February 13, 2006 -

OTTAWA -- America’s most influential living choreographer, Merce Cunningham is genius personified, the pope of avant-garde dance – and the dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company are at their breathtaking best performing an evening of mixed repertoire in Southam Hall of the National Arts Centre on Saturday February 25, 2006 at 20:00. In nearly 200 original works choreographed since the 1940s, Merce Cunningham has always prized invention over convention. Using elements of chance in his choreographic process and its musical accompaniment, and employing computers to create an unending array of movement possibilities, Cunningham has consistently created new languages for dance. The current company of 14 dancers is known for exquisitely strong technique and their dynamism and warmth as performers. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform Suite for Five, Native Green, and Split Sides -- effortlessly demonstrating the infinite inventiveness of dance as abstract movement.

“Possibilities in dance are bound only by our imagination and our two legs.”

Merce Cunningham

A great paradox of Merce Cunningham has always been the classical structure of his choreography, which, moment to moment, honours the body in all its symmetry. He epitomises an appealingly clean and sharply delineated choreographic style, demanding a high level of refinement and strength from his dancers. Cunningham’s aesthetic, in which music, décor, and even separate sections of a dance happen simultaneously with no causal relationship, creates an atmosphere in which the unusual becomes commonplace. Even for those who have been Cunningham watchers for decades, the incredibly prolific Merce Cunningham (who creates a new work each year) has never lost the capacity to surprise -- while the company repertoire remains engaging decade after decade.

Writing in The New Yorker magazine, dance critic Joan Acocella said, “I don’t think any choreographer in the world gives us a closer look at the truth. Beauty without reasons, and without anxiety over the lack of reasons: that may be what life was like before we started making it up. Sometimes, when I look at Cunningham’s stage, I think I’m seeing the world on the seventh day, with everything new and just itself — before the snake, and the tears, and the explanations.”

Suite for Five was created in 1956-58 with music by John Cage (Music for Piano), costumes by the renowned visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, and lighting by Josh Johnson (2002). The five short pieces in Suite for Five are highly theatrical, with the effortless floating quality of ballet. Merce Cunningham has said about this piece, “The events and sounds of this dance revolve around a quiet center, which, though silent and unmoving, is the source from which they flow.” As in all Cunningham pieces, there is no narrative, no characters -- just the dancers and their movements. Though music accompanies the piece, it is not necessary, as the dance should be able to speak for itself. That is the Cunningham philosophy.

Native Green is a lighthearted piece for three couples who dance in unison, set to electronically altered guitar music by John King. “I think it’s a quite lyric work. I was thinking that dancers should do more dancing together,” Cunningham has said. Like many of the choreographer’s works, Native Green uses Cunningham's trademark technique of isolated collaboration. Choreographer and composer agree on an exact length for a work and then go their separate ways. The dance and the music are created apart from one another – and sometimes Cunningham doesn’t hear the music at all until the day the piece is performed. It is left to the audience to connect the sound to the movement.

Take a chance on dance! Premiered in 2003 during the company’s 50th anniversary season, the joyful and visually stunning Split Sides literally rolls the dice five times to determine the order of the choreography, costumes, lighting, décor, and music (still innovative and adventurous, Merce Cunningham has set the piece to music by Britain’s Radiohead and Iceland’s Sigur Rós). Thus, this may be the first occasion in which those elements have been presented in that order, and it may be the last. Therein lies Cunningham’s essence: every moment, every dance, every experience is unique, and should be savoured for its uniqueness. During Split Sides, pristine moves and deep pliés take on a life of their own as body flips and transitory encounters flood the stage.

CELEBRITY DICE ROLLERS
Before Split Sides begins, rolling the dice onstage in Southam Hall will be:
Cathy Levy, Producer of Dance Programming at the National Arts Centre
Peter Boneham, Artistic Director of Ottawa’s innovative Le Groupe Dance Lab
José Navas, dancer-choreographer and Artistic Director of Montreal’s Compagnie Flak
Stephen Beckta, Ottawa’s most famous sommelier; and
Pierre Brault, well-known Ottawa performer and comedian

“…the dancing was fast-paced, mischievous and fun, with an almost carnival air.”

Sarah Kaufman, The Washington Post

 “[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

“Merce Cunningham’s dances can induce love at first sight.”

Dance Magazine, 2002

“Here is a choreographer whose genius… is internationally recognized and honoured. Even if one knows nothing about the underlying principles of his works, those works testify – through their purity, originality and complexity – to the integrity of a seminal giant in the field.”

The New York Times, 1999

“There is no dance company today in which style and technique are more ideally fused. No company of dancers today is composed of more individually attractive (or attractively individual) people. And no company today has such consistently superb choreography.”

Financial Times, London, 1999

“Merce Cunningham reinvented dance, and then waited for the audience... The elegance, simplicity, and force of his work are unique -- and undeniable... he has taught us something new and powerful about how to dance and how to live, and about the diversity of art in America.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov

CHOREOGRAPHY Merce Cunningham

Suite for Five (1956-1958)
MUSIC John Cage, from Music for Piano
COSTUMES Robert Rauschenberg
LIGHTING Beverly Emmons

Native Green (1985)
MUSIC John King, Gliss in Sighs
DÉCOR AND COSTUMES William Anastasi
LIGHTING William Anastasi, reconstructed by Aaron Copp

Split Sides (2003)
MUSIC Radiohead, Sigur Rós
DÉCOR Robert Heishman, Catherine Yass
COSTUMES James Hall
LIGHTING James F. Ingalls

Merce Cunningham Dance Company performs Suite for Five, Native Green, and  Split Sides in Southam Hall of the National Arts Centre on Saturday February 25, 2006 at 20:00. Tickets are $51.50, $48.50, $38 and $29, and $26.75, $25.25, $20 and $15.50 for students (upon presentation of a valid student ID card). Tickets are available at the NAC Box Office (in person) and through Ticketmaster (with surcharges) at (613) 755-1111; Ticketmaster may also be accessed through the NAC’s website at www.nac-cna.ca. Last-minute tickets (subject to availability) for full-time students are $10 at the Live Rush Centre in the NAC Foyer two hours before each performance only, upon presentation of a valid ‘Live Rush’ card.NEW for 2005-06! Groups of 10+ save 15% to 20% off regular ticket prices to all NAC Music, Theatre and Dance performances; to reserve your seats, call 947-7000 ext. 384 or e-mail grp@nac-cna.ca

Photos for all dance events can be viewed and downloaded at: www.nac-cna.ca/media/

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Information:
Gerald Morris
Marketing and Media Relations, NAC Dance Department
(613) 947-7000, ext. 249
gmorris@nac-cna.ca

MERCE CUNNINGHAM, born in Centralia, Washington, received his first formal dance and theatre training at the Cornish School in Seattle. From 1939 to 1945, he was a soloist in the Martha Graham company. He presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in April 1944. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) was formed in the summer of 1953. Since that time Cunningham has choreographed nearly 200 works for his company. In 1973 he choreographed Un jour ou deux for the Ballet of the Paris Opéra, with music by John Cage and design by Jasper Johns. (A revised version was presented there in 1986.) The Ballet of the Paris Opéra also performed a revival of his Points in Space in 1990. His work has also been presented by New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Zurich Ballet, and Rambert Dance Company (London), among others.

Cunningham has worked extensively in film and video, in collaboration first with Charles Atlas and later with Elliot Caplan. In 1999, the collaboration with Atlas was resumed with the production of the documentary Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance. In 2004-2005, they collaborated again on a new piece whose final form is in two versions, Views on Camera and Views on Video. This was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; further projects under this grant will include films of Split Sides (2003) and Ocean (1994; revived 2005).

Cunningham's interest in contemporary technology has also led him to work with the computer program DanceForms, which he has used in making all his dances since Trackers (1991). In 1997, he began work in motion capture with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar of Riverbed Media to develop the decor for BIPED, with music by Gavin Bryars, first performed in 1999 at Zellerbach Hall, University of California at Berkeley. Another major work, Interscape (2000), reunited Cunningham with his early collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, who designed both décor and costumes for the dance, which has music by John Cage. 

In 2002-2003, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company celebrated its 50th anniversary, beginning with performances at the Lincoln Center Festival 2002 in New York City and ending in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s ‘Next Wave’ Festival in October 2003, when Split Sides was first presented. In the summer of 2005, MCDC again appeared in the Lincoln Center Festival, presenting a revival of the 1994 work Ocean.  

In October 2005, Merce Cunningham received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo. Other honours and awards include the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2000), the Handel Medallion from the Mayor of New York City (1999), the Bagley Wright Fund Established Artists Award, Seattle (1998), the Nellie Cornish Arts Achievement Award from his alma mater, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle (1996), the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (1995), and the Wexner Prize of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus (with John Cage, posthumously, 1993). Cunningham was also a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1985, in which year he also received a Laurence Olivier Award in London and a MacArthur Fellowship. In France, he was made Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1982 and first Chevalier (1989) and then Officier (2004) of the Légion d'Honneur.

Cunningham has collaborated on two books about his work: Changes: Notes on Choreography, with Frances Starr (Something Else Press, New York, 1968), and The Dancer and the Dance, interviews with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (Marion Boyars, New York and London, 1985). Merce Cunningham/Dancing in Space and Time, a collection of critical essays edited by Richard Kostelanetz, was published in 1998 by Da Capo Press. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, chronicle and commentary by David Vaughan, was published in 1997 by Aperture and in French translation by Editions Plume. A digital supplement entitled Merce Cunningham: Fifty Forward was produced by the Cunningham Dance Foundation in 2005. Aperture published Other Animals -- Cunningham’s drawings and journals -- in 2002.

In August 2001, Merce Cunningham returned to the stage in the first theatrical presentations of John Cage’s An Alphabet, at the Edinburgh Festival, with subsequent engagements in Berlin, Champaign-Urbana (Illinois), Berkeley, California, and Perth, Western Australia. In the revival of How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965), first performed in the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival at the New York State Theater, Merce Cunningham read the accompanying stories by John Cage, together with David Vaughan.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY (MCDC) came into being in the summer of 1953, when Cunningham took a group of dancers who had been working with him in New York to Black Mountain College, the progressive liberal arts school near Asheville, North Carolina. The group included Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Paul Taylor, and Remy Charlip, who also designed costumes for many of the early dances. John Cage was music director and David Tudor the company musician. In June 1964, as the company began its second decade, it set off on a world tour that was to last six months, with performances in Western and Eastern Europe, India, Thailand, and Japan. The recognition, by audiences and critics alike, of the importance of the work of Cunningham and Cage and their associates made this tour a turning point in the company’s history. Extended domestic tours and New York seasons were soon part of the annual schedule, as well as further trips abroad. John Cage’s association with the company continued until his death in August 1992, when David Tudor succeeded him as music director. Tudor died in August 1996. In 1995, Takehisa Kosugi was appointed music director. From 1954 to 1964, Robert Rauschenberg was the company’s resident designer.

The following decade saw a number of celebrated collaborations with visual artists such as Jasper Johns (who was appointed artistic advisor in 1967), Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Robert Morris. Mark Lancaster succeeded Johns as artistic advisor in 1980, and was in turn succeeded by William Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw, from 1984 to 1995. Since the 1970s, Cunningham has choreographed a number of video- and filmdances in collaboration with Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan. The collaboration with Atlas resumed with the production of the documentary Merce Cunningham: a lifetime of dance, shown in the PBS ‘American Masters’ series in December 2001. In August 2004, Cunningham and Atlas collaborated on Views on Camera and Views on Video. The stage version, Views on Stage, was performed for the first time in Edinburgh at the conclusion of the company’s UK tour in October 2004.

In July 2005 the company opened the Lincoln Center Festival in New York with a revival of the 1994 work Ocean, which will also be performed in London in October 2006.  After single performances in Battery Park, New York, and Le Havre, France, the company toured in the fall to Houston TX, Lawrence KS, Chicago IL, South Bend IN, Minneapolis MN, and West Lafayette IN. North American touring continues in 2006 with visits to Ottawa, Ithaca NY, and Washington DC. The company will return to Seoul, South Korea, in April. A European tour will follow in May, with appearances in Budapest, Hungary; Rome and Modena, Italy; and Grenoble, France.