MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY (USA)

WHAT: ANNIVERSARY EVENTS

WHEN: TUE 4 – SAT 8 NOV

WHERE: TATE MODERN: TURBINE HALL

TICKETS: 020 7887 8888

"The high priest of pure movement", The Daily Telegraph

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Merce Cunningham
By Judith Mackrell for The Guardian

When Merce Cunningham first agreed to stage a series of dance Events in the Turbine Hall, he knew he'd be competing with an awesome space. What he didn't know was the effect that Olafur Eliasson's recently installed Weather Project would have on the venue.
Eliasson's cosmic sorcery of lights and mirrors not only seems to double the scale of the hall, but inspires everyone present to feel as if they're walking blindly off the planet into the setting sun.

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His greatest moment in the sun
Merce Cunningham's latest Event is being staged beneath Olafur Eliasson's giant installation in Tate Modern. By Zoe Anderson for The Independent

This year's Dance Umbrella festival ends with a double celebration. A week of anniversary Events at Tate Modern marks 25 years of Umbrella and 50 years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Now 84, Cunningham is a hero of modern dance, one of the 20th century's great choreographers. His dances are endlessly inventive, still testing new possibilities. His most famous innovation, made with the composer John Cage, was the separation of dance, music and design.

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Merce Cunningham: Anniversary Events, Tate Modern
By Zoe Anderson for The Independent

Abundance is a characteristic of Merce Cunningham's choreography. He wants the stage to be like life, lots of different things happening at once. The Anniversary Events, brought to Tate Modern by BITE and Dance Umbrella, take the principle to astonishing extremes.

Extremes and principles are part of Cunningham's history - his radical separation of music and dance, his use of chance in choreography.

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Merce Cunningham Tate Modern
By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times


To mark the end of Dance Umbrella's silver jubilee season, and to pay tribute to Merce Cunningham as his company celebrates its golden jubilee, what better wheeze than a Cunningham "Event" and what better location than the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern? This tremendous space is at present the setting for Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, an installation dominated by a vast sun-disc which shines through misty air, while, 70 ft above us groundlings, mirrored panels reflect our ant-like motions.

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Everything new under the sun
By Debra Craine for The Times
Dance: Merce Cunningham
Tate Modern


IT’S impossible to see all of Merce Cunningham’s grand finale to this year’s Dance Umbrella festival. That’s because it’s spread out over three performing spaces in Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall, one of the most exciting spaces in all London. Even more exciting now, in the eerie glow of Olafur Eliasson’s amazing installation, The Weather Project. Its golden orb looms over us as we wander from one square of dance to another.

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Spinning through space
Ismene Brown reviews the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Tate Modern for The Daily Telegraph



There's something immutably stodgy and institutional about Tate Modern; a gigantic vacant crate with tight, white shoebox galleries stuck pertly on to its flank. That loud, boring, dispossessed turbine hall demands elephantine thinking from the artists asked to fill it - Bourgeois's spider, Kapoor's red silk trumpet, and currently Olafur Eliasson's vast, chilly, neon sun glaring yellow through puffs of steam.

Sensually pleasing: an ethereal performance in an extraordinary environment
Eliasson's installation has the luck this week to shine on Merce Cunningham's inveterately unpredictable modern dance company.

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Skipping the light fantastic
Tate Modern's vast space was the perfect place for Dance Umbrella's spectacular anniversary finale

Jann Parry
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

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<small>[ 09 November 2003, 10:33 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Leaps in the dark
While Inbal Pinto’s Boobies charts strange territory, Merce Cunningham’s collages depict wonderful scenes. David Dougill reports

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This was definitely 'an event'.

I loved the scale of the whole thing, the vast space, the echoing soundscape. In fact when the dancers first came on I felt like they were a bit too small and human. You could see them wobbling in their balances, make out the zips and seams in their (horrible) catsuits. But as the piece progressed you settled into the rhythm of it, became a part of it really.

I also liked how casual it was – people sitting with their coats on, standing, wandering around. You could choose what you wanted to watch. It was a bit like being in a supermarket, they lay out the goods and you take your pick.

And it made you watch in a totally different way to being at a theatre, you could take in the bigger picture or zoom in to a single limb. But I think the movement itself was best appreciated on a small scale. Near the end I stopped flitting between stages and became entranced by a duet between two women touching elbows. Suddenly I wasn't really aware of the surroundings, just two dancers.

But at one point I also became quite engrossed in the offstage dance of an usher who repeatedly had to move spectators away from the cordoned-off area. This wasn't what I was supposed to be looking at but I think Merce 'Chance' Cunningham might have appreciated it – the unexpected result of arbitrary parameters and all that.

I thought the whole experience was very much about the choice you have as an audience. You get out what you put in. And you couldn't deny it was a great celebration for the company's 50th anniversary.

Katherine Phillips posted this in another topic and I have moved it here:

Merce Cunningham at The Tate Modern, 04/11/03

Descending the ramp in to the vast concrete Turbine hall, it takes a little while to register that Olafur Eliasson’s gigantic sun is not a full circle, but rather a semi circle reflected in a mirrored ceiling.

In this reflection we see ourselves, the audience, milling around the space amidst smoke machines and soft, greyish lighting. The music begins; scraping, growling strings unnerve the audience before the dancers appear and march to one of three square dance floors, positioned below the gallery upon which the musicians sit, and over which, Eliasson’s sun beams artificially down.

The installation art work is an ideal setting for this all encompassing dance piece, where the surroundings, the audience and the dancers all become equal components of the performance environment. The audience shifts from floor section to floor section, as do the dancers as they arc, jump and lunge in sequence, flitting between the spaces.

The spectators become as much a part of the performance as the dancers – they are the pattern border on the ceiling mirror canvas. As the music becomes more tense and discordant, the audience seems to move more quickly between the performance areas, slowing again when the music calms. There is a sense of everyone moving to their own timing – the dancers and the musicians certainly, and the audience influenced by both.

Each angle from this promenade performance provides a new perspective and it is especially thrilling to have a birds eye view in the ceiling – something usually only made available through the use of film. Choreographic elements such as isolation and grouping of the dancers are made more prominent by the parallels or juxtaposition of the audience - endless possibilities, parallels and view points are created by the encapsulating nature of the performance experience.

A review of the installation that provided the setting for Merce Cunningham's Tate Event:

A terrifying beauty
The mesmerised visitors flocking to Tate Modern's 'setting sun' installation have added a layer of meaning to the work, says Richard Dorment for The Daily Telegraph.


I promise to resist the temptation to unleash a torrent of purple prose about Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project at Tate Modern. It is more in keeping with the spirit of the piece to describe it with clinical detachment, and to trust that my words can convey something of its beauty and power.

The fourth in the series of art works commissioned by Unilever to fill the vast space of the Turbine Hall, The Weather Project is, essentially, a vast optical illusion.

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Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Tate Modern, London by Gavin Roebuck for The Stage


Half a century of Merce Cunningham's Dance Company is celebrated as part of this year's 25th Dance Umbrella festival of contemporary dance.

At the Tate Modern, in the vast cathedral-size turbine hall and beneath Olafur Eliasson's giant installation of a hazy sun, there are three performance spaces to view at once from all sides.

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From the February issue of our magazine: