Download or read book Merce Cunningham Fifty Years Signed Edition written by Merce Cunningham and published by Aperture Direct. This book was released on 2005-06-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Merce Cunningham written by David Vaughan and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay by David Vaughan.
Download or read book Chance and Circumstance written by Carolyn Brown and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited memoir from one of the most celebrated modern dancers of the past fifty years: the story of her own remarkable career, of the formative years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and of the two brilliant, iconoclastic, and forward-thinking artists at its center—Merce Cunningham and John Cage. From its inception in the l950s until her departure in the l970s, Carolyn Brown was a major dancer in the Cunningham company and part of the vibrant artistic community of downtown New York City out of which it grew. She writes about embarking on her career with Cunningham at a time when he was a celebrated performer but a virtually unknown choreographer. She describes the heady exhilaration—and dire financial straits—of the company’s early days, when composer Cage was musical director and Robert Rauschenberg designed lighting, sets and costumes; and of the struggle for acceptance of their controversial, avant-garde dance. With unique insight, she explores Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and experimentation with compositional procedures influenced by Cage. And she probes the personalities of these two men: the reticent, moody, often secretive Cunningham, and the effusive, fun-loving, enthusiastic Cage. Chance and Circumstance is an intimate chronicle of a crucial era in modern dance, and a revelation of the intersection of the worlds of art, music, dance, and theater that is Merce Cunningham’s extraordinary hallmark.
Download or read book Walker s Way written by Isabelle Storey and published by . This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isabelle Storey's memoir of her 10-year marriage to Walker Evans. The story of an elegant young woman's infatuation with a great American artist - with the man himself, with what he stood for aesthetically and with his artistic and social circle and how her initial passion gradually cooled into disenchantment. In candid, poignant narrative, which draws on the couple's correspondence, Isabelle describes how their marriage grew more formal, cooler and eventually failed altogether as Isabelle felt compelled to move on.
Download or read book Merce Cunningham written by Jack Anderson and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1998-08-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text gathers writings by and about the choreographer, Merce Cunningham, tracing his career from 1944-1992. For nearly 60 years he challenged and provoked audiences by stripping theatrical dance of its traditional narrative.
Download or read book Dancing Lives written by Karen Eliot and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The private and performance lives of five female dancers in Western dance history
Download or read book Other Animals written by Merce Cunningham and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known worldwide for his remarkable, groundbreaking choreography, Merce Cunningham has a secret: he also draws. For the first time he opens a door into his fantastical animal kingdom with Aperture's publication of Other Animals. Cunningham, an obsessive observer with a colossal sense of humor, revels in nature with the same childlike vision and expressiveness that infuses his dances. Like his dances, his drawings are impressions, inventions, gestures, and interactions. Cunningham introduces us to a bird riding a turtle, a bizarre hybrid creature wearing a fashionable sweater, and an ostrich that rivals the gracefulness of his dancers. The drawings are collected in a beautifully produced, colorful volume, with selected entries from Cunningham's journals and photographs of some of his dances and their notations. These drawings offer a key to understanding how Cunningham renders his vision of the world through dance--and how his vision is translated into costuming through his collaboration with designers such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçonnes.
Download or read book Merce Cunningham written by Carrie Noland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century, Merce Cunningham is known for introducing chance to dance. Far too often, however, accounts of Cunningham’s work have neglected its full scope, focusing on his collaborations with the visionary composer John Cage or insisting that randomness was the singular goal of his choreography. In this book, the first dedicated to the complete arc of Cunningham’s career, Carrie Noland brings new insight to this transformative artist’s philosophy and work, providing a fresh perspective on his artistic process while exploring aspects of his choreographic practice never studied before. Examining a rich and previously unseen archive that includes photographs, film footage, and unpublished writing by Cunningham, Noland counters prior understandings of Cunningham’s influential embrace of the unintended, demonstrating that Cunningham in fact set limits on the role chance played in his dances. Drawing on Cunningham’s written and performed work, Noland reveals that Cunningham introduced variables before the chance procedure was applied and later shaped and modified the chance results. Chapters explore his relation not only to Cage, but also Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, James Joyce, and Bill T. Jones. Ultimately, Noland shows that Cunningham approached movement as more than “movement in itself,” and that his work enacted archetypal human dramas. This remarkable book will forever change our appreciation of the choreographer’s work and legacy.
Download or read book A Year from Monday written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-20 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes lectures, essays, diaries and other writings, including "How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" and "Juilliard Lecture."
Download or read book Love Icebox written by John Cage and published by John Cage Trust. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cage's passionate, distraught and affectionate letters to Cunningham provide a vivid portrait of the start of their life together These early letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham will be revelatory, for while the two are widely known as a dynamic, collaborative duo, the story of how and when they came together has never been fully revealed. In the 39 letters of this collection, spanning 1942-46, Cage shows himself to be a man falling deeply in love. When they first met at the Cornish School in Seattle in the 1930s, Cage was 26 to Cunningham's 19. Their relationship was purely that of teacher and student, and Cage was also very much married. It was in Chicago that their romantic relationship would begin. Cage was teaching at Moholy-Nagy's School of Design when Cunningham passed through town as a dancer with the Martha Graham Company, appearing on stage on March 14, 1942. Cage's letters, which begin in earnest a week later, are increasingly passionate, distraught, romantic and confused, and occasionally contain snippets of poetry and song. They are also more than love letters, as we see intimations that resonate with our experience of the later John Cage. Love, Iceboxtakes its shape from these letters--transcribed, chronologically ordered, and in some instances reproduced in facsimile. Laura Kuhn, Cage's assistant from 1986 to 1992 and now longtime director of the John Cage Trust, adds a foreword, afterword and running commentary. Photographic illustrations of their final 18th Street loft in New York City, as well as personal and household objects left behind, remind us of the substance and rituals of their long-shared life.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics written by Rebekah J. Kowal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, dance has become a vehicle for querying assumptions about what it means to be embodied, in turn illuminating intersections among the political, the social, the aesthetical, and the phenomenological. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics edited by internationally lauded scholars Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and the late Randy Martin presents a compendium of newly-commissioned chapters that address the interdisciplinary and global scope of dance theory - its political philosophy, social movements, and approaches to bodily difference such as disability, postcolonial, and critical race and queer studies. In six sections 30 of the most prestigious dance scholars in the US and Europe track the political economy of dance and analyze the political dimensions of choreography, of writing history, and of embodied phenomena in general. Employing years of intimate knowledge of dance and its cultural phenomenology, scholars urge readers to re-think dominant cultural codes, their usages, and the meaning they produce and theorize ways dance may help to re-signify and to re-negotiate established cultural practices and their inherent power relations. This handbook poses ever-present questions about dance politics-which aspects or effects of a dance can be considered political? What possibilities and understandings of politics are disclosed through dance? How does a particular dance articulate or undermine forces of authority? How might dance relate to emancipation or bondage of the body? Where and how can dance articulate social movements, represent or challenge political institutions, or offer insight into habits of labor and leisure? The handbook opens its critical terms in two directions. First, it offers an elaborated understanding of how dance achieves its politics. Second, it illustrates how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance, thus addressing both the relationship between the politics in dance and the politics of dance. Using the most sophisticated theoretical frameworks and engaging with the problematics that come from philosophy, social science, history, and the humanities, chapters explore the affinities, affiliations, concepts, and critiques that are inherent in the act of dance, and questions about matters political that dance makes legible.
Download or read book The Prickly Rose written by Jeff Slayton and published by Author House. This book was released on 2006-11-09 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Click this link to read a review of The Prickly Rose. Dancer, choreographer and renowned teacher, Viola Farber performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for thirteen years. The Viola Farber Dance Company toured the United States and Europe from 1968-1983. Director of the National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers for three years and the recipient of many awards, Farber became the chairperson of the Dance Department at Sarah Lawrence College in 1987, and held that position until her sudden death in 1998. Written for dancers by her ex-husband and dance partner, The Prickly Rose offers excerpts from her letters and journals, reviews, articles regarding her work, interviews with dancers who worked with her, interviews with family members, and more. Viola Farber's legacy still lives on in the muscles of every dancer who was fortunate enough to study with her.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment written by Mark Franko and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.
Download or read book Envisioning Dance on Film and Video written by Judy Mitoma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtually everyone working in dance today uses electronic media technology. Envisioning Dance on Film and Video chronicles this 100-year history and gives readers new insight on how dance creatively exploits the art and craft of film and video. In fifty-three essays, choreographers, filmmakers, critics and collaborating artists explore all aspects of the process of rendering a three-dimensional art form in two-dimensional electronic media. Many of these essays are illustrated by ninety-three photographs and a two-hour DVD (40 video excerpts). A project of UCLA – Center for Intercultural Performance, made possible through The Pew Charitable Trusts (www.wac.ucla.edu/cip).
Download or read book Choreographies of the Living written by Carrie Rohman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.
Download or read book Performing Arts and Digital Humanities written by Clarisse Bardiot and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital traces, whether digitized (programs, notebooks, drawings, etc.) or born digital (emails, websites, video recordings, etc.), constitute a major challenge for the memory of the ephemeral performing arts. Digital technology transforms traces into data and, in doing so, opens them up to manipulation. This paradigm shift calls for a renewal of methodologies for writing the history of theater today, analyzing works and their creative process, and preserving performances. At the crossroads of performing arts studies, the history, digital humanities, conservation and archiving, these methodologies allow us to take into account what is generally dismissed, namely, digital traces that are considered too complex, too numerous, too fragile, of dubious authenticity, etc. With the analysis of Merce Cunningham’s digital traces as a guideline, and through many other examples, this book is intended for researchers and archivists, as well as artists and cultural institutions.
Download or read book Rethinking Dance History written by Larraine Nicholas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The need to ‘rethink’ and question the nature of dance history has not diminished since the first edition of Rethinking Dance History. This revised second edition addresses the needs of an ever-evolving field, with new contributions considering the role of digital media in dance practice; the expansion of performance philosophy; and the increasing importance of practice-as-research. A two-part structure divides the book’s contributions into: • Why Dance History? – the ideas, issues and key conversations that underpin any study of the history of theatrical dance. • Researching and Writing – discussions of the methodologies and approaches behind any successful research in this area. Everyone involved with dance creates and carries with them a history, and this volume explores the ways in which these histories might be used in performance-making – from memories which establish identity to re-invention or preservation through shared and personal heritages. Considering the potential significance of studying dance history for scholars, philosophers, choreographers, dancers and students alike, Rethinking Dance History is an essential starting point for anyone intrigued by the rich history and many directions of dance.
