Merce Cunningham Dance Company

RainForest / Duets / BIPED

Archive 2011
Dance
Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt
decemberdec 20 – 23

© BIPED, Jean Freebury © Stephanie Berger ©

© Rainforest © Tony Dougherty ©

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RainForest (1968)
Choreography, Merce Cunningham
Music, David Tudor, RainForest
Décor, Andy Warhol, Silver Clouds
Lighting, Aaron Copp
With 6 dancers
First Performance: Buffalo Festival of the Arts, Buffalo, NY. 9 March 1968.The revival and preservation of RainForest is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

Duets (1980)
Choreography, Merce Cunningham
Music, John Cage, Improvisation III (Peadar et Mel Mercier, percussion)
Décor and Costumes, Mark Lancaster
Lighting, Mark Lancaster et Christine Shallenberg
With 12 dancers
First performance: City Center Theater, New York NY. 26 February 1980.
Restaged by Robert Swinston (2010).
Thanks to the School of Dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts for the costumes used in the reconstruction of Duets.

BIPED (1999)
Choreography, Merce Cunningham
Music, Gavin Bryars, BIPED
Décor, Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser
Costumes, Suzanne Gallo
Lighting, Aaron Copp
With 13 dancers
First Performance: Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, California. 23 April 1999.
The décor for BIPED is an exploration of the possibilities of the new animation technology of motion capture. The movement (but not the physical appearance) of the dancers was transposed into digital images.  Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar collaborated with Cunningham to make a new piece of virtual choreography. The dancers involved in the motion capture process were Jarred Phillips, Jeannie Steele, and Robert Swinston.
BIPED was commissioned by the American Dance Festival through the Doris Duke Awards for New Work, The Barbican Centre, London, and Cal Performances, Berkeley, CA.
Major support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the AT&T Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts (with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Altria Group, Inc.) in partnership with the Walker Art Center.
Gavin Bryars BIPED is used by arrangement with European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music Limited, London, publisher and copyright owner.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company's dancers for the homage tour : Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Emma Desjardins, Jennifer Goggans, John Hinrichs, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, Krista Nelson, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Robert Swinston, Melissa Toogood, Andrea Weber

Coproduction Théâtre de la Ville-Paris ; Festival d’Automne à Paris
Partnership with France Inter

In its third year, the tribute paid to Merce Cunningham by his dance company offers the Festival d’Automne’s audience one last chance to explore the choreographer’s revolutionary journey through the 20th century - from Suite for Five (1956-1958) to XOVER (2007), which marked his reunion with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg.

In the same place

Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt
septembersept 13 – 22

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Radouan Mriziga / Rosas, A7LA5
Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione

Dance

In collaboration with the choreographer and dancer Radouan Mriziga, the challenge taken up by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is to make Vivaldi's Four Seasons heard, using the tools of dance to hone the way we listen to this baroque masterpiece. Under the auspices of abstraction, the resulting alliance reconnects with the imaginary ecological world that is conjured up by this famous concerto.
Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt
septembersept 23 – 28

Rabih Mroué
Who’s Afraid of Representation?

Theatre Portrait

We find ourselves in the company of major figures of European Body Art (Joseph Beuys, Orlan, Marina Abramović, to name a few) via their accounts of exhibitions and public scarifications dating back to the 1970s. In parallel with this runs the true story of a killing spree carried out by a Lebanese office at his workplace, and the fluctuating motivations for his acts.
Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt
octoberoct 3 – 5
Maison des Arts de Créteil
novembernov 6 – 7

Lola Arias
Los días afuera

Theatre
Buy tickets

At the crossroads between musical and documentary, Lola Arias brings us a choral composition in which six female former inmates talk about their lives during and after incarceration. Their six intertwining destinies raise questions about the various forms of violence present in contemporary society, whilst exploring the margins of fiction and reality at the same time.
Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt
novembernov 5 – 16

Robert Wilson
PESSOA – Since I've been me

Theatre

The hero of this new work by Robert Wilson is Fernando Pessoa. And a paradoxical hero at that. The Portuguese poet spent his life 'multiplying himself', inventing heteronyms, or fictitious authors, to whom he attributed works he himself wrote. He even went as far as to invent relationships, either amicable ones or from master to disciple, between his different avatars.
Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt
novembernov 19 – 23

Jan Martens
VOICE NOISE

Dance
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In this breakthrough piece for Jan Martens, VOICE NOISE brings together six dancers to shape a soundscape comprising some of the great female performers and composers of our time. In his own pop-inspired and precise way, the choreographer questions a very contemporary story, and in doing so raises the question of how some of these voices were silenced.