MCDC Commissions Daniel Arsham to Create Décor for Park Ave Armory Shows

As it enters the final four months of its Legacy Tour, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) announced today that it has commissioned artist Daniel Arsham to create the décor for its final performances, to be held December 29 - 31 at Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The performances mark the conclusion of the Company's two-year celebration of Cunningham's artistic legacy comprising more than 150 performances around the world, and the culmination of the Company's nearly 60 years of cross-disciplinary innovation. In what will be his fourth collaboration with MCDC, Arsham will fill the Armory's vast drill hall with massive suspended "clouds" comprised of thousands of individual colored spheres.

"MCDC has collaborated with a remarkable lineage of visual artists over the years, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol," said Trevor Carlson, Executive Director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. "This new collaboration with Daniel continues the Company's long tradition of bringing together unique creative voices, both emerging and established, from every discipline-a tradition that has transformed the way we experience the visual and performing arts."

To create the décor for MCDC's final performances, Arsham enlarged digital photographs of real clouds, producing a variety of color pixels that serve as the palette for the colored spheres that make up the cloud forms. The appearance of the clouds will vary from different vantage points within the Armory, with the individual spheres creating a sense of pixilation from close up, and blending together to form the image of a cloud from a distance. Arsham took many of the cloud photographs that form the basis for the décor from airplane windows while on tour with MCDC. Among the group of contemporary artists who collaborated with Cunningham in the final years of his career, Arsham first worked with the Company in 2007 when he was commissioned to create the décor for eyeSpace. He also collaborated on MCDC's 2009 Paris tour, and most recently created a site-specific installation for its December 2010 Legacy Tour engagement at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami.

Arsham's new work will serve as the décor for a series of new site-specific Events performed across three stages in the Park Avenue Armory's dramatic drill hall. The performances will feature the last-ever music commission by the MCDC Music Committee, led by Music Director Takehisa Kosugi. Reflecting an intimate knowledge of Cunningham's creative process and the radical innovations he and John Cage pioneered, the new music by Kosugi, David Behrman, John King, and Christian Wolff will be performed by musicians positioned throughout the space to create an immersive acoustic experience. As Cunningham requested, all tickets to the final New York performances will be priced at $10, and will be available for sale to the public beginning August 15 at www.armoryonpark.org.

The months leading up to the Park Avenue Armory performances will feature landmark engagements on the Legacy Tour, with MCDC's final appearances in London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, the Bay Area, and Washington D.C. Highlights include:

· A newly announced engagement at Bard College's Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, September 9 - 11. The Company will perform a program of three seminal Cunningham works, including Suite for Five (1956-1958), an early collaboration with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg; Antic Meet (1958), a playful dance whose costumes, famously, featured a chair strapped to Cunningham's back; and the vigorous, fast-paced Sounddance (1975).

MCDC's first and only Legacy Tour engagement in Cunningham's birthplace, Washington State. The Company will perform two evening-length programs spanning Cunningham's creative career-featuring the dances RainForest (1968), Duets (1980), Quartet (1982), BIPED (1999), Split Sides (2003), and XOVER (2007)-at Seattle's Paramount Theater, October 27 and 29.

Performances at the Walker Arts Center in conjunction with the opening of Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, the first in a series of exhibitions exploring Cunningham's collaborations with visual artists through works from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection, which the Walker acquired in March. To celebrate Cunningham's legacy and the exhibition opening, the Walker will host a 10-day festival of dance, talks, and workshops, featuring performances of Antic Meet (1958), RainForest (1968), and Pond Way (1998) by MCDC, November 4 - 6.

The Tour's penultimate U.S. engagement at BAM (Brooklyn Academy Of Music), celebrating Cunningham's most significant artistic collaborations, December 7 - 10. The program will feature the New York premiere of the revival of Roaratorio (1983), a work created to accompany John Cage's monumental 1979 composition Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, last performed at BAM in 1986; the New York City premiere of the revival of RainForest (1968), with Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds as décor; BIPED (1999), a Cunningham masterpiece which incorporates motion-capture technology; Second Hand (1970), with costumes by Jasper Johns; Pond Way (1998), featuring décor by Roy Lichtenstein and music by Brian Eno; and Split Sides (2003), a work with music by Radiohead and Sigur Rós, representing Cunningham's most radical and thrilling use of chance procedures. The BAM performances mark the last time these dances will be performed by MCDC in the U.S.

A full schedule of Legacy Tour engagements and detailed descriptions of repertory are available by request and online at www.merce.org/legacy-tour/schedule.php.

About the Legacy Tour
Celebrating Cunningham's lifetime of artistic achievement, the Legacy Tour showcases seminal works from throughout Cunningham's career, and offers audiences around the world a final opportunity to see Cunningham's choreography performed by the company he personally trained. Currently encompassing more than 50 engagements, the Legacy Tour brings MCDC to new destinations around the world and includes performances at venues throughout Europe and the United States that have been pivotal in showcasing the Company for the past 50 years.

A total of 18 works are being presented during the Legacy Tour, featuring seven newly revived pieces, many of which have not been performed for decades. The tour repertory highlights the artistic collaborations that characterized Cunningham's creative life, including his work with visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Lancaster, and Andy Warhol, and musicians John Cage-Cunningham's long-time collaborator and life partner-David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós, among others.

About the Cunningham Dance Foundation and the Legacy Plan
The Cunningham Dance Foundation, which has supported the creative work of Merce Cunningham since 1964, developed the precedent-setting Legacy Plan to address how an arts organization established to fulfill a single artist's vision can transform itself to a post-founder existence, and ensure the perpetuation of an enduring creative legacy. Following Cunningham's death in July 2009, the Foundation implemented the multifaceted plan, which includes the celebratory two-year Legacy Tour, and supports career transition for the dancers, musicians, and staff who have invested their time and creative efforts into the realization of Cunningham's vision. The Plan also provides for the creation of digital "Dance Capsules" that will bring Cunningham's work to life for future generations of dancers, scholars, and members of the public.

Following the conclusion of the Legacy Tour and the closure of MCDC, the Cunningham Dance Foundation will also close, and its assets will be transferred to the Merce Cunningham Trust, a separate nonprofit organization established by Cunningham in 2000 to hold the rights to his work and manage his artistic legacy in perpetuity.

Lead support for the Cunningham Dance Foundation's Legacy Plan, including the tour, has been provided by Leading for the Future, a program of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and an anonymous donor.

Major support has been provided by American Express; Candace and Frederick Beinecke; Bloomberg; Jill F. & Sheldon M. Bonovitz; Centre des Développement Chorégraphique; Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP; Sage & John Cowles; Anthony & Mary Creamer; Molly Davies; The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; Jeanne Donovan Fisher; Judith R. & Alan H. Fishman; the Marshall Franklin Foundation; Fund for the City of New York - Open Society Foundation; Agnes Gund; the Hayes Fund of HRK Foundation; Pamela & Richard Kramlich; Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation; Jacqueline Mattise Monnier; The New York Community Trust;; The Prospect Hill Foundation; Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk Radke; The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Mark Rudkin; The Fan Fox & Leslie R Samuels Foundation; The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation; The SHS Foundation; The Shubert Foundation; Allan G. & Ferne Goldberg Sperling; Sutton & Christian Stracke; Miralles Tagliabue EMBT; Trust for Mutual Understanding; Paul L. Wattis Foundation; and Friends of MCDC.

Public funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The Cunningham Dance Foundation extends special thanks to its Board of Directors for their generous support.

Additional information is available at www.merce.org.