The End of the Legacy: Merce Cunningham’s Final Performances Begin Tonight

“Antic Meet” (1958) with décor and costume by Robert Rauschenberg. (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Written jointly by Jason Andrew and Julia K. Gleich

With a final series of performances beginning tonight and continuing through New Year’s Eve at the Park Avenue Armory, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will close, ending nearly sixty years in operation.

First formed at Black Mountain College in 1953, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has changed the world of dance, not only through the development of a unique dance technique, but also in its embrace of cross-disciplinary collaboration with musicians and artists. Cunningham’s dances certainly stand alone in their use of space, time and the human form, but the experience of his choreography is magnified through his collaborators.

Cunningham’s most famous collaboration was with his life partner the composer/philosopher John Cage. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. One of the most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded can occur in the same time and space but can be created independently of one another.

“This continued to play out over six decades of Merce’s creative lifetime including a variety of other types of artists other than composers including visual artists, digital media artists, filmmakers, dancers, costume designers, and lighting designers,” remarked Trevor Carlson, Executive Director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, at a panel hosted at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on Thursday, December 8. The panel invited four of the Company’s recent collaborators to discuss their work with Merce Cunningham: Daniel Arsham (set design), Gavin Bryars (composer), Paul Kaiser (designer), and Patricia Lent (dancer).

The sculptor Isamu Noguchi was among the earliest artists to team up with Cunningham and Cage, designing sets and costumes for Cunningham’s “The Season’s,” which was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein for his Ballet Society in 1947. And when it was officially founded in the summer of 1953 at Black Mountain College, collaboration had become a vital signature of the company.