Merce Cunningham Redux

Merce Cunningham Redux PDF Author: James Klosty
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 9781576879429
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
James Klosty'sMerce Cunninghamwas the first book ever published about Cunningham. It appeared in 1975 and was republished in 1986. Now, for the 100th anniversary of Cunningham's birth, it is reincarnated for a twenty-first-century audience in duotone printing, redesignedand completely reimagined with an additional 140pages of photographs, many published never before. In the years since their passing, the historical importance of the partnership of John Cage and Merce Cunningham has grown to the point where no consideration of avant-garde art, music, and dance in America makes sense if Cunningham and Cage are not posited, serene and smiling, at the wellspring of its inspiration. This is true not only in America but around the globe as well. Art does not exist in a vacuum and neither did Cunningham and Cage. Painters such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Robert Morris, and composers such as Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Pauline Oliveros joined the endeavor. Jasper Johns slyly lured Marcel Duchamp into allowing his iconic Large Glass to be used as decor for a Cunningham dance. Cunningham repeatedly invited Erik Satie (without Satie's permission) into his musical family. This seemingly haphazard association of innovative artists served as the nearest thing America could offer in counterbalance to Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. In addition to Klosty's photographs of the artists, composers, and dancers;and the dances themselves, both in rehearsal and performance; the book contains texts from Cunningham's associates including John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, Paul Taylor, Lincoln Kirstein, Edwin Denby, and a dozen others.

Merce Cunningham Redux

Merce Cunningham Redux PDF Author: James Klosty
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 9781576879429
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
James Klosty'sMerce Cunninghamwas the first book ever published about Cunningham. It appeared in 1975 and was republished in 1986. Now, for the 100th anniversary of Cunningham's birth, it is reincarnated for a twenty-first-century audience in duotone printing, redesignedand completely reimagined with an additional 140pages of photographs, many published never before. In the years since their passing, the historical importance of the partnership of John Cage and Merce Cunningham has grown to the point where no consideration of avant-garde art, music, and dance in America makes sense if Cunningham and Cage are not posited, serene and smiling, at the wellspring of its inspiration. This is true not only in America but around the globe as well. Art does not exist in a vacuum and neither did Cunningham and Cage. Painters such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Robert Morris, and composers such as Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Pauline Oliveros joined the endeavor. Jasper Johns slyly lured Marcel Duchamp into allowing his iconic Large Glass to be used as decor for a Cunningham dance. Cunningham repeatedly invited Erik Satie (without Satie's permission) into his musical family. This seemingly haphazard association of innovative artists served as the nearest thing America could offer in counterbalance to Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. In addition to Klosty's photographs of the artists, composers, and dancers;and the dances themselves, both in rehearsal and performance; the book contains texts from Cunningham's associates including John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, Paul Taylor, Lincoln Kirstein, Edwin Denby, and a dozen others.

Dancing with Merce Cunningham

Dancing with Merce Cunningham PDF Author: Marianne Preger-Simon
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063620
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book

Book Description
Dancing with Merce Cunningham is a buoyant, captivating memoir of a talented dancer’s lifelong friendship with one of the choreographic geniuses of our time. Marianne Preger-Simon’s story opens amid the explosion of artistic creativity that followed World War II. While immersed in the vibrant arts scene of postwar Paris during a college year abroad, Preger-Simon was so struck by Merce Cunningham’s unconventional dance style that she joined his classes in New York. She soon became an important member of his brand new dance troupe—and a constant friend. Through her experiences in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Preger-Simon offers a rare account of exactly how Cunningham taught and interacted with his students. She describes the puzzled reactions of audiences to the novel non-narrative choreography of the company’s debut performances. She touches on Cunningham’s quicksilver temperament—lamenting his early frustrations with obscurity and the discomfort she suspects he endured in concealing his homosexuality and partnership with composer John Cage—yet she celebrates above all his dependable charm, kindness, and engagement. She also portrays the comradery among the company’s dancers, designers, and musicians, many of whom—including Cage, David Tudor, and Carolyn Brown—would become integral to the avant-garde arts movement, as she tells tales of their adventures touring in a VW Microbus across the United States. Finally, reflecting on her connection with Cunningham throughout the latter part of his career, Preger-Simon recalls warm moments that nurtured their enduring bond after she left the dance company and, later, New York. Interspersed with her letters to friends and family, journal entries, and correspondence from Cunningham himself, Preger-Simon’s memoir is an intimate look at one of the most influential companies in modern American dance and the brilliance of its visionary leader.

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham PDF Author: Fionn Meade
Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers
ISBN: 9781935963141
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 451

Get Book

Book Description
Published in conjuction with exhibitions held at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 8-July 30, 2017, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, February 11-April 30, 2017.

Chance and Circumstance

Chance and Circumstance PDF Author: Carolyn Brown
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307575608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Get Book

Book Description
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most celebrated modern dancers of the past fifty years: the story of her own remarkable career, of the formative years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and of the two brilliant, iconoclastic, and forward-thinking artists at its center—Merce Cunningham and John Cage. From its inception in the l950s until her departure in the l970s, Carolyn Brown was a major dancer in the Cunningham company and part of the vibrant artistic community of downtown New York City out of which it grew. She writes about embarking on her career with Cunningham at a time when he was a celebrated performer but a virtually unknown choreographer. She describes the heady exhilaration—and dire financial straits—of the company’s early days, when composer Cage was musical director and Robert Rauschenberg designed lighting, sets and costumes; and of the struggle for acceptance of their controversial, avant-garde dance. With unique insight, she explores Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and experimentation with compositional procedures influenced by Cage. And she probes the personalities of these two men: the reticent, moody, often secretive Cunningham, and the effusive, fun-loving, enthusiastic Cage. Chance and Circumstance is an intimate chronicle of a crucial era in modern dance, and a revelation of the intersection of the worlds of art, music, dance, and theater that is Merce Cunningham’s extraordinary hallmark.

John Cage Was

John Cage Was PDF Author: James Klosty
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819575043
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Intimate portraits and remembrances of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century It is difficult to imagine a world without John Cage. His playful, challenging spirit remains pervasive—a formative force in the lives of those in the forefront of today's arts. This special book combines iconic photographs of Cage by James Klosty with eclectic testimony the author commissioned from people the world over, each asked to contribute their thoughts on Cage's influence on their lives and work with one-hundred-word statements. These remembrances range from humorous to reverent, and are from artists including Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Gavin Bryars, Jasper Johns, Harry Mathews, Meredith Monk, Mark Morris, Ron Padgett, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Reich, Peter Sellars, Stephen Sondheim, Twyla Tharp, Michael Tilson Thomas, Anne Waldman, Robert Wilson, and many more. The evocative duotone photographs show John Cage alone and in association with Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Octavio Paz, Aaron Copland, and many others. The book provides public and private glimpses into the man who transformed chance from an inescapable inevitability of life into disciplined creativity through music, writing, philosophy, printmaking, and, on the largest scale of all, living. John Cage Was gives us a privileged view of an irreplaceable man who had few enemies and innumerable disciples.

Dear Diary

Dear Diary PDF Author: Lesley Arfin
Publisher: Vice Books
ISBN: 9781576873830
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Lesley Arfin kept a diary during the apocalypse that was her adolescence, chronicling her depression from being bullied in the 10th grade and her discovery of heroin. Lesley told her diary everything. Now in her 20s, Lesley has returned to her journal and added new comments that only an adult looking back on their own life can perceive. Most of these are in the vein of What the hell was I talking about?' Lesley's hilarious updates remind readers how heavy it all seemed back then and how irrelevant it all really is in the face of adulthood.'

Walker's Way

Walker's Way PDF Author: Isabelle Storey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Isabelle Storey's memoir of her 10-year marriage to Walker Evans. The story of an elegant young woman's infatuation with a great American artist - with the man himself, with what he stood for aesthetically and with his artistic and social circle and how her initial passion gradually cooled into disenchantment. In candid, poignant narrative, which draws on the couple's correspondence, Isabelle describes how their marriage grew more formal, cooler and eventually failed altogether as Isabelle felt compelled to move on.

Begin Again

Begin Again PDF Author: Kenneth Silverman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book

Book Description
A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--

Tokyo, 1955-1970

Tokyo, 1955-1970 PDF Author: Doryun Chong
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN: 0870708341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book

Book Description
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 18, 2012-Feb. 25, 2013.

Rethinking Dance History

Rethinking Dance History PDF Author: Larraine Nicholas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134827636
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book

Book Description
The need to ‘rethink’ and question the nature of dance history has not diminished since the first edition of Rethinking Dance History. This revised second edition addresses the needs of an ever-evolving field, with new contributions considering the role of digital media in dance practice; the expansion of performance philosophy; and the increasing importance of practice-as-research. A two-part structure divides the book’s contributions into: • Why Dance History? – the ideas, issues and key conversations that underpin any study of the history of theatrical dance. • Researching and Writing – discussions of the methodologies and approaches behind any successful research in this area. Everyone involved with dance creates and carries with them a history, and this volume explores the ways in which these histories might be used in performance-making – from memories which establish identity to re-invention or preservation through shared and personal heritages. Considering the potential significance of studying dance history for scholars, philosophers, choreographers, dancers and students alike, Rethinking Dance History is an essential starting point for anyone intrigued by the rich history and many directions of dance.