FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 2017

Media Contacts: Elena Grotto 312.397.3828 [email protected] Karla Loring 312.397.3834 [email protected] Images: www.mcachicago.org/media

MCA CHICAGO AND THE WALKER ART CENTER PRESENT SIMULTANEOUS EXHIBITIONS OF : COMMON TIME

February 11 - April 30, 2017

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis together present the largest survey ever of Merce Cunningham and his dynamic artistic collaborations in the immersive exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time. This major exhibition, organized by the Walker, runs at both museums concurrently, premiering at the Walker on February 8, and at the MCA on February 11, with performances by international touring companies and former Merce Cunningham Dance Company dancers. The exhibition embodies both institutions’ dedication to cross-disciplinary programming and artistic practice, and is organized by the Walker Art Center’s Artistic Director Fionn Meade and Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts Philip Bither, with Joan Rothfuss and Mary Coyne. It is overseen at the MCA Chicago by Curator Lynne Warren.

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Renowned as both a choreographer and a dancer, Merce Cunningham (American, 1919-2009) revolutionized dance in the 20th century and continues to influence generations of artists, composers, and choreographers. Cunningham’s innovations and philosophies over a prolific 60-year career changed the course of modern dance and provided the impetus and inspiration for key movements in postwar artistic practice. The exhibition draws primarily on the Walker’s Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) Collection—acquired following the company’s disbanding in 2011—which includes costumes, decor elements, and sets from major works spanning the breadth of the company’s creativity.

Exploring what Cunningham described as the “underlying principle that music and dance and art could be separate entities independent and interdependent, sharing a common time,” the exhibition showcases Cunningham’s multidisciplinary collaborations between leading post-war artists. Performance backdrops, costumes, artworks, photographs, documentary video and video installations, sets, and ephemera immerse viewers in Cunningham’s creative activities. The exhibition highlights partnerships with artists including lifelong collaborator John Cage as well as Black Mountain colleague and other major figures including , Robert Morris, and , Nam June Paik, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, all of whom developed work for MCDC.

The exhibition presents a rare opportunity to view innovative and less recognized immersive installations by such artists as Charles Atlas and Ernesto Neto. Special features include a presentation of Andy Warhol’s décor for Cunningham’s RainForest, made of Warhol’s famous helium-filled silver balloons, and Charles Atlas’s MC9, which fills one of the MCA galleries with 35 years of clips from Cunningham pieces in a dazzling audio-visual realization.

Common Time also comprises new commissions, including performances of Cunningham’s ‘Events’ by former company dancers Dylan Crossman, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, and Melissa Toogood; a 3D video and live collaborative performance of Tesseract by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener; Morton Feldman’s monumental six-hour-long work with the Spektral Quartet; an experiential concert exploring sound and volume led by Matthew Duvall; and re-stagings of Cunningham’s repertory from contemporary dance company CCN–Ballet de Lorraine.

Throughout the exhibition, listening stations present some of the many important musical compositions commissioned by Cunningham from Cage and artists such as David Behrman, Morton Feldman, Takehisa Kosugi, Pauline Oliveros, and David Tudor. Films and videos by Nam June Paik and Charles Atlas explore how Cunningham worked to present dance especially for the screen. By presenting little- known facets of well-known careers within the context of Cunningham’s work, Common Time sheds new light on the risk-taking spirit Cunningham embodied in his own practice and cultivated among his collaborators.

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Over his prolific 60-year career, Merce Cunningham’s many innovations in the field of dance were fueled by his philosophy that movement did not need to be tied to telling a story or even set to music. This exhibition explores Cunningham’s influence on the arts, through the notion of “common time.” His nonhierarchical attitude had composers, musicians, designers, and visual artists working together as equals. “Common time” was a radical break with the more traditional model where an individual conceives the dance and has input into all aspects of its realization. This co-existent relationship of the arts was exemplified by Cunningham’s lifelong collaborations with composer John Cage.

This exhibition emphasizes the cross-disciplinary relationships between Cunningham’s Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which he formed in 1953, and the leading post-World War II figures with whom he worked. He partnered with visual artists who created décors—the stage elements within which the dancers interact—as well as costumes. Composers were tapped to contribute existing compositions or asked to create a score, but often with little explanation of the dance Cunningham had choreographed. Cunningham’s revolutionary vision of creativity is presented in projects dating from the 1940s to recent years. Décor, costumes, and music are augmented with photomurals and video documentation of the dances that demonstrate his “independent and interdependent” way of working.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

This 456-page volume, published by the Walker Art Center, reconsiders the choreographer and his collaborators as an extraordinarily generative interdisciplinary network that preceded and predicted dramatic shifts in performance, including the development of site-specific dance, the use of technology as a choreographic tool and the radical separation of sound and movement in dance. It features ten new essays by curators and historians, as well as interviews with contemporary choreographers—Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener—who address Cunningham’s continued influence. These are supplemented by rarely published archival photographs, reprints of texts by Cunningham, Cage and other key dancers, artists and scholars, several appendices and an extensive illustrated chronology placing Cunningham’s activities and those of his collaborators in the context of the 20th century, particularly the expanded arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. This book is an essential volume for anyone interested in contemporary art, music and dance. Edited by Fionn Meade and Joan Rothfuss, and texts by Carlos Basualdo, Juliet Bellow, Philip Bither, Roger Copeland, Mary L. Coyne, Douglas Crimp, Hiroko Ikegami, Kelly Kivland, Claudia La Rocco, Benjamin Piekut, and David Vaughan. Interviews by Victoria Brooks, Danielle Goldman, and Aram Moshayedi.

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PERFORMANCE PROGRAMS

MCA Cunningham Event February 11-12, 1:30 and 4 pm, Free with admission To celebrate the opening weekend of the exhibition, former dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Dylan Crossman, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, and Melissa Toogood, perform Cunningham’s signature approach to dance in non-conventional spaces. Presented in the fourth-floor lobby, MCA Cunningham Events are performed twice each day during museum hours and last about 30 minutes. Museum Event No. 1 (1964) was Cunningham’s devised solution to an invitation from Vienna’s Museum of the Twentieth Century to perform in a gallery—an unencumbered space without the aid of theatrical illusion. Events have since been performed at hundreds of locations as diverse as gymnasiums and the front of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, and now for the first time at the MCA. For the Event, dancers create materials using excerpts from key works drawn from six decades of original choreography, each lasting about 30 minutes, and performed twice daily during gallery hours.

CCN - Ballet de Lorraine: Works by Merce Cunningham and Others February 18 (7:30 pm) and 19 (3 and 7:30 pm), Tickets: $30 Presented with the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago Sounddance is one of Merce Cunningham’s most beloved pieces, which he created in 1975 in part as a reaction to the uniformity and unison of classical ballet. The work is fast and vigorous, a kind of organized chaos, driven by a powerful score by musician/composer David Tudor. Inspired by the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching (Chinese books of changes), Cunningham created the highly dramatic Fabrications by combining 64 short dance phrases. They are balanced with Untitled Partner #3, combining dance and film in a performance-installation. This work is by Ballet de Lorraine’s artistic leaders Petter Jacobsson and rehearsal director Thomas Caley, both of whom danced for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The collaboration features live music by the composer Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, and visual design by artist Dove Bradshaw. With this program, the MCA presents the Chicago debut of Ballet de Lorraine, one of the most important European companies performing contemporary works in balance with an extensive repertory of modern dance by leading choreographers.

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Music for Merce February 25 (7:30 pm) and 26 (3 pm), Tickets: $30 This two-evening festival gathers a veritable all-star group of key composers and musicians who collaborated with Merce Cunningham across different periods of his career. Convened by guest curator John King, these major figures include David Behrman, Joan La Barbara, Fast Forward, George Lewis, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Quinta, Phil Selway, and Christian Wolff. Cunningham and John Cage, partners in life and art, defied expectations of how to do things. Their restless explorations not only revolutionized their individual fields, they also changed the relation of music and dance. Instead of dance moving to music, they created both elements separately and brought them together at the performance— fundamentally changing the nature of how you experience performance. This historic occasion features a different program on each of the two days. Both programs present significant historical works from the varied composers’ collaborations with Cunningham and John Cage, as well as new compositions, improvisations, and musical events involving the full group.

Spektral Quartet, Morton Feldman: String Quartet No. 2 March 11 (6 pm), Tickets: $12 The Spektral Quartet is known for immersive and adventurous concerts often performed in unconventional settings. This project marks the Chicago debut of Morton Feldman’s monumental, six-hour-long work. Recognized for works he composed for Cunningham, Feldman wrote his String Quartet No. 2 as a durational piece to explore the limits of physical and non-narrative music. An epic achievement that is rarely heard, the music creates a trance-like focus. Due to the quiet nature of this concert, it is performed after regular gallery hours, but the Spektral Quartet also rehearses the music during regular museum hours.

Charles Atlas / Rashaun Mitchell / Silas Riener: Tesseract March 23-25 (7:30 pm), Tickets: $30 Choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, both dancers who performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, collaborate with radical video artist Charles Atlas on this new project that uses technology to shape new ways of seeing. Part film, part live performance, this event begins as a 3D viewing experience of dances composed for camera and unfolds into live dance with real- time video mixed and projected live by Atlas, allowing for multiple perspectives of bodies in motion. 5

Matthew Duvall and Guests: Whisper(s) April 23 (3 pm), Tickets: $12 Co-presented with Contempo / UChicago Presents Whisper(s) is an experiential concert exploring sound and volume led by percussionist Matthew Duvall of Eighth Blackbird. In the spirit of Merce Cunningham and his collaborating partner, composer John Cage, Duvall crafts a program that finds form and meaning in dynamic extremes—from a focused scream to the expansive edge of silence. The program begins in the theater with solo percussion works by Erik Satie, Morton Feldman, John Luther Adams, Matthew Burtner, and Yu-Hui Chang. It then moves to the upper floors of the museum, where Duvall is joined by 99 percussionists for the US premiere of Voice of the Winds, a new ambient work by composer/percussionist Marta Ptaszynska. Influenced by John Cage’s fascination with the presence of silence, this work makes an indelible soundscape by using 100 of the loudest instruments at their most ethereal.

EDUCATION PROGRAMS

MCA Talk: John King, Gordon Mumma, and Phil Selway February 26, 2 pm For this once-in-a-lifetime gathering, composers John King, Gordon Mumma, and Phil Selway discuss their distinctive music and incredible combinations of collaborators that define over seventy years of Cunningham works.

MCA Talk: Lynne Warren on Merce Cunningham March 7, noon, Free with admission Curator Lynne Warren leads a tour of the exhibition in the Griffin Galleries.

ABOUT THE WALKER ART CENTER AND THE MINNEAPOLIS SCULPTURE GARDEN

One of the most internationally celebrated art museums and multidisciplinary art centers, the Walker Art Center is known for presenting today’s most compelling artists from around the world. In addition to organizing traveling exhibitions and presentations of its world-renowned collections, the Walker presents a broad array of contemporary music, dance, design, theater, and moving image. In 2015, the Walker celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding as a public art center dedicated to presenting and collecting the art of our time with a series of institutional initiatives, exhibitions, and events that spanned more than a year. Although it was more than 125 years ago when lumber baron Thomas Barlow (T.B.) 6

Walker built a room onto his Minneapolis house, mounted his 20 favorite paintings on the wall, and opened his door to the community, it was in 1940 that the Walker’s contemporary-focused mission to be a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and active engagement of audiences was born. Supported by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Walker became a public art center presenting the work of living artists, forming a collection beyond the 19th-century holdings of its founder to the multidisciplinary works of today’s artists.

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Image credits: Frank Stella, Décor for Scramble (1967) in Event for Television 1977 (still) video. Directed by Merrill Brockway. Courtesy WNET-TV New York Archives. Décor ©2016 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Merce Cunningham Dance Company rehearsing Travelogue (1977), City Center Theater, New York City, September 1978 Photo: Johan Elbers Courtesy Johan Elbers (exterior). A Anna Finke photo of Event 1 at Dia Beacon, in the Andy Warhol Shadows gallery, Pictured: Emma Desjardins and Koji Mizuta, Photo: Anna Finke. CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, Sounddance, Photo: Laurent Philippe. Joan La Barbara, Photo: Paula Court. Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, Tesseract, 2015, Pictured: Melissa Toogood, Photo: Courtesy of Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener + Charles Atlas. Spektral Quartet, Photo: Drew Reynolds. Matthew Duvall, Whisper(s), Photo: Elliot Mandel.

Merce Cunningham: Common Time is organized by the Walker Art Center with major support provided by the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is also provided by Agnes Gund and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

Lead support for Merce Cunningham: Common Time is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris: Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul, Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda and Bill Friend, and Stephanie and John Harris; Cari and Michael Sacks; and Helen and Sam Zell. Major support is provided by the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation, Abby McCormick O’Neil and D. Carroll Joynes, anonymous, and the Nancy Lauter McDougal and Alfred L. McDougal Exhibition Fund. Additional generous support is provided by The Irving Harris Foundation, Joyce E. Chelberg, NIB Foundation; Robert Lehman Foundation, Jennifer and Alec Litowitz, and Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund. Special thanks to exhibition chairs, Sara Albrecht and Anne L. Kaplan. The MCA is proud to partner with the Harris Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance, and the Joffrey Ballet.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The museum is generously supported by its Board of Trustees; individual and corporate members; private and corporate foundations, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and government agencies. Programming is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Museum capital improvements are supported by a Public Museum Capital Grant from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The MCA is a proud member of Museums in the Park and receives major support from the Chicago Park District. The MCA is located at 220 E. Chicago Avenue, one block east of Michigan Avenue. The museum and sculpture garden are open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm and Tuesday from 10 am to 8 pm. The museum is closed on Monday. Tuesdays are Community Free Days with free admission for Illinois residents. Suggested general admission is $12 for adults and $7 for students and seniors. Children 12 years of age and under, MCA members, and members of the military are admitted free. Information about MCA exhibitions, programs, and special events is available on the MCA website at mcachicago.org or by phone at 312.280.2660.

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