'EyeSpace' audience toys with iPods
Rachel Howard, Chronicle Dance Correspondent

Monday, January 28, 2008

It could have seemed gimmicky in the hands of almost any other choreographer: a dance set to music played on each audience member's individual iPod.

But the concept is this: Each viewer presses "shuffle" on a personal iPod simultaneously, randomizing the tracks of composer Mikel Rouse's music and creating his or her own private experience of the dance unfolding onstage. And the choreographer was Merce Cunningham, the 88-year-old maverick who revolutionized movement's relationship to music and decor.

Cunningham takes dance to industrial site
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Twice on a single Sunday afternoon in November, the 14-member Merce Cunningham Dance Company will present a new, "site-specific" work titled "Craneway Event" at a repurposed Ford assembly plant in Richmond.

By site-specific, Cunningham means a performance to some degree responsive to the setting in which it transpires.

The new work will take place on multiple stages among which the audience can move. It will include scored and improvised sound elements realized by the MCDC's musicians: David Behrman, John King, Takehisa Kosugi and Christian Wolff.

Inspiring at 89
Merce Cunningham's imagination and craft impresses
BY RITA FELCIANO
Wednesday November 12, 2008

REVIEW After the Company's opening night performance on Nov. 7, 89-year-old Merce Cunningham took to the Zellerbach Hall stage in a wheelchair. With his impish smile still intact but otherwise looking frail, he spread his hands. That's when I started to cry for the second time that week. It's what happens when history unfolds before your eyes.

Cunningham is the single most important 20th century choreographer still alive — and still working. The opening concert of his company's two-week residence showed why: imagination, buoyancy, and impeccable craft. Nowhere was this more evident than in the breathtakingly beautiful Suite for Five (1953-58), the company's first group piece — its male roles originally realized by Cunningham himself and our own blithe spirit, Remy Charlip.