Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham (1919 – 2009) was born in Centralia, Washington. He received his first formal dance and theater training at the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle. From 1939 to 1945, he was a soloist in the company of Martha Graham. He presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in April 1944. Merce Cunningham Dance Company was formed at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1953. Since that time Cunningham choreographed nearly 200 works for his company. His work has also been presented by New York City Ballet, the Ballet of the Paris Opera, American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Zurich Ballet, Netherlands Ballet, and Rambert Dance Company (London), among others.
Cunningham worked extensively in film and video, in collaboration first with Charles Atlas and later with Elliot Caplan. In 1999, the collaboration with Atlas was resumed with the production of the documentary Merce Cunningham, a Lifetime of Dance. Atlas has directed further archival films of repertory works as part of an ongoing project funded by the Mellon Foundation. The new webcast series Mondays with Merce features footage of Cunningham leading technique class and Company rehearsal interwoven with archival footage and interviews with former dancers and collaborators.
Cunningham’s interest in contemporary technology also led him to work with the computer program DanceForms, which he has used in making all his dances since Trackers (1991). In 1997, he began work in motion capture with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar of Riverbed Media to develop the décor for BIPED, with music by Gavin Bryars.
His final production, Nearly Ninety, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on his 90th birthday on April 16, 2009. Nearly Ninety featured a score composed and performed live by Sonic Youth, Led Zeppelin cofounder John Paul Jones, and longtime MCDC music director Takehisa Kosugi as well as the work of Barcelona-based architect Benedetta Tagliabue, fashion designer Romeo Gigli, and Tony award-winning lighting designer Brian MacDevitt.
Merce Cunningham was the recipient of numerous awards including the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2000), the Handel Medallion from the Mayor of New York City (1999), the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (1995), and the Wexner Prize of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus (with John Cage, posthumously, 1993). Cunningham was also a recipient of the National Medal of Arts (1990) and the Kennedy Center Honors (1985), a Laurence Olivier Award in London (1985), and a MacArthur Fellowship (1985). In France, he was made Officier of the Legion d’Honneur (1989) and Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2004).
Cunningham and the Pacific Northwest
Mercier Philip Cunningham attended Cornish College of the Arts (1937 – 1939) and went on to international renown. He was born in Centralia, Washington, yet took his birthplace with him. The names of Cunningham dances "Rainforest" (1968), "Borst Park" (1972), "Inlets" (1977) and "Inlets 2" (1983), all refer to parts of Washington. It was as a student at the Cornish School that Cunningham met his lifelong collaborator and partner John Cage, and they began their groundbreaking interdisciplinary experiments. Over the years, Cunningham repeatedly returned to the region for personal and professional visits, sometimes creating and premiering new work.
Recommended Resources
Selected Accolades
- Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1954, 1959
- Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1982
- Inducted as an Honorary Member into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1984
- Kennedy Center Honoree, Washington DC, 1985
- MacArthur Fellowship, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 1985
- Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, France, 1989
- National Medal of Arts, Washington DC, 1990
- Named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, 2000
- Inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, 1993
- Made an Officier of the Légion d'Honneur, France, 2004
- Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo, 2005
- Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, Skowhegan Medal for Performance, 2009
On a local level, in 1996 Cunningham was honored with the Nellie Cornish Arts Achievement Award from Cornish, in 1998 he received the Bagley Wright Fund Established Artists Award, and in 2006 Cornish awarded Cunningham an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.
Patricia Lent // Stager and Director of Licensing Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Patricia Lent was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1984 – 1993) and White Oak Dance Project (1994 – 1996). She has been on the faculty of the Merce Cunningham Studio since 1988, teaching technique classes and workshops, and staging repertory. She is currently the Director of Repertory Licensing for the Cunningham Dance Foundation, and was recently named a trustee of the Cunningham Trust.
From 1998 to 2007, Lent taught second and third grade at P.S. 234 in Lower Manhattan. Her essay in Forever After: New York City Teachers on 9/11, includes an account of the class trip she took to an MCDC rehearsal which launched the Cunningham Studio’s Educational Outreach Program. She holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia, and an M.S.Ed. from Bank Street College of Education.
John Cage
John Cage (1912 – 1992) Experimental music pioneer and Founding Music Director of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, John Cage created some of his most astounding work while teaching, accompanying dance classes, composing, and performing at Cornish during the years 1938 through 1940. Cage met Merce Cunningham at Cornish and was associated with him from the early 1940s, and was Musical Advisor for Merce Cunningham Dance Company until his death in 1992. Cage and Cunningham were responsible for a number of radical innovations in musical and choreographic composition, such as the use of chance operations and the independence of dance and music.
Cage studied with Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss, and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1951 he organized a group of musicians and engineers to make music on magnetic tape. In 1952, at Black Mountain College, he presented a theatrical event with Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg considered by many to be the first Happening. Cage was the recipient of many awards and honors, beginning in 1949 with a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music through his work with percussion orchestra and his invention in 1940 of the prepared piano. Cage was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and was inducted into the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1989. He was named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture in 1982, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. Cage was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 1988 –1989 academic year. He was a laureate of the 1989 Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation. The 1991 Zurich June Festival was devoted to the work of John Cage and James Joyce.
Cage was also the author of many books, among them Silence (1961), A Year from Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983). I – VI (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1988 – 89) was published by the Harvard University Press in spring 1990. This book includes transcripts of the question and answer periods that followed each lecture, and an audiocassette of Cage reading one of the six lectures. Conversing with Cage, a book length composition of excerpts from interviews, by Richard Kostelanetz, was published in 1988 by Limelight Editions.
Cage's music is published by the Henmar Press of C.F. Peters Corporation and has been recorded on many labels. Since 1958, many of Cage's scores have been exhibited in galleries and museums. A series of fifty-two watercolors, the New River Watercolors, executed by Cage at the Miles C. Horton Center at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC in April/May 1990. In 1991, the Cunningham Dance Foundation produced Cage/Cunningham, a documentary film on the collaboration of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, partly funded by PBS, under the direction of Elliot Caplan. John Cage died in New York City on August 12, 1992.
Recommended Resources
Deborah Wolf // Rehearsal Director
Deborah Wolf is a Professor in the Dance Department at Cornish College of the Arts where she has taught since 1992. She has been teaching, performing and choreographing for over thirty years, nineteen of which were with Concert Dance Company of Boston, New England’s premier modern repertory ensemble. At CDC, she was Artistic Director, Resident Choreographer and dancer, performing works by over 50 choreographers including Merce Cunningham, Bebe Miller, and Mark Morris. A recipient of a Massachusetts Artist Fellowship and seven Finalist Awards in choreography, she has also received grants from the NEA, Boston area Arts Councils, and Seattle’s Artist Trust. Her work has been produced or commissioned by Boston Ballet, Jacob’s Pillow, Boston’s Dance Umbrella, Velocity’s Strictly Seattle, Men in Dance, Composer/Choreographer, Bellingham Repertory Dance, and On the Board’s 12 Minute Max Mainstage, and Northwest New Works, among others. Most recently her work was selected for The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009, administered by The Joyce Theater and On the Boards.
Jarrad Powell // Music Ensemble Director
Jarrad Powell is Professor in the Music Department at Cornish College of the Arts where he has taught since 1987. His compositions have been performed and broadcast internationally and include pieces for voice, gamelan, various western and non-western instruments, electro-acoustic music, music for theater, dance and experimental film. Since the early 80’s he has directed the group Gamelan Pacifica, one of the most active and adventurous gamelan ensembles in the U.S. He is Music Director and composer for Scott/Powell Performance, a contemporary dance company formed in 1994 with noted choreographer Mary Sheldon Scott. Commissions include the Walker Arts Center, Performing Arts Chicago, On the Boards, Music in Motion, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and many others. He has received numerous grants, including NEA, Arts International, Rockefeller Foundation, Artist Trust Foundation and Creative Capital Foundation.
Tonya Lockyer // Project Coordinator and Rehearsal Director
Tonya Lockyer is an adjunct faculty member in Dance at Cornish College of the Arts. Lockyer studied on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham Studios 1990 – 1993: studying with Cunningham, performing his masterworks Torse and Sounddance, and working in the Cage/Cunningham Archives. As a dancer and award-winning choreographer Lockyer has directed interdisciplinary collaborations and site-specific events in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Russia. As Artistic Director of VIA, her critically acclaimed work toured internationally receiving awards from Arts International, The Nureyev Foundation, The Canada Council and The Banff Center. In 2008 her evening-length solo “Consumed” was presented by On The Boards and awarded residencies by ACT and American Dance Festival. Lockyer served as Visiting Artist at Mimar Sinan University Istanbul, Brigham Young University, The University of Maryland and The University of Calgary. Her writing on performance is published in CQ and the book Vu Du Corps. She is a Certified Movement Analyst and holds a MFA from the University of Washington.
Holley Farmer
Holley Farmer (Visiting Artist) was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company 1997-2009. She received a New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”) in 2004 for sustained achievement. Prior to joining the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, she danced with The Theatre Ballet of Canada, Oakland Ballet, and the original Canadian cast of The Phantom of the Opera. In 2010, Farmer played Babe in the original Broadway cast of Twyla Tharp’s Come Flay Away. She received her BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts, and her MFA in Dance from the University of Washington.
Photo: Kurt Smith