Fujiko Nakaya: Artist of fog

Q. and A. | Fujiko Nakaya on Making Sculptures Out of Fog

by Ken Miller, The New York Times, May 27, 2014

Cunningham, Cage, Johns, Rauschenberg: Duchamp's American legacy

Bride, 1912, Marcel Duchamp, American (born France), 1887 – 1968. Oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 21 7/8 inches (89.5 x 55.6cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp

Philadelphia Museum of Art's fall/winter exhibition season includes Dancing around the Bride:Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp, highlighting Marcel Duchamp's impact on four great contemporary artists--composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Dancer Carolyn Brown in Walkaround Time, 1968. Choreography by Merce Cunningham, American, 1919-2009. Stage set and costumes by Jasper Johns, American, b. 1930. Photograph © 1972 by James Klosty

Opening on October 30, the show will feature more than sixty works by Johns and Rauschenberg and more than forty by Duchamp, as well as prerecorded and live music by John Cage, and live performances of Merce Cunningham dances on a large dance floor at the center of the exhibition's “Main Stage” section.

John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg outside Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London during the 1964 world tour of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Photograph © Douglas H. Jeffrey, courtesy Merce Cunningham Trust

“As the Philadelphia Museum of Art holds the world’s largest and most significant collection of works by Marcel Duchamp, it is only fitting for the Museum to present this first exhibition juxtaposing works by Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg with one another and exploring their complex and vitally important relationship to Duchamp,” says Timothy Rub, the Museum’s George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer. “This multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary show will enable visitors to experience and more fully appreciate one of the most exciting and momentous periods in the history of modern art.”

Dancing around the Bride runs through January 21 and will travel to the Barbican Centre in London in February 2013.

For complete exhibition information, click here.

For general visitor information, click here.

Map/Directions

Trisha Brown: The air is full of pictures

The air is full of pictures no matter where you reach in.

(Jack Gilbert, "The Difficult Beauty" from The Dance Most of All)

I was reading The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert's book of poems, during intermission at Dance Theater Workshop's presentation of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. I came across the line above and thought, "Wow, that's really true. That's exactly how I experience Brown's spacious world." And we reach in, again and again, because it is such a joy to do so.

Particularly true of Foray Forêt (1990) with the subtly Near East opulence of its Rauschenberg costumes, the tantalizing near/far wanderings of its offstage/outdoors marching band, and its generous abundance of movement. Particularly true of the easy-flowing yet precisely connected and rendered macro- and micro-movements danced by Brown's tribe with their yielding knees and wafting arms and the assured and articulate, if arcane, hieroglyphics of it all.

The invisible, peripatetic band--conductor Tom Goodkind's TriBattery Pops, a volunteer crew of Tribeca and Battery Park residents--plays a repertoire stretching from "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" to jazz. The strange effect of "following" them with our ears alone as they move outside our vision creates a sense of a wider space in which Brown and the dancers make their work. It's a distinctly American and diverse environment, one with complicated history encoded in the very things that are meant to entertain us or rally us. At first, Brown's serene dancers seem to inhabit a rarified enclave, but then you realize that they're co-existing with the world implied by the music, not contradicting it, and maybe it is gently informing what they're doing. After all, Brown is an American shaped, as we all are, by popular culture and circumstances. Although nothing is crudely underscored, you begin to see places where music and movement fondly caress each other.

In the midst of all of this heady material, please be sure to keep an eye on Elena Demyanenko. The way she places her feet, cocks her head, draws and expels her breath are all of a piece, a deep, connected way of dancing the incredibly complex coordinates that looks like a way of addressing the incredibly complex demands of life--burning within, alert, intuitive and wise.

More power to Neal Beasley for taking on a legendary, iconic Brown solo--Watermotor (1978). Perhaps it's a matter of physical difference--he is compact--but his explosive attack turns Watermotor into a very different dance (which might be just fine with Brown). I found it hard to see the movement slip through his body the way it slipped through hers. I saw the periphery of the rapid movement instead of the play of the rapids. I saw the end result of the force, a virtuosic, if considerably less interesting, performance.

For M.G.: The Movie (1991)--with its audacious stillness, even more audacious repetition (check out that nearly endless opening sequence), cheesy theatrical special effects and stilted movement aesthetics--seems to be anything but a dance critic favorite. However, the key to it, I think, might be Time--both literally giving it time to work on you and, after you've seen how it shapes up, thinking back over how Brown fractures and distorts time throughout. I can't claim that I feel drawn to this work, but I do think Brown's doing something here around time that's intriguing.

Hard to believe that this season marks this company's debut at Dance Theater Workshop. Trisha Brown Dance Company. Dance Theater Workshop. All I'm sayin'.

See Trisha Brown Dance Company tonight through Saturday at 7:30pm (program and ticket information)

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

SITI: "Okay. That feels good to me."

In her Director's Note, Anne Bogart wonders how SITI Company's new DTW production of bobrauschenbergamerica--a work premiered in the innocent American spring of 2001--will resonate with today's audiences. Let me take a stab: We are now either too scarred and scared--and cynical--for this or we are greatly in need of its delirious good spirits. Actually, I can't decide which way to go on this question, but I can tell you that I, for one, love this show.

bobrauschenbergamerica works like one of Raushenberg's "combines" of homely things. It makes something magic(k)al of the mess. In its wild and basically good-natured juxtapositions, it keeps prodding you to reconcile what's artificial with what's natural or sincere. No, you don't get to choose.

It doesn't take diversity, of any kind, seriously in any dreary kind of way but rather turns the seriousness of social diversity into the exuberance of a neighborly smorgasbord, mercilessly dragging you to the table. If you're still kicking and screaming--you're overthinking, perhaps, why the whole cast is suddenly doing the Electric Slide or, at another moment, square dancing--this is a vaudevillian show that shoves pop music and fried chicken at you until you're helpless and giggling because, basically, it knows who you are. You're an American. This stuff--all of it--is your DNA.

And that's the way it should be--America, a delicious mess, a raucous work-in-progress. This visually-festive production and playwright Charles L. Mee spliced material argue that there's nothing we need to fix about that--and keep that in mind, Arizona. As the final words go, "Okay. That feels good to me."

Bogart's ensemble is, overall, great. But pay particular attention to performances by Ellen Lauren (Susan, a white woman in a racially-mixed couple rocked by fairly ordinary challenges) and Leon Ingulsrud (darkly sculpted by Brian H Scott's lighting and his own physical discipline, as he delivers his decreasingly funny chicken jokes).

bobrauschenbergamerica continues at Dance Theater Workshop through May 16. Click here for complete schedule information and ticketing.

Review: Trisha Brown Dance Company at BAM

Trisha Brown Dance Company
by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, May 2009

Robert Rauschenberg, Dead at 82

Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, May 13, 2008