Do makeup smudges count as damage, or do they lend a patina of authenticity? How do you rebuild a 50-year-old stage set? Using objects from the Walker’s newly acquired Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection, experts demonstrate the process of conserving and cataloging artworks and artifacts made for dance, theater, and other types of live performance. Join Walker registrar Joe King, Cunningham research fellow Abigail Sebaly, and conservators Beth McLaughlin and David Marquis for a behind-the-scenes look at creating the new exhibition Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg.
Four Events that Have Led to Large Discoveries (About Merce Cunningham)
"What was it about Cunningham that made him stand out so," asks art historian Douglas Crimp in his catalogue essay for the 2017 exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time. "The dance movement he made—whatever its diverse sources in ballet and modern technique, observation of people in the streets and animals in nature, chance operations, pure invention—was uniquely suited to his own body, and he was its finest exponent." Joining in a worldwide celebration of choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham's birth—born on this day in 1919—we share Crimp's essay online for the first time as a testament to Cunningham's influence, innovation, and iconoclasm.
