By Roger Copeland
Merce Cunningham and the Modernizing of contemporary Dance is an entire learn of the lifestyles and paintings of this seminal choreographer/dancer. greater than only a biography, Copeland explores Cunningham's lifestyles tale opposed to a backdrop of a whole century of advancements in American artwork. Copeland strains his personal event of Cunningham's dances-from the turbulent past due '60s during the experimental works of the '80s and '90s-showing how Cunningham moved dance clear of the hugely emotional, subjective paintings of Martha Graham to a go back to a brand new type of classicism. This ebook areas Cunningham within the leading edge of an inventive revolution, a revolution that has its parallels in tune (John Cage, and the minimalist composers who him), portray (Jaspar Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), theater (the "happenings" of the '60s), and dance itself (the Judson college of dancers). An iconclastic and hugely readable research, this e-book may be loved by way of all these attracted to the advance of the yankee arts within the twentieth century.
Read or Download Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance PDF
Best dance books
Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance
Road Scenes offers a concept of past due medieval appearing and function via a clean and original studying of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. The functionality conception viewpoint hired the following, besides the exam of actor/character dialectics, paves the way in which to understanding either non secular theatre and the complexity of past due medieval theatricalities.
Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance
The choreographies of invoice T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped identify dance as a vital discourse of the 90s. those dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the viewers to work out the physique as a resource of cultural id -- a actual presence that strikes with and during its gendered, racial, and social meanings.
The Remix Manual: The Art and Science of Dance Music Remixing with Logic
Are you able to flip a soulful ballad right into a hit dance tune, or make any Billboard hit your personal? With this all-in-one consultant to remixing, you could! even if you are a expert DJ or manufacturer, or are only commencing to combine tracks, this step by step consultant will deliver you thru the total means of making your individual professional-quality remixes.
In regularly multiple, the thinker, visible artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept that of the "more than human" within the context of circulation, notion, and event. operating from Whitehead's method philosophy and Simondon's conception of individuation, she extends the innovations of stream and relation constructed in her prior paintings towards the inspiration of "choreographic considering.
- Choreographics: A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present
- The Life and Ballets of Lev Ivanov: Choreographer of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake
- The Neurocognition of Dance: Mind, Movement and Motor Skills
- Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities
- The Moment of Movement: Dance Improvisation
- Powwow
Additional resources for Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance
Example text
And their faces were unlike those of any other dancers I’d seen. They avoided the pert, strained, plastered-on smiles of the ballet dancer as well as the dramatized angst that sometimes made modern dancers look hopelessly melodramatic. What one saw was the thought-process-made-visible: a complete concentration on the task at hand. Above all, they didn’t seem silent in the way that Martha Graham’s dancers did. They looked smart and wise (a little mischievous, no doubt), maybe even “smart ass,” as if they had chosen to be silent, as if it was cool to be silent.
Suzuki, and the impact that television is thought to have had on his work. This book challenges equally familiar notions about the connections between Cunningham’s compositional procedures and those of abstract expressionism, the ways in which his choreography relates to conceptions of contemporary classicism, and the deeper significance of his attraction to the vocabulary of classical ballet. Certainly, when it comes to current academic fashion(s), this book is vigorously polemical. It champions a number of the ideas most vilified by the race/class/gender gurus: formalism, objectivity, disinterestedness, the value of the visual (as opposed to the tactile)—terms often associated (naively, in my view) with patriarchy, “the prevailing culture,” the West, phallocentrism, and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
This attitude of “indifference” was equally evident in Pauline Oliveros’s sound score for “Canfield”—which assigned the musicians the task of scientifically testing the acoustical properties of the performance space. As the lights dimmed out at BAM, one could hear Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma communicating with one another over walkie-talkies. With a cool and scrupulous objectivity, they discussed the acoustical properties of the opera house. The Holy Grail for these techno-musicians was a search for From Graham to Cunningham 29 what they called the “resonant frequency” of the performance space.