"Merce Cunningham: Common Time" exhibition

[dirac]

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis presents a major exhibition of items from the Cunningham archives.

Quote

The amount of material amassed over the life of the company—founded in 1953 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an outgrowth of the school’s fertile inter-arts experiments—is staggering: over four thousand objects and texts related to more than 150 dances and eight hundred Events, as Cunningham termed the time-based works that brought independently developed sound, visual elements, and movement into intimate and revelatory proximity on the stage. Extraordinarily collaborative in nature, Cunningham’s practice was closely intertwined with a large cohort of artists, designers, and musicians that included (among many others) Rei Kawakubo, Takehisa Kosugi, Isamu Noguchi, and David Tudor; his philosophy regarding nonrepresentational dance and his frequent use of chance-based methodologies were most importantly shaped in dialogue with his life partner, John Cage.