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Vocabulary > Arts > Dance
Merce Cunningham
by Mark Seliger
BAM Presents Merce Cunningham at
90 April 14, 2009
http://dancingperfectlyfree.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/merce-by-mark-seliger.jpg
1984
Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Photo by Tony
Dougherty.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcdc/223170114/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcdc/223170114/
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=merce%20cunningham&w=78629323%40N00
dance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/dance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/sep/22/the-metamorphosis-dance-review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/series/stepbystepguidetodance
ballet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/dec/07/ballet-jennifer-homans-dance
How the 60s New York arts scene revolutionised dance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/oct/12/new-york-60s-arts-scene
avant-garde dancer
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/
us-choreographer-merce-cunningham-dies-at-90-1762991.html
choreographer
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/merce_cunningham/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/30/dance.usa
choreographer > Wayne McGregor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/dec/02/undance-review-sadlers-wells
Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater
gave black
choreography identity and emotional presence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/sep/09/step-by-step-alvin-ailey
Garth Fagan
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/garth_fagan/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/dance/29garth.html
Paul Taylor
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/paul_taylor/index.html
Merce Cunningham
1919-2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/mercecunningham
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/arts/dance/28cunningham.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/
news/us-choreographer-merce-cunningham-dies-at-90-1762991.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2009-07-27-cunningham-obit_N.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072701082.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/27/merce-cunningham-dance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/gallery/2008/sep/16/mercecunningham.dance
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/merce_cunningham/index.html
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/merce-cunningham-dies/?hp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/30/dance.usa
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment/watch/v150357902BFpGeGT#
http://www.merce.org/about_biography.html
http://www.merce.org/about_video.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11Ev9uKlKNM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35kPfQbn7IU
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/07/27/arts/1247463664370/merce-cunningham-1919-2009.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/gallery/2008/sep/16/mercecunningham.dance
Annabelle Lyon 1916-2011
American ballerina who danced with some of
the most important companies
in the formative years of 20th-century American ballet
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/arts/dance/annabelle-lyon-dancer-with-balanchine-dies-at-95.html
Merce Cunningham Dies
July 27, 2009
10:08 am
The New York Times
By Alastair Macaulay
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Merce Cunningham in his company’s
studio in the West Village in 2008.
Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer who was among a handful of
20th-century figures to make dance a major art and a major form of theater, died
Sunday night. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and
George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and
choreography, posing a series of “But” and “What if?” questions over a career of
nearly seven decades.
He went on doing so almost to the last. Until 1989, when he reached the age of
70, he appeared in every single performance given by his company, Merce
Cunningham Dance Company; in 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre,
he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater. And in
2009, even after observing his 90th birthday with the world premiere of the
90-minute “Nearly Ninety,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music he went on
choreographing for his dancers, telling people as they went to say farewell to
him that he was still creating dances in his head.
In his final years he became almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest
choreographer. For many, he had simply been the greatest living artist since
Samuel Beckett.
He had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard
Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred
Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s
equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap.
In old age, when he could no longer jump and when his feet were gnarled with
arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.
International fame came to him before national fame. In due course he was
acknowledged in America as one of its foremost artists, but for a time his work
was known here only in specialist dance, art and music circles. Not so in
London, Paris and other cities. There he was widely celebrated as the creator of
a new classicism, as Diaghilev’s successor, as one of the most remarkable
theater artists of his day.
And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade,
with sold-out Cunningham seasons in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville or the
Opera.
Yet he was always a creature of New York. Close to the founding members of the
so-called New York Schools of Music, Painting and Poetry, Mr. Cunningham
himself, along with Jerome Robbins and the younger Paul Taylor, led the way to
founding what can retrospectively be called the New York School of Dance.
These choreographers both combined and rejected the rival influences of modern
dance and ballet, notably the senior choreographers Martha Graham and George
Balanchine. They absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural
world and city life. They tested connections between private subject matter and
theatrical expression. And they re-examined the relationship between dance and
its sound accompaniment.
With Graham and Balanchine, they made New York the world capital of
choreography; and the New York School influenced the world in showing how pure
dance could be major theater. Many of the dancers who passed through Mr.
Cunningham’s company — notably Mr. Taylor and Karole Armitage — went on to be
prestigious choreographers themselves. Many other choreographers, notably Twyla
Tharp and Mark Morris, paid tribute to his influence.
With his collaborator and life partner John Cage, Mr. Cunningham’s most
celebrated achievement was to have dance and music composed independent of each
other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not
music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things as
well.
A full obituary will follow at nytimes.com.
Merce Cunningham Dies,
NYT, 27.7.2009,
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/merce-cunningham-dies/
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