Cornish Dance Theater, the performing ensemble of the Dance Department at Cornish College of the Arts, is pleased to present its Fall 2010 Concert, with choreography by modern dance icon Merce Cunningham and Seattle choreographers Steve Casteel, Nancy Cranbourne, Iyun Harrison, and Tonya Lockyer
Cornish Dance Theater Fall 2010 Concert
November 19 at 8pm
November 20 at 2pm and 8pm
Broadway Performance Hall, 1625 Broadway Avenue, Seattle
Tickets: $10 general, $5 students, seniors & alumni
For more information please visit or call 206.726.5011.
For TeenTix ($5 Tickets for ages 13-19) visit.
About the Performance
The Cornish Dance Theater Fall 2010 Concert features a Merce Cunningham minEvent alongside the choreography of Steve Casteel, Nancy Cranbourne, Iyun Harrison, and Tonya Lockyer. Modern dance icon Merce Cunningham’s minEvent is an uninterrupted sequence of excerpts drawn from three of his masterworks: Roaratorio (1983), Fabrications (1987), and Enter (1993) staged by former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member Patricia Lent during a three-week residency. Members of Cornish Dance Theater perform the minEvent to music by John Cage, performed live by Cornish’s Indeterminacy Ensemble and directed by Jarrad Powell. The performance is part of the Merce Cunningham minEvent Project 2010 – 2011, celebrating Cornish Alumnus Merce Cunningham. Learn more.
Newest member of the Cornish dance faculty Iyun Harrison presents Meeting Ground, an exploration of the moments and spaces where divergent elements cross paths and collide. His dancers purposefully challenge ideals of beauty and taste in this athletic contemporary ballet. Nancy Cranbourne’s choreography draws audiences into the jazz medium in a way that is fun and undeniably funky. Her cast revels in the dance’s flirtatious moments just as much as the energetic, beat-driven ones.
Guest choreographer Tonya Lockyer’s dancers rock out to Radiohead in the pleated skirts and button-down shirts of students at a private school. Just like high school, the mood of the piece sweeps from playful to bittersweet with movement ranging from serpentine to gestural. Seattle composer Ryan Love’s music sets off faculty member Steve Casteel’s contemporary work. Movement and music combine in an aggressive dance with moments of beautiful noise.
The Merce Cunningham minEvent Project 2010 – 2011 has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, with additional support from The Boeing Company and the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation.
Please note: the Saturday, November 20 matinee performance will be followed by an informal question and answer period.
Biographies
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.
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.
Patricia Lent (Stager) 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.
Jarrad Powell (Indeterminacy Ensemble Director) 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.
Steve Casteel (Faculty) was born in Tacoma, WA and received his early training from Jan Collum School of Classical Ballet. At age sixteen Steve joined Boston Ballet II. In 1987, Steve became a member of Houston Ballet where he was promoted to soloist and performed many of the great classical works such as Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Coppélia, and Cinderella. With Houston Ballet, he performed works by such renowned choreographers as Christopher Bruce, Jirí Kylián, Sir Kenneth McMillan, Ben Stevenson, and Paul Taylor. In addition, he has performed with Diablo Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Next Stage Dance Theatre, and Spectrum Dance Theatre. Locally, Steve has danced in works by Kay Englert, Dominique Gabella, Amii LeGendre, Wade Madsen, Dale Merrill, Crispin Spaeth and Deborah Wolf. From 1997 to 1999 he worked for Washington Contemporary Ballet in Tacoma as Assistant to the Director. In 2001, Steve received his Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle WA. In 2004, he received his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in Tucson AZ. From 2004 to 2006 Steve was the Public Relations Coordinator for Next Stage Dance Theatre. Steve has taught at Bainbridge Dance Center (Bainbridge Island), Berkeley Ballet Theater (Berkeley CA), Cornish Preparatory Dance Program (Seattle), Dance Fremont (Seattle), Spectrum Dance Theater (Seattle), and The University of Washington (Seattle).
Nancy Cranbourne (Faculty) lives in Boulder CO, and Seattle WA. She teaches at the University of Colorado/Boulder and in the Boulder community. Nancy is the Artistic Director of the dance company 40 Women Over 40, featured on the Hallmark Channel, in Dance Teacher Magazine, and on the More Magazine website. Nancy is also an award winning actress and playwright; she was voted “Best Actress” by Westword Magazine for her performance in 2 Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization, and received the Denver Drama Critics Circle Award for “Best New Play” for the same production (with collaborators Patti Dobrowolski and Molly Thompson). Nancy began her dance career in Seattle where she performed extensively with Wade Madsen.
Iyun Harrison (Faculty), a native of Jamaica, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Juilliard School and Master of Fine Arts degree from Hollins University/American Dance Festival. Over the 13 years of his performing career in New York City he danced with Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet Hispanico of New York, National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and Ailey II. He has appeared as guest artist with Connecticut Ballet, Buglisi Dance Theatre and Lubbock Ballet. Iyun danced work by George Balanchine, Jiri Kylian, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Michael Smuin, Alvin Ailey, Lar Lubovitch, Donald Byrd, Talley Beatty and George Faison. His television credits include PBS’ Setting the Stage 2007, NBC’s ‘20th Hispanic Heritage Awards, PBS’ Who’s Dancin’ Now? – Arts Education in Your Community and The South Bank Show in England. Additionally, he has taught/choreographed for the Juilliard Dance Ensemble, the Ailey School, American Dance Festival, Jamaica School of Dance, University of the West Indies at Cave Hill–Barbados, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, American College Dance Festival and Webster University. Prior to joining the Cornish faculty, he was on the faculty at Webster University. His choreography was selected for the regional gala performance of the American College Dance Festival at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and for the national American College Dance Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Tonya Lockyer (Faculty) is a dance artist and educator focused on the borderlands of performance, embodiment and social justice. She began her career with Contemporary Dancers Canada before dancing in New York, Boston and Seattle performing the work of Donald Byrd, Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Charles Moulton, Mark Haim, Wade Madsen and others. She was also Principal Dancer/Rehearsal Director for Paula Josa-Jones. In 1999 she founded VIA, a performance company dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration and inter-cultural exchange. VIA toured internationally receiving awards from Arts International, The Canada Council, The Nureyev Foundation, Seattle Arts Commission and multiple residencies at The Banff Centre for The Arts. Since 2005, VIA has become a laboratory for Tonya’s performance research. She has been awarded more than thirty-five commissions by companies, festivals and universities in the US and abroad. In 2008, her evening-length solo “Consumed” was commissioned by On The Boards for their main season, and awarded residencies by ACT Theater and American Dance Festival. Tonya teaches modern technique, improvisation, composition, movement analysis and the contemporary history of dance, live art and choreographic culture. She has been appointed Visiting Artist at Mimar Sinan University Istanbul, Brigham Young University, The University of Calgary and The University of Maryland Baltimore County.
She has served on the faculties of The Bates Dance Festival, the University of Washington, The American Dance Festival, The International Festival of Dance Russia, Strictly Seattle, and The Seattle Festival of Dance and Improvisation. Her writing on performance is published in Contact Quarterly and the book Vu Du Corps: Lisa Nelson Mouvement et Perception. Tonya holds an MFA from the University of Washington and is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst.
