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Antic Meet excerpt


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Here’s a wonderfully playful excerpt from Merce Cunningham's Antic Meet that I haven't seen anywhere else – the Sports and Diversions No. 2 section – with Cunningham and another male dancer I don’t recognize. This is not the section released on the ArtPix DVD.

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Interesting -- I can't get the video to run, but perhaps it's just having a bad day. I did snoop around the rest of the website -- Cunningham and Carolee Schneeman were the only movement artists I recognized in the masterlist, but under Charles Atlas' listing there are several works including choreography by Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Karole Armitage, Philippe Découflé, John Kelly,

Also a video excerpt from Exchange in 1978 including a solo for Cunningham.

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I got the video to run finally by paying attention to the "View Video" button below the lower right corner of the view window, but first, clicking here and there on its page brought me to this one, where credits for the whole 40 minute film are given, including cast:

Director: Arne Arnbom. Décor and Costumes: Robert Rauschenberg. Producer: Sveriges Radio Televisionen. Music: John Cage. Dancers: Carolyn Browne, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley, Viola Farber, Sandra Neels, Steve Paxton.
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my guess of Charlip is clearly off here.

as the credits show Charlip, who was in the original cast of ANTIC MEET, was not there by the time of this film.

the answer then is Steve Paxton, as noted above and as noted by a more knowledgeable Cunninghamian.

the credits above, btw, misspell Brown's name, she uses no 'e'.

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I love Antic Meet. I bought a video of the whole thing about 10 years ago when he Cunningham company was selling off its stock of old tapes. It is one of my favorite dances of all time. there are many sections, many of them famous i their own right. This Hilarious duet is NOT one ofhte standouts. It's a little like dubliners, wherehte famous sections are Ivy Day in he Committee Room and The Dead but ALL the stories are great and any one by itself is powerful.

THe great thing about htis piece is how thankless it is to any one except for Merce [who famously ran hurdles in his side yard, superbly, but never went out for track].. E.g., and especially, for steve Paxton. For me, it's impossible to see this and not think -- o, that's why Paxton invented invented Contact Improv. he has said, "I wanted to have more fun onstage." And yet it is SO droll. I also can't help wondering if that isn't one of Edward Gorey's mink coats Merce wears to drag Paxton off stage.

RG, can you advise on that matter?

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the following has come from a Cunninghamian in an email correspondence:

<<
The coat in Antic Meet along with all the costumes, apart from the jumper with no head hole, were designed and sourced by Robert Rauschenberg, the then design director for the MCDC or Merce Cunningham and Dancers as it was known.
He bought the coat along with the old second world war parachutes he used to make the dresses for the women, at 2nd avenue thrift stores.
The jumper was conceived by Cunningham and Valda Setterfield advised on how to construct it and made up of many squares of knitted panels, the majority of which were knitted by Setterfield and Cunningham and sewn together by Setterfield.

>>

"jumper," to anyone unfamiliar with British usage, is the name given to the garment we call a sweater hearabouts; the info was culled by the writer of my email from Carolyn Brown's "Chance and Circumstance."

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