Latest news with #MerceCunningham
New York Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Sandra Neels, a Force in Modern Dance for 60 Years, Dies at 85
Viewed on film, dancing from more than 50 years ago tends to have a period quality, a certain quaintness. But films of the dancer and dance teacher Sandra Neels performing the revolutionary choreography of Merce Cunningham have not dated in the least. Tall, slender, long-limbed, self-possessed, conveying an innocence bordering on unworldly, Ms. Neels appears onscreen as if she were filmed only yesterday, a lone figure commanding space with hands and feet that are exceptionally articulate. She danced for Cunningham from 1963 to 1973, creating roles and solos that are still performed today. Later, she became a successful choreographer in her own right and a renowned teacher, and when she died recently at 85, she had been eminent in American dance for more than 60 years. Her death was announced by Winthrop University, in Rock Hill, S.C., where she had been an associate professor of dance since 1990. The university specified no cause or place of death. Sandra Neels was born on Sept. 21, 1939, in Las Vegas, and grew up in Portland, Ore. Her father, Frank F. Neels, was an electrician who also shone as a ballroom dancer. Her mother, Edith (Vallereux) Neels, known as Val, was a singer, an entertainer and a pianist at the Joan Mallory School of Dance in Portland, where Sandra and her sister, Sheryl, first studied tap and ballet. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Robert Rauschenberg Found a Home in Dance
It's not common for the set of a dance to have its own title. But 'Tantric Geography,' the set for Merce Cunningham's 1977 'Travelogue,' isn't ordinary. For one thing, it moves. It's an odd sort of trolley with a row of wooden chairs for seats. These are fixed between upturned bicycle wheels that don't touch the ground. The dancers ride it as it rolls on hidden wheels, pulled by a rope. What's most significant about this set, though, is that it was designed by Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). 'Travelogue' was a reunion, the resumption of a collaboration with Cunningham and his company that had been intensely close and extraordinarily creative in the 1950s and '60s. Two years later, in 1979, Rauschenberg started designing for a younger friend, the choreographer Trisha Brown, contributing to another string of masterpieces. These two artistic relationships — Rauschenberg and Cunningham (1919-2009), Rauschenberg and Brown (1936-2017) — are the focus of 'Dancing With Bob,' a program that the Trisha Brown Dance Company is taking on a national tour in honor of Rauschenberg's centennial. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Melissa Toogood Named New Director of Juilliard's Dance Division
The Juilliard School has named Melissa Toogood as dean and director of its dance division, the school announced on Tuesday. Toogood, a Bessie Award-winning dancer who was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in its final years, succeeds Alicia Graf Mack, who is to become the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Toogood, who is Australian and lives in Sydney, will begin on July 1. 'I've had many types of experiences and worked with many kinds of dancers and companies, Toogood, 43, said in a phone interview. 'I've always been reaching for new knowledge.' Damian Woetzel, president of the Juilliard School, called her 'one of the extraordinary artists of our time' and said: 'I've watched her stage, I've watched her teach, I've watched her develop dancers at all levels, but really focusing on the younger dancers. And I have seen her develop her own leadership in that way that is inspiring.' Toogood, who started teaching at the Cunningham school at the choreographer's request, continued to dance in New York after Cunningham's company performed for the last time in 2011. 'I had a really intense freelance career, which is challenging and uncertain, and I hope to prepare young people for all of those outcomes,' she said. 'Because I can speak to it personally.'
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in dance: Lyon Opera Ballet: Cunningham Forever (Biped & Beach Birds); Giselle…
The American choreographer Merce Cunningham loved birds. He painted pictures of them every morning. In Tacita Dean's evocative film of him at work, made in 2008, the year before his death, birds fly in and out of the frame outside the windows of the Craneway Pavilion in California where he's rehearsing, their jerky pecks, stalks and poses reflecting the dancers' movements within. It's impossible to watch Beach Birds, created in 1991, without thinking of that film. In this revealing revival, the dancers of Lyon Opera Ballet balance against a pink dawn, slightly swaying as their arms open and curve in clean, slow strokes. The light, randomly programmed, shifts through bright changes to dusk-like orange as the work progresses and the dancers move, never quite in unison, each in their own world, creating sculptural shapes. John Cage's score eddies around them, full of the rush of a rainstick, of sea sounds. Unitard costumes by Marsha Skinner give the dancers white bodies and black arms that define the air around them. When they settle into groups, two might stand upright over a third, who makes a loop of his arms and drops forward, leg raised, to touch the floor. A trio of women echo each other's loping steps from the back of the stage, bodies arched like a single duplicated figure. The mood is tranquil, lovely, infinitely rich. The music is live, played by the composer Gavin Bryars, his son Yuri, Audrey Riley, James Woodrow and Morgan Goff. Bryars's presence in the pit feels like an event, particularly for Biped (1999), for which his own score shimmers with melancholy gravity. The piece was developed by Cunningham using the computer software DanceForms, and its explorations are made explicit with a design by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar that projects digital forms and bars of light on to a screen in front of the dancers. The effects are fascinating, the interaction between the two worlds highlighting differences in weight, space and gravity. At one moment, as the silver-clad dancers arrive in a great rush of movement, straight arms whirring, backs flat in arabesques, the images above them show modelled human forms hanging upside down on a red line of light. It's complex, complicated, difficult to absorb, but it still looks like the future – albeit one imagined from a distant past. The dancers of Lyon Opera Ballet perform with commitment and energy, honouring the switches of mood and pace. This Cunningham programme is part of the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival that's filling London with a dizzying array of contemporary international dance. At the Linbury theatre, the exceptional dancer Samantha van Wissen performed a solo looking at an old classic, Giselle, in a new way, offering an animated lecture of movement while speaking from an essay by the writer and director François Gremaud. Giselle… (the ellipsis in its title differentiate it from the original) breaks down the ballet by retelling the story with a historic gloss, some humour – 'It's odd to wear white to harvest grapes' – and modernist irony: 'Finally, she stops in a very sculptural position.' Van Wissen, who performs in French with surtitles, is an amiable host, and her movement is always riveting – she imitates Mikhail Baryshnikov at one point, flings in Beyoncé at another. But at an unbroken 110 minutes, the event is nearly as long as the ballet itself, and though interesting, it's not as illuminating as it needs to be. Star ratings (out of five)Cunningham Forever (BIPED & Beach Birds) ★★★★Giselle… ★★★
Telegraph
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Cunningham Forever: Bask in the strange, hypnotic beauty of a great choreographer
Somebody once asked dancer-turned-choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) what one particular piece of his was about. His reply was simple: 'It's about 40 minutes.' An alumnus of Martha Graham's trailblazing company, and the longtime companion of composer John Cage, he was modern dance's great abstract expressionist. Which, rather in the vein of drip-fiend Jackson Pollock, has made him the genius choreographer that even devoted dance fans are 'allowed' to dislike. Cunningham pioneeringly introduced chance into the creative process, with steps and score generally distant acquaintances at most. He tended to rehearse his dancers – with daunting rigour – in silence, meaning that the first time they'd hear the score would be at the work's premiere. Small wonder the choreographer Mark Morris, his similarly revered but famously 'musical' compatriot, has expressed reservations. Depending on point of view, either everything or nothing 'happens' in Cunningham's pieces, which are not entirely un-balletic in terms of the poise and discipline required (if absolutely not ballet), and which dancers are required to deliver with entirely impassive faces. His work teases, suggests, evokes – but anyone hoping for anything even remotely resembling a narrative, or even any kind of conventional stylistic or dramatic beginning, middle or end, will be thwarted. The two pieces on offer from the visiting and well-drilled Lyon Opera Ballet, as part of this month's London-wide Dance Reflections, are a case in point. They begin, they go through a labyrinth of different and random-feeling permutations. And then, when you least expect it, the curtain descends: that's it, folks. Beach Birds (1991), which opens the bill, sees an octet of dancers extremely loosely pretending to be just that. Half an hour long, it's a strange, extraordinarily serene confection, one whose visual and choreographic elements – all hinting at the title, without any of them entirely going there – coalesce perfectly. Designer Marsha Skinner has the cast wearing black-and-white unitards with black gloves, and the action playing out against a subtly changing cyclorama that might (or might not) represent the passing of a day. Cage's score-cum-soundscape alternates between deadpan individual piano notes and a kind of shimmering, Pink Floydian gurgle that could be waves retreating from a sun-dappled pebbly shoreline, or else just good old electronic static. And amid all this, the dancers – either individually, or else in groups of two, three, or more, one cluster seeming to spark another off at random – hop, strike poses and flicker their limbs in a manner that's neither entirely avian nor entirely human. It's as if Cunningham has metamorphosed them into a curious kind of flesh-and-blood, animal/human pun, but in the most benign and beautiful way. Heftier in terms of both length (50 minutes) and cast (14), 1999's BIPED comes across as a high-tech, virtual-reality cousin of its alfresco forebear. Playing out to Gavin Bryars's artful wash of electronica, its actual steps were formulated with the help of DanceForms software, with Cunningham then deploying motion-capture to create huge avatars of the dancers that intermittently skitter, skip and twirl across the otherwise invisible gauze at the front of the stage. Its sheer length makes it quite a commitment on the part of the audience. And unlike Beach Birds, it occasionally (in one quintet, particularly) revealed cracks in the dancers' unity on Wednesday's opening night. Resist trying to impose conventional order on it, however – even if you might eke out an elegiac note at its close – and this kaleidoscopic symphony of sound, light and movement can (and here did) cast quite a spell. Cunningham forever? You wouldn't entirely bet against it.
