, only of themselves. – Richard Howard, on Chekhov Experiencing one of Merce Cunningham’s Events is to see a seamless, intermissionless hour (or so) of dance excerpts, combined in a novel context; experiencing eight Events… Continue reading THE ANGLE OF INCIDENT
Rather than say NO, which cuts something off, you can say YES and then find some way to something.
Merce Cunningham
CUNNINGHAM’S DANCERS
PARIS–My last conversation with Merce Cunningham was at his apartment. There he graciously held what was in effect a series of farewells, courteous to the end. That afternoon I read this to him, from the Tao te Ching: Only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is… Continue reading CUNNINGHAM’S DANCERS
BIRTHDAY MESOSTIC
HOW TO / MERCEHave an old soul, but a young heart.Be open to change.Love surprises.Embrace the new.Have friends both old and young.Study nature.Study Zen.Avoid making value judgements.Cast the I Ching.Read the Tao.Make choices by chance procedures,and regard all results with even-mindedness.Be clear.Be uncluttered.Have house plants.Live and work in every direction,so that whichever way you face… Continue reading BIRTHDAY MESOSTIC