Category: dance

“With the news of Merce Cunningham’s death has come a blizzard of wonderful photographic portraits of the dancer in action. He was a great camera subject, often caught in mid-flight, lyrical yet hyperbolic, arrestingly individualistic. To this extraordinary photographic record … I would like to add a small trove of images of Cunningham from around 1946, which unlike so much of what we have been seeing are not products of the photographer’s eye.”

“[I]magine a situation where the paintings of Rauschenberg or Bacon were taken down from galleries as soon as those artists died; where the novels of Saul Bellow were removed from the bookshelves, or the music of Stravinsky was silenced. … No other art form would accept for a second that death implied the possible death of an artist’s oeuvre. But what makes this a genuine issue for modern dance is the umbilically close connection between most choreographers, their companies and their work.”

“The tenders of Merce Cunningham’s flame are now known. The dance foundation devoted to the choreographer, who died at 90 on July 26, named on Wednesday the four individuals Mr. Cunningham had selected as trustees of his life’s work.”

Evansville Dance Theatre has filed a legal action against its former artistic director and ballet mistress for violating a non-compete clause in a contract. Keith Martin and B.J. Martin resigned from the company on June 8, claiming “artistic interference from the organization’s board of directors,” and opened a dance studio in the city.

In James Jeon’s She, Giselle, “The characters are the same, but the story takes a turn when Giselle realizes that her lover, Albrecht, is actually her half-brother … [and then] runs away without telling Albrecht that she’s pregnant. The lonely Giselle … ends up in a brothel … and finally dies of AIDS.”

“Last year’s short season has turned out to be the last for Le Groupe Dance Lab. The dance company’s board of directors announced on Friday that the company would be shut down. … The final decision to close the company was the result of the loss of one third of its budget (a reduction due to the suspension [of operations in January]) which would make it difficult to attract a new artistic director or mount a performance season.”

Joan Acocella: “Merce Cunningham’s signal achievement is that he established modernism–abstraction, decentralization–in dance. In consequence, some people loathed his work, thought it was a prank. Which meant, of course, that others were required to like it. … Now, perhaps, audiences will be able to think about him more clearly.”

“This Event, lasting just over an hour, took place on two separate small stages, with a long corridor of space between them. To concentrate on one stage but occasionally glimpse entirely different choreography occurring in the distance on the other — a characteristic Cunningham arrangement — was poignant, frustrating and thrilling. There was a sense of abundance, a reminder that there is always more dance than we can absorb.”

“So You Think You Can Dance” was judged the winner by Thursday primetime viewers ages 18-49, according to Nielsen preliminary nationals, enabling Fox to score a victory in the demo. CBS topped the night in overall viewers.

“The tone of Cunningham’s obituaries is significantly different from that of Cage’s. When he died in 1992, less than a month before his 80th birthday, Cage was widely credited for being among the most original music thinkers of all time and among the most influential and charismatic musicians of his day. But no one dared call him the greatest composer of his time.”