RIP Merce Cunningham

Alas!

The I-Ching is the Book of Changes, and Mr. Cunningham’s choreography became an expression of the nature of change itself. He altered images onstage without narrative sequence or psychological causation, and the audience was allowed to watch dance as one might watch successive events in a landscape or on a street corner.

“Psychology doesn’t interest him; zoology and anthropology do,” Mr. Cunningham’s leading co-dancer, Carolyn Brown, once wrote. When another dancer asked what “Minutiae” (1953) was about, Mr. Cunningham took her to the window of the New York studio, showed her the street below and said, “That.”

Mr. Cunningham often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence.

“You have to love dancing to stick to it,” he once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

RIP - the dude was inspiring even in his old age. so full of life and creativity!! Thanks for everything!!

RIP. a sad loss.

RIP...

http://blog.danceruniverse.com/images/user/1087/cunningham_320.jpg

never got to see the company perform but i loved this when i saw it at dia:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/press-room/news/2699

RIP

i feel lucky to have celebrated his 90th birthday with him this year and to have seen his last piece. It was beautiful. Sonic Youth played and the set was like this big industrial lego sculpture thing, that the band was suspended on.

may he rest in peace.

That's quite a memory to have, I'm envious.

that is awesome surm

RIP

In his own words.

oh wow, friend and i were JUST talking about his legacy/what will happen to his works after his death (this was inspired by pina bausch's death). rip!!!!

Wasn't there a very recent controversy where he mysteriously fired a couple of his longest serving dancers with no reasons provided?

:-(

RIP. We serendipitously had a class on his work scheduled for today, so I got to watch Biped today.

Not to be disrespectful to the deceased, but how disrespectful was Garrison Keillor's obit in Salon?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2009/07/29/san_francisco/

Peace. Grace. Separateness. Freedom. Longing. Detachment. Repetition. Circumspection. Sorrow. Affection.

omg that keillor obit is str8 garbage

Wow, I missed this completely! RIP the Merce!!!!

Yeah, this completely passed me by... Such sad news.

I miss you. Don't be dead.

Saw a documentary tonight (Cunningham--with two documentaries on photographer Bill Cunningham, Merce would have been a better title). Tough go for me. It felt like there was an assumed familiarity with and understanding of modern dance; I have neither. I needed some of those much-reviled talking heads to give me some context as to how the work I was seeing connected to other art (there was a little bit on the abstract expressionist painters) and to the world (again, brief mention of Vietnam and race riots).

The trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4t_l5mu9lE