< Nearly Ninety

To commemorate his 90th birthday, Merce Cunningham created a new work on an ambitious scale. Mr. Cunningham collaborated with musical contributors Sonic Youth, Takehisa Kosugi, and John Paul Jones, as well as Tony Award-winning lighting designer Brian MacDevitt, and architect Benedetta Tagliabue to create this epic masterpiece.

< Merce at the Museum

Site-specific performances designed to allow audiences to experience the Cunningham aesthetic as they are surrounded by works of fine art.

“The point about Cunningham Events is that each performance is uniquely tailored to the venue where it's staged…. the constant genius of Cunningham's work is its ability to move into large mysteries…. The extreme architecture of the Event works its own magic. The pleasure of making sense of this Event feels like an intensely secret one - until you see the experience reflected on the faces of everyone around.”

–The Guardian 2003

< Ocean (1994)

A 90-minute work (without intermission) for the whole company, performed in the round, with music by David Tudor and Andrew Culver, and lighting and costumes by Marsha Skinner. The piece is in nineteen sections. Cunningham habitually uses a chance process based on the number of hexagrams in the I Ching, resulting in 128 possible phrases. There are solos, duets, trios, quartets, and ensembles involving the entire cast of fourteen dancers.

“…one of those rare events that define the art of this city when the levels of vision and support are equally exceptional.”

–San Francisco Examiner

Excerpt of John Cage’s score Aria.
Copyright ©1960 Henmar Press Inc.

< XOVER

This work by the Company’s three founding pillars presents the juxtaposition of a legendary score by John Cage, daring new choreography by Merce Cunningham, with décor and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, and the interpretive skills of a fearless diva. For Dance Company, electronic ensemble and singer.

XOVER is a co-commission of barbicanbite08, London and the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. XOVER was made possible through public support by the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art.

< eyeSpace

Cunningham’s latest masterpiece can incorporate the iPod with a variety of possibilities for the adventurous presenter; decor by Daniel Arsham or Henry Samelson with three different scores by Mikel Rouse (iPods), David Behrman or Annea Lockwood.

< Gymnasium

An “event” by the Cunningham company creating opportunities for dancing in unusual spaces. Site-specific, low production cost presentation.

< Views on Stage (2004)

The stage version of Cunningham’s latest filmdance, made in collaboration with Charles Atlas, with décor by Ernesto Neto.

< Split Sides (2003)

Split Sides is a work for the full company of fourteen dancers. Each design element was made in two parts, by one or two artists, or, in the case of the music, by two bands (Radiohead, Sigur Ros). The order in which each element is presented is determined by chance procedure at the time of the performance. Mathematically, there are thirty-two different possible versions of Split Sides.

“The dancing always looked new and unexpected. Varied from moment to moment, it ran the gamut from solemnity to whimsy to sheer mass exhilaration. If the music, the stunning movement and all the rest were not exactly made for one another, each element did appear made in such a way as to perfectly illuminate the other components. Chalk up one more triumph for Cunningham.”

–Los Angeles Times 2003

< Crises (1960)

“a dramatic, though not a narrative, dance concerned with decisive moments in the relationship between a man and four women.”

–John Cage

< BIPED (1999)

“For Biped, digital designers Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser created a decor of light illusions. These must be the most precisely tailored designs Cunningham has ever commissioned. Bars of light contribute to the fluid architecture of the piece, expanding and contracting the space in which the dancers move. Spectral figures stride in mid-air, performing the same choreography as the solid bodies below. They are in fact the same bodies, etherealised through motion capture.”

–The Guardian 2000

< Suite for Five (1956-1958)

This piece was made by adding a trio, duet, and quintet to Merce Cunningham’s earlier Solo Suite in Space and Time (1953), which consisted of five solos. Under the title Suite for Five in Space and Time, it was first performed at the University of Notre Dame in May 1956. Music by John Cage and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg.

< Fabrications (1987)

“‘Fabrications’ (1987), from the same decade, has moments of wistful tenderness, 1940s-style dresses (by Dove Bradshaw), snippets of old social dances in the choreography, and old pop songs in the score (by Emanuel Dimas De Melo Pimenta), and half-remembered stories of young romance. It also boasts a riveting performance by Holley Farmer, who combines lightness and flexibility with rocklike aplomb. Sensitively restaged by Patricia Lent, Fabrications reveals a choreographer attuned to the claims of the human heart.”

–Dance Magazine 2002

< CRWDSPCR (1993)

The title may be read as “Crowd Spacer” or “Crowds Pacer,” condensed as in computer language. Like all of Cunningham’s dances since 1991, the choreography was developed with the use of the “DanceForms” software. The impression is of nonstop, even frenetic activity, interrupted only by a long, slow solo for a woman. A more vigorous solo is that for a man, who jumps up and down more than two dozen times.

< Sounddance (1975)

In the fall of 1973 Cunningham had spent nine weeks in Paris working with the Ballet of the Paris Opéra, for whom he choreographed Un jour ou deux. This had been a difficult experience, and when he returned to his own company, he has said, “I felt like doing something vigorous, fast, complex.” The dancers emerge one after the other from an opening in the tentlike structure at the back of the stage. Once they enter, they remain on stage until they are swept back into the structure, as though in a wind tunnel.