Word: cunningham
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Over one-fourth of the audience walked out on the opening night of the Boston Ballet's Fall, 1974 season. The reason: a performance of "Winterbranch," a work by avantgarde master Merce Cunningham...
...certainly not the first time a Cunningham piece has driven away an audience. In 1973, Clive Barnes remarked in a review in the New York Times that "there were so many deserters during the performance that one feels that the Cunningham company may have an amnesty problem facing it." The international press has grumbled at and applauded Cunningham for thirty-odd years. His efforts have been labelled "barefoot inconsequentiality," "a much-needed shot in the backside," "self-indulgent and camp," and "the principal creative force in America's modern dance." And Cunningham himself has been both scorned as a fraud...
Members of the Harvard community had a chance to judge for themselves Tuesday, when Cunningham led an historic Learning from Performers lecture-demonstration in the Radcliffe Gym. The Cunningham company is in Massachusetts on a five-week Pilot Long Term Residency program in which master classes, films, and exhibits of work by artists who have been associated with Cunningham complement the company's unique exposition of dance...
...dance is likely to be predictable--a fitting tribute to the child of a family of Centralia, Washington lawyers who grew up to shock those who shocked the world with modern dance. But even outrageous art can only outrage within a context of respectability; for Cunningham, the background includes both sporadic ballet study and several years in the early '40s as a leading dancer with Martha Graham's company. Beginning with his first solo recital in 1944, however, Cunningham gradually drifted away from the objective, disciplined symbolism of modern dance's first generation toward his own radical redefinition. New York...
...this, Cunningham's baffling, inventive choreography is almost as controversial as ever--and he himself, an intensely private person, has offered no comprehensive explanations on either philosophy or method. What is certain is that his 25-year collaboration with avant-garde composer John Cage has been of major importance. Cage's concern with reevaluating the whole idea of music, with both reducing its definition to an almost untenable minimum and expanding its material to an almost unlimited scope, is parallelled in Cunningham's approach to dance...