Merce Cunningham Trust Launches Online Centennial Repertory Festival
By: Chloe Rabinowitz May. 04, 2020
The Merce Cunningham Trust, in conjunction with its licensees and collaborators, is launching the Centennial Repertory Festival, a free online retrospective of performances from the recently completed Merce Cunningham Centennial, which comprised hundreds of events around the globe. At a time when live performance is at a standstill, this unique online festival offers people everywhere the ability to see a diverse set of dancers perform the work, for the first time since Cunningham's death in 2009 and the closing of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 2011. To accompany these archival performances, the Centennial Repertory Festival includes new videos with their Cunningham stagers teaching choreographic phrases from the dances, and in some cases introducing the works.
Licensing partners who participated in the Centennial and are joining the Trust in this effort sharing their recorded performances include the Lyon Opera Ballet, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Stephen Petronio Company, CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston, American Dance Festival, John Scott Dance, and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Each performance will be available for viewing, free to the public, for a two-month period-one month on the Trust website and Vimeo channel, and one month via the licensee. A new performance will be shared on the Trust website each Monday.
Between September 2018 and December 2019, the Centennial gathered worldwide audiences around Merce Cunningham's enduring vision and its ability to continue pushing dance-and the way it's embodied, perceived, recorded, and taught-forward. While audiences were symbolically connected through an international celebration of this legacy, events were unique to their given locations and the companies coordinating and performing them. However, one event, Night of 100 Solos-which took place on what would have been Cunningham's 100th birthday (April 16, 2019) in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles-transcended the spatial limits of live performance by live-streaming all three singular presentations, allowing anyone anywhere to experience the Event.
The Centennial Repertory Festival now builds on that strategy-recognizing that as our lives become necessarily confined, they can also continue in new ways to expand, and that as the world socially distances, connection can be found in other modes of shared experience. In this vein, audiences can now, from their own homes, get a view of a diverse segment of Merce Cunningham's extensive repertoire-as it was performed and celebrated in so many corners of the world in the past two years by both professional dancers and students.
Among these dances are some that have rarely been seen in the past decade prior to the Centennial, including Exchange (1978), performed in the Centennial by Lyon Opera Ballet; Totem Ancestor (1942) and Night Wandering (1958) performed by John Scott Dance; and Pond Way (1998), performed in the Centennial by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. The nature of the festival befits the legacy of a choreographer who applied new technologies to dance and revolutionized notions about how dance can be captured on film, emphasizing the potentials of the relationship between the camera, the moving body, and the viewer.
The festival is the result of a special arrangement, in which the Trust is waiving its standard licensing restrictions on such video presentations of live performances. This initiative was met with great enthusiasm from licensees, who are looking for ways to continue to reach and engage their public during this isolating time. Merce Cunningham Trust Executive Director, Ken Tabachnick, says, "The Trust is constantly searching for ways to use the rich and diverse assets we have to accomplish the goals of our partners, which furthers our mission to make Merce Cunningham's work accessible to the public."
Merce Cunningham Trust Director of Licensing Patricia Lent, curator of the Centennial Repertory Festival, says, "This unique experience is only possible due to the high-quality work our licensees presented and the cooperation of our collaborators who have generously and eagerly supported this initiative."
All MCT streaming is available through the Trust website at https://www.mercecunningham.org/licensing/ or on its Vimeo page at https://vimeo.com/channels/cunninghamrepfestival.
Schedule of Trust Streaming Dates for the Centennial Repertory Festival
Sounddance
Ballet de Lorraine
May 4 - 31
Cunningham x 100 (Event)
Conservatoire National de Paris
May 11 - June 7
Tread
Stephen Petronio Company
May 18 - June 14
Totem Ancestor
John Scott Dance
May 25 - June 21
Exchange
Lyon Opera Ballet
June 1 - 28
How To Pass, Kick, Fall and Run
American Dance Festival
June 8 - July 5
Scramble
NYTB/ChamberWorks
June 22 - July 19
Sounddance
Juilliard School
June 29 - July 26
Beach Birds
CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston
July 13 - August 9
Summerspace
Lyon Opera Ballet
July 20 - August 16
Pond Way
Flanders Ballet
July 27 - August 23
Night Wandering
John Scott Dance
August 3 - August 30
More dances will be announced.
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