Merce Cunningham
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Prog 2, Peacock TheatreThursday, 24 September 2015
If the Trocks didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Every genre needs its loving parodists, treading the fine line between homage and dommage, and an art form as stylised and convention-governed as classical dance is riper for it than most -... Read more... |
Rooster/Four Elements/Sounddance, Rambert, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 21 May 2014
Sure as carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, the 2010s are following a standard 20-year nostalgia cycle by embracing the 1990s as their "retro twin" decade. The quiet rumblings of the last few years – student Nineties parties and the... Read more... |
Rambert: RainForest/ Seven For A Secret/ Elysian Fields, Sadler’s WellsWednesday, 16 November 2011
Rambert is making a thing of acquiring classic works from the 20th-century contemporary repertory – and a very good thing, too. First staged by them last year, RainForest, a minor Merce Cunningham piece from 1968, was recently performed by the... Read more... |
Richard Alston Dance Company, Focus on Alston, The PlaceFriday, 21 October 2011
Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons... Read more... |
Armitage Gone! Dance, Queen Elizabeth HallWednesday, 12 October 2011
I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics... Read more... |
Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican TheatreFriday, 07 October 2011
Any newcomers to Merce Cunningham who visit the last performances ever in Britain of his modern dance company - renowned, even notorious, for its abstruse abstractness - will surely go away with an impression of laughter, playfulness, the lightness... Read more... |
Jérôme Bel, Cédric Andrieux, Royal Opera House Linbury StudioTuesday, 04 October 2011
Dance is eating itself. Or dancers are eating themselves, rather. It's on-trend to defy the idea of the mute dancer, and instead have them verbally explaining themselves, their motivation, their art. This year’s Dance Umbrella launched last night... Read more... |
Q&A Special: The Late Merce CunninghamTuesday, 26 October 2010
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly... Read more... |
