Merce Cunningham Dance Co. To Present Final Performance on NYE

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) will present its final performances, a series of Cunningham's signature site-specific Events, December 29 - 31 at Park Avenue Armory in New York City. To be performed across three stages in the Armory's soaring drill hall, the Park Avenue Amory Events mark the conclusion of the Company's two-year Legacy Tour, comprising more than 60 engagements and 150 performances around the world, and the culmination of the Company's nearly 60 years of cross-disciplinary innovation. The Park Avenue Armory Events will feature new music commissions by the MCDC Music Committee, décor by artist Daniel Arsham, costumes by MCDC Wardrobe Supervisor Anna Finke, and lighting by MCDC's Lighting Director Christine Shallenberg. As Cunningham requested, all tickets to the final performances are priced at $10.

"Since the days of MCDC's earliest tours, when John Cage served as both Music Advisor and the Company's de facto bus driver, and Robert Rauschenberg played the role of stage manager, the Company has continually transformed the way individuals across the country and around the world experience the arts with its radical approach to space, time, technology, and artistic collaboration," said Trevor Carlson, Executive Director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. "These historic Events at Park Avenue Armory offer an opportunity to celebrate Merce's extraordinary creative vision, and honor the musicians, artists, and generations of dancers who have brought that vision to life over the years."

Events are presented without intermission and, as Cunningham described them:

"…consist of complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time to allow not so much an evening of dance as the experience of dance."

Throughout its history, the Company has mounted over 800 of these signature site-specific choreographic collages in unusual locations around the world, including two previous engagements in the Armory's drill hall: a 1983 performance and the 2009 public memorial for Cunningham. The Park Avenue Armory Events are arranged by Robert Swinston, a Company member since 1980, who became Cunningham's Assistant in 1992 and MCDC's Director of Choreography following Cunningham's death.

The performances will feature the last-ever music commissions for MCDC, with each of the four members of the Music Committee composing a new work for the occasion. Reflecting an intimate knowledge of Cunningham's creative process and the radical innovations he and John Cage pioneered, the new music by Music Director Takehisa Kosugi, David Behrman, John King, and Christian Wolff will be presented in different orders each evening to create six unique performances. The music at the Park Avenue Armory Events will be performed by an ensemble of 17 musicians through a site-specific 16 channel sound installation designed to harness the remarkable acoustics of the Armory's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

For the décor, artist Daniel Arsham will fill the drill hall with massive suspended "clouds" comprised of thousands of individual colored spheres. For his fourth and final collaboration with MCDC, 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 suspended 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.

Costumes for the Park Avenue Armory Events are designed by Anna Finke, MCDC's Wardrobe Supervisor and Company Photographer. Each costume features either a photograph of Westbeth, the West Village artist's residence that has been home to the Cunningham Studio since 1971, or a photograph of the surrounding skyline taken from the building's roof.

About the Legacy Tour

Celebrating Cunningham's lifetime of artistic achievement, the Legacy Tour has showcased seminal works from throughout Cunningham's career, and offered audiences around the world a final opportunity to see Cunningham's choreography performed by the company he personally trained. Encompassing 60 engagements in nearly 50 cities, the Legacy Tour has brought MCDC to new destinations around the world, and included 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 were presented during the Legacy Tour, including seven newly revived pieces, many of which had not been performed for decades. The tour repertory highlighted 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's Legacy Plan and the Merce Cunningham Trust

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. As announced in September 2011, the Trust will establish headquarters at New York City Center in 2012, where it will offer daily classes in Cunningham Technique™. The Trust will also launch a pilot program, the Cunningham Fellowship, through which a stipend will be awarded to individuals to restage a Cunningham work during a four-week intensive workshop. The Trust will continue to license Cunningham works to leading dance companies and educational institutions worldwide, and will partner with cultural institutions to mount special projects, performances, and exhibitions that celebrate Cunningham's artistic achievements.

Legacy Plan Support

Lead support for the Cunningham Dance Foundation's Legacy Plan and the Legacy Tour has been provided by Leading for the Future, a program of 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. and Sheldon M. Bonovitz; Centre de Développement Chorégraphique – French Cultural Ministry; Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP; Sage and John Cowles; Anthony B. Creamer III; Molly Davies; The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; Jeanne Donovan Fisher; Judith R. and Alan H. Fishman; the Marshall Frankel Foundation; Fund for the City of New York – Open Society Foundations; Agnes Gund; the Hayes Fund of HRK Foundation; Pamela and Richard Kramlich; Yoko Ono Lennon; Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation; Jacqueline Matisse Monnier; The New York Community Trust – Wallace Special Projects Fund; The Prospect Hill Foundation; Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk Radke; 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. and Ferne Goldberg Sperling; Sutton and Christian Stracke; Miralles Tagliabue EMBT; Trust for Mutual Understanding; the Paul L. Wattis Foundation; and Friends of MCDC.

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

Music for Park Avenue Armory Events commissioned from and performed by the MCDC Music Committee with a generous grant from American Music Center's Live Music for Dance program, with additional support from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music's Performing Ensembles Program.

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

Additional information is available at www.merce.org.

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