Courtesy of arts·meme friend Nancy Dalva [her blog, the informal formalist], the recently named Merce Cunningham Trust Scholar in Residence, comes this marvelous photo of the great dance maker who passed away in 2009. Nancy sits, at right, in conversation with Cunningham.

Among her other activities, Nancy has been producer/writer of the Internet series Mondays With Merce.

In a note, Nancy updates us on what she’s overseeing at the Merce Cunningham Trust.

The web series proper ended as the company did, with The Last Interview webisode — just Merce (my questions off camera) in the last 20 minutes of our last interview — of some 19, all filmed. The footage of Merce is unedited.

Over the series, “Mondays with Merce” filmed Cunningham:

• teaching 15 full Cunningham Technique™ classes; 
• rehearsing his company in more than 30 works on 31 afternoons; 
• working on location staging five Events at Dia:Beacon, and
• onstage on his 90th birthday.

The crew filmed in New York, Los Angeles, and Moscow — including his Memorial at the Park Avenue Armory — and documented the final weeks of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  

For the series, I conducted–in addition to the 19 interviews with MC, 42 other interviews, all filmed.

All of this film makes up the “Mondays with Merce” Film Library, which will belong to the Merce Cunningham Trust.

_{Photo by Christopher Young, courtesy N. Dalva}

Alas dance fans will have to traipse to Minneapolis to see the stuff, made in New York City though it was. The art works represent the choreographer’s seminal collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, John  Cage, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others.

The collection will roost at the Walker Art Center, one of the most progressive art museums in the county and an ardent supporter of Cunningham, who died in 2009 after a nearly 70 year career.

It actually makes sense for the 150-object collection to reside at the Walker. The museum’s relationship with Cunningham dates to 1963, when MCDC first performed in Minneapolis. Since then, the Walker actively supported Cunningham’s work over 45 years through nine residencies, three commissions, an exhibition, and some 17 separate engagements, including three world premieres and two U.S. premieres.

That’s huge. We can’t get a coherent sponsorship of dance, or even an acknowledgment that it’s an art form, from an L.A. museum, by hook or by crook.

The collection’s highlights include Rauschenberg’s combine Minutiae (1954/1976), and Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds installation, used in the dance RainForest (1968) (pictured above).

Click on all three photos to see details. When you look, try to grasp what this modest and unassuming man from Washington state had the vision to put before his audience.

Highlights of the Walker/Cunningham collaboration include the MCDC’s 1969 Walker residency, in which the company performed the iconoclastic Canfield; the 1998 exhibition Art Performs Life, exploring the work and life of Cunningham; Event for the Garden (1998), a special performance in front of Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen to celebrate the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden’s 10th Anniversary, which incorporated dozens of Andy Warhol’s silver Mylar pillows floating in the air around the stage; and Cunningham’s monumental restaging of Ocean (2000), at the bottom of a Minnesota quarry.

The collection will be displayed in November 2011 concurrent to the Cunningham’s company’s last performances at the Walker.

Founded in 1879, the Walker was established at its current location in Minneapolis in 1927. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided crucial underwriting to the purchase and transfer of the collection. Thank you, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for your love of dance.

Read this story in The Huffington Post.

_{Minutiae (1954) MCDC perform against Rauschenberg work of same name, one of earliest and largest freestanding Combines he created. Photo Herb Migdoll, 1976}

_{Rainforest (1968) featuring Andy Warhol mylar pillows, Cunningham, Meg Harper dancers}

Excerpted from article concerning the wind-up of MCDC as a performing ensemble, from March 2011 issue of “Dance” Magazine

Intended to avoid the disastrous legal squabbles of the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1990s, the [Legacy] plan provides a road map to ensure the continued life of Cunningham’s oeuvre while also making the announcement of the phased shutdown of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The two-year Legacy Tour has already traveled to more than 20 cities and will wind down with a final performance in New York on Dec. 31. On that bittersweet New Year’s Eve, the remarkable ensemble, a creative engine for the last half of the 20th century, will disband.

Read full article here.

_{Photos: Merce Cunningham in Fabrications, 1987, photo by Dee Conway.}

The program includes the marvelous “Split Sides,” made in 2003 to a rock score by Sigur Rós and Radiohead. I wrote about “Side Splits” in La Opinión at the time. Read it here.

Enjoy these unbelievable Merce-only photographs of “Split Sides”:

[[Show as slideshow]]

Everyone understands that Merce Cunningham Dance Company will wind down at the end of this year, correct? Consult the Legacy Tour schedule here.

_{photo: Stephanie Berger}

	Barysh & the Merce’ites click for better view
Marisa Meets Misha click for better view
	Mark Murphy, Executive Director, REDCAT, Trevor Carlson, Executive Director, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Mikhail Baryshnikov, guest artist click for better view

photo credit: stefanie keenan

• merce misha mashup
• DANCE REVIEW: Cunningham’s “Roaratorio“
• Los Angeles Music Center co-commissions “Roaratorio”
• LA Observed writes about the event.
  

“It was unutterably moving to watch,” said long time company archivist David Vaughan of the historic reconstruction of “Roaratorio” (1983) that graced Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s fare-thee-well performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall this weekend.

“We all feel Merce in the dance.”

Indeed, watching company elder Robert Swinston, 60, clad in purple trousers, perform Cunningham’s solo midway through “Roaratorio’s” heady deconstruction of Irish social dance, you recognize the great departed dancer/choreographer’s idiosyncratic gestures.

The way Merce liked to lunge sideways, how he would kick like a Rockette while walking, stab a straight arm to advance himself through space … seeing this, you miss him. It makes you remember the thrilling moment when he would join his (young) group on stage — and the way his odd elfin presence, and his separateness, would affect the proceedings.

“Roaratorio”, for me, needed two viewings. The same dance whose hard-core relentlessness almost broke me on Friday, two days later swelled my emotions with its sensual beauty!

Sunday’s outpost in Disney Hall’s uppermost rows gave the most pleasurable perspective. There, on high, the aural flotsam and jetsam of John Cage’s brilliant Ireland-derived score wafted through their air. (James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” inspired the ambient sound collage — seagulls, car traffic, baby cries, moos, neighs.) And you could gaze down on Cunningham’s immensely contained, rigorous choreographic chess game.

The unceasing pageant of “Roaratorio” is revealed through many memorable dance episodes; Swinston indicates 36 components contributed to the whole. In the one sequence that, for me, forms the heart of the ballet’s long contiguous outpouring, four to five dancers traverse the stage, freely and grandly, adding and dropping colleagues from the wings as they go. It’s the tide washing over the shore, dislodging and dispersing pebbles and seaweed with each swipe. A man enters, but rather than join the pulsating group, he lifts and puts down a woman without losing a beat. It’s abstract, beautiful patterning, and when Cunningham adds the unexpected lift you think, aha, so this is choreography.

By “Roaratorio’s” end, you’re seeing an Irish village. The community’s youngsters engage in mating duets, facing one another, raising and holding hands high to the side. Only it’s fractured fairy tales; they’re broken puppets and it’s all off-sync; they’re herky-jerky reelers. Right at that moment, perfectly, a sheep rudely bleets in Cage’s score.

Other couples seem older: crisscrossing arms, they conduct a foggy do-si-do, slowly, methodically, promenading the stage. Here, a touch of Irish melancholia seeps in.

Merce, we knew ye well. Come on, he was the dance world’s leprechaun.

Cunningham trademarks are all there: the plethora of leaps (for a long stretch the dance seems to be all leaping), the stage-skittering “triplets,” the calmly planted big-bird arabesques, and, most familiar, upper-torso arches with sudden side- or upward-tilts of the head. Who else does this move? No one. Only Merce Cunningham.

Ah, Disney Hall as a dance venue! The dancers, when “off duty,” repair to seats behind the stage, still in full audience view, and there they rest, sip from water bottles and await re-entry. One cannot help but muse that architect Frank Gehry upholstered these seats with vibrant flowered fabric to honor Lillian Disney’s love of gardening. And that tonight, how we would do the same for Merce if only we could … hand him a huge bouquet.

Prior posts:

• Los Angeles Music Center co-commissions “Roaratorio” revival
• Neil Greenberg chats about “Roaratorio”