His entire career was a heroic act of vision and persistence. One of the most revered and revolutionary choreographers of the 20th century, Cunningham was a rule breaker who collaborated deeply with many artists, including his life partner, composer John Cage. Their experiments involved allowing music and dance to exist separately, as well as introducing the concept of chance as a creative device.
In 2019, the year of his centennial, Cunningham — who died at 90 in 2009 — is being celebrated all over the world with performances, workshops, talks, screenings and more.
“The ideas are still very much alive and relevant and exciting and creative,” Ken Tabachnick, the executive director of the Merce Cunningham Trust, said. “Every time I see something again, I’m just amazed at how relevant it is. It could have been made yesterday.”
That is one of the important points that Tabachnick and Trevor Carlson — a trustee and the producer of the trust’s celebration of the centennial — hope to impart with the multitentacled celebration. Events continue all year and are updated on the trust’s website, but one highlight is just around the corner: “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event,” on April 16, Cunningham’s birthday.
Three cities — London (at the Barbican), New York (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Los Angeles (at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA) — will stage Events, the name that Cunningham gave to performances that featured fragments of works from his repertory. (Events date to 1964.)
“We’re looking to continue Merce’s tradition of doing things that hadn’t been done before,” Carlson said. “We wanted to make the largest Event ever made.”
In the spirit of the new, none of the performers — including New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns, Martha Graham dancer PeiJu Chien-Pott and choreographers Kyle Abraham and Vicky Shick — are former Cunningham dancers. Those dancers are involved, however, in staging the solos. (Cunningham’s company, according to his wishes, disbanded after his death and a legacy tour.)
“We wanted to signal that the Cunningham legacy has a future for people who never experienced Cunningham,” Tabachnick said. “So you’ll see ballet dancers, you’ll see dancers who are not classically or rigorously trained, you’ll see younger dancers and older dancers. And that is to show the diversity and breadth of the possibilities for the legacy.”
Events are piling up and include a Cunningham celebration at the Joyce Theater (April 17-21) featuring Compagnie CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston, Ballet West and the Washington Ballet.
Amid the excitement, Carlson has a problem. It’s a good one.
“It’s wild, but I’m afraid we might have to expand the amount of time of the centennial in order to include everyone who wants to be included,” he said. “I think we’re going to see ourselves extending to what would have been Merce’s 101st birthday.”
— GIA KOURLAS
Also Looking Forward To ...
Dance Theater of Harlem This has never been just another ballet troupe. It was created, in 1969, as a hopeful reaction to hope-crushing circumstances. The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the spurs to action, but the principal problem in need of addressing was long-standing and continuing: the dearth of opportunities for ballet dancers who were not white. “You can’t do this,” these dancers were told by the world in many ways. Dance Theater of Harlem told them they could and then proved it to the world.
The survival of this institution for 50 years deserves a big celebration. With the death of its trailblazing founding director, Arthur Mitchell, in September, the anniversary festivities have also become memorials. In recent decades the company has valiantly struggled with diminished funds, and its New York season at City Center (April 10, 12-13) isn’t as grand as one might wish. Such signatures pieces as “Agon,” “Firebird” and “Creole Giselle” return only in excerpts. But it’s appropriate that one of Mitchell’s works (“Tones”) is being revived, and Robert Garland, the troupe’s underrecognized resident choreographer, is presenting a premiere. However these turn out, the occasion is major.
— BRIAN SEIBERT
Pam Tanowitz at New York City Ballet (and Beyond) When Emma Portner, known for her video dances, withdrew from a New York City Ballet commission, the company turned to Pam Tanowitz. The circumstances are hardly ideal, but here’s a one-word reaction: Finally.
Tanowitz, whose new ballet will be unveiled at the company’s spring gala May 2, has been making dances since 1992. Celebrated for her ability to mix classical and contemporary vocabulary within a framework of formal structures, she will expand a piece set to Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5 that she created during a choreographic workshop at American Ballet Theatre in 2017.
It’s not the prolific Tanowitz’s only new dance this season: In April, she presents a work at the Martha Graham Dance Company; another commission, from Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, will have its premiere at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Bach Festival in June, the same month she presents a new work for her company and City Ballet dancers Sara Mearns and Taylor Stanley at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival.
And on March 22, she will land in Cleveland to stage a site-specific work at Pilgrim Congregational Church for her company along with local dancers. “Recital #1 (five small dances for Cleveland)” is an experiment: She’s looking at ways to reimagine her repertory.
— GIA KOURLAS
Ligia Lewis at Performance Space Every so often, New Yorkers catch a glimpse of choreographer Ligia Lewis, who spends much of her time in Berlin. Her brief visits, which in recent years have been high points of the American Realness festival, are not to be missed.
Capping the refusal-themed “No Series” at Performance Space New York, Lewis will present “minor matter” and “Water Will (in Melody),” two parts of a triptych that began in 2014 with the spare and piercing “Sorrow Swag.” Each work in the trilogy corresponds to a color, teasing out its associations: blue, red and white. (“Sorrow Swag” featured a lone male performer enveloped in blue light.)
First seen in New York at Abrons Arts Center, where three indefatigable dancers (Lewis included) seemed almost to topple the theater walls, “minor matter” (red) returns May 21-22. Exploring the space between love and rage — and the relationship between blackness and the black-box theater — it stages a kind of tangled collective struggle, in which the people onstage could be conspiring with or against one another, maybe both at once. The final part, “Water Will (in Melody),” May 28-29, flirts with melodrama and catastrophe, which sounds like a fitting end.
— SIOBHAN BURKE
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.