Merce Cunningham Dance Company
50th Anniversary Season
Cunningham Dance Foundation opening night Benefit featuring Radiohead & Sigur Rós, performing live

VENUE
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

DATE/ TIME
Oct 16-18 at 7:30pm

TICKETS
Tickets: $20, 40, 55

Cunningham Dance Foundation opening night Benefit featuring Radiohead & Sigur Rós, performing live Oct 14 at 8pm

*NOTE: Performance-only tickets for the Oct 14 Cunningham Dance Foundation Benefit featuring Radiohead and Sigur Ros are sold out. A limited number of gala dinner/ticket packages are available via the Cunningham Dance Foundation at 212.255.8240, ext 14. Be advised that these packages begin at the $500 level.

BAMtalk
The Merce Cunningham Legacy: Four Key Discoveries
Oct 18 at 4pm

It was in 1954 that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company made the first of more than ten groundbreaking BAM appearances. Since those heady days, Cunningham's revolutionary approach to such elements as time, space, and scale has profoundly influenced multiple generations of visual and performing artists. Because of him, we now see dance as an art form no longer bound by convention to a storyline or particular musical score.

This fall, BAM marks the company's 50th anniversary, continuing a yearlong celebration of a choreographer who has proved to be the world's most rigorous and consistently inventive dancemaker-one whose ideas have extended beyond movement to embrace radical collaborations with like-minded revolutionaries such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. A prime example: the world-premiering Split Sides, a chance-driven work set to original music by the experimental rock bands Radiohead and Sigur Rós, both playing live on opening night. Turner Prize-nominee Catherine Yass and eighteen-year-old camera obscura experimenter Robert Heishman contribute photographic décor, alongside lighting by James F. Ingalls and costumes by James Hall. The arrangement of the movement, music, décor, lighting, and costumes-each element created in two distinct parts-will change nightly as determined by the toss of coin, guaranteeing that every performance will be a surprise.

Also on the program, the New York premiere of Fluid Canvas, revealing Cunningham's ongoing fascination with the computer with its brush-stroked, motion-captured images by digital artists Marc Downie, Shelly Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser. Complementing the visuals is music composed and performed live by John King, with lighting and costumes by Ingalls and Hall, respectively. The Guardian (UK) raved, "This is a work packed with a lifetime's knowledge. evoking [Cunningham's] genius for animating every part of the stage."

PROGRAMS
Split Sides (2003)
World Premiere
Music by Radiohead and
Sigur Rós
Photography by Catherine Yass and Robert Heishman
Costume design by James Hall
Lighting design by
James F. Ingalls

Fluid Canvas (2002)
NY Premiere
Music by John King
Digital artwork by Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser
Costumes by James Hall
Lighting by
James F. Ingalls

Split Sides was commissioned by BITE:04, the Barbican, London, and the College of Saint Benedict-Benedicta Arts Center, St. Joseph, MN. It was co-commissioned by BAM and Carlson Center at Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS.

Fluid Canvas was co-commissioned by BITE:02, the Barbican, London.

Major support for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's 50th anniversary was provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation, Sage and John Cowles, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Phyllis Wattis.