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By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

The morning of the final day of Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the troupe paid tribute to its late artistic director by holding two family movement workshops inspired by Cunningham’s technique and choreography strategies. Led by MCDC Director of Special Projects Kevin Taylor, the Sunday workshops were a chance for parents and their children, ages six and up, to playfully move in Disney Hall’s glorious BP Hall, an open foyer with walls carved out of wood and high skylights that let in natural light.

Attendees frolicked to the lively music of flautist Gerald Blanding, who said the improvisational nature of his playing at the workshop was in the same vein as Cunningham collaborator John Cage’s musical compositions. Cage would play his music live for MCDC, free to alter the composition slightly at each performance.

Taylor took the group of eager participants through a series of exercises in which they practiced twisting, turning, balancing, posing and jumping—all staples of Cunningham technique. Inspired by the space, Taylor led participants single-file along BP Hall’s curvy walls, and encouraged the kids to think about new ways to move. “Merce liked to say that there’s five ways to jump. So we’re going to find all five ways,” he said to the ebullient bunch.

To conclude the workshop, Taylor introduced an interactive approach to choreograph a short dance. “Merce would sometimes use chance in making his dances; something else would make the decisions,” Taylor commented before pulling out of his bag two oversized dice, one with a simple dance step noted on each of the six sides, the other a typical die with numbers. Rolling the dice with wide smiles, the kids created a combination—for example, six jumps followed by three turns.



The enthusiasm the budding dancers displayed highlights the importance of arts education and enrichment programs. Particularly in the case of MCDC, which will be disbanded in December 2011 after completing its two-year Legacy Tour, education will play a crucial role in passing on Cunningham’s technique and vision to future generations of dancers.

After all, it was Cunningham himself who pointed out the ephemeral nature of dance: “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

A booming noise fills Walt Disney Concert Hall Friday night. Just as the lights illuminate the stage, the 15 dancers of Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) enter, carrying stools and clad in brightly colored layers of leotards and shorts, skirts and pants, tights and leg warmers. The reds, yellows, greens and blues of their clothing are made all the brighter against the white marley floor the artists dance on. This is Roaratorio, restaged for the first time since 1987, playing at the Music Center June 4 to 6.

Prior to the start of the performance, Bonnie Brooks, chair of the dance department at Columbia College Chicago, and Patricia Lent, MCDC director of licensing, take the stage. Lent explains Cunningham intended Roaratorio to be “a collage—a layering of different elements.” This effect is seen not only in terms of the costuming, but in the dance itself, and is heard in the music for the piece, John Cage’s 1979 Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, which preceded the creation of the 1983 dance.  

Cage, Cunningham’s longtime collaborator and partner up until his death in 1992, had a love of all things James Joyce. He developed a score based on the Irish author’s Finnegans Wake. Inspired by the 2,462 places mentioned in the book, Cage went to each locale and recorded the soundscape. A base track of Irish music, including fiddle, Uillean pipes, flute and bodhrán (Irish frame drum), is layered upon with the sounds of Ireland—a baby crying, dogs barking, chirping birds, running water, street traffic—and several voices, including Cage’s. The eight-channel surround sound system, installed in Disney Hall especially for MCDC’s performances, enhances the immersive experience.

Just as the music is layered, the dance itself consists of multiple elements, oftentimes happening simultaneously on different parts of the stage: Several couples do a bouncy Irish jig-inspired dance on stage right, a soloist moves center stage, a group of women moves slowly but steadily on stage left, demonstrating their balance. The dancers, achieving near technical perfection, rotate out frequently. Offstage, they peel off layers of costuming to replace them with new layers, reinventing their outfits.

The post-performance TalkBack, moderated by Sasha Anawalt, director of arts journalism programs at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, includes a discussion prompted by an audience question about the costuming. Mark Lancaster, costume, décor and lighting designer, says he didn’t choreograph the costume changes—the dancers are free to decide what they want to wear, when.

As a Cunningham aficionado, Anawalt comments on the piece’s simultaneous old and new quality, especially with respect to Robert Swinston, the only artist performing in Roaratorio who danced with Cunningham in the original version over 25 years ago. Swinston reprises his original role and additionally dances Cunningham’s, causing those who knew Merce to do a double take. It is in Swinston, Anawalt notes, that Merce’s spirit, almost eerily so, lives on.

By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

Merce Cunningham Dance Company has officially settled in at the Music Center. Thursday evening, the dancers had tech rehearsal in preparation for Friday’s premiere performance of Roaratorio at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Trevor Carlson, executive director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, was in attendance at the rehearsal, along with other MCDC staff and friends of the dancers. But before Carlson took his seat in the theater, he was across the street at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), where he and Bonnie Brooks, the chair of the dance department at Columbia College Chicago, held a public discussion about all things Merce. “The Legacy of Merce,” part of the museum’s Art Talk Series, was presented as a result of a partnership between MOCA and Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center.

A brief film, highlighting interviews with Cunningham shortly before his death, set the tone for the discussion. “There are certain limits to what the human body can do, but within the limits, the variety is endless,” Cunningham stated in his characteristically wise manner.

Because MCDC is a company that has only ever performed works by Cunningham, it was decided that upon the choreographer’s death, the troupe would embark on a two-year world tour, and then disband. “Merce was very clear that he created his company to perform his work…(He) said he created a dance company because he knew if he had a company to make works for, he’d always have a part to dance,” Carlson explained with a laugh. 

Carlson also discussed the method by which the Merce Cunningham Trust will preserve the choreographer’s works for future generations—namely by creating “Dance Capsules,” digitized information that can aid those interested in restaging Cunningham works. These Dance Capsules include rehearsal tapes, performance videos, interviews with dancers, Cunningham’s notes and, when possible, dancers’ notes.

One such Dance Capsule will be developed for Roaratorio. Cunningham’s distinctive style was on full display at the company’s Disney Hall tech rehearsal for the piece, which was filmed by MCDC staff. MCDC, normally a 14-dancer company, will perform Roaratorio with 15 dancers. The additional performer—Robert Swinston (MCDC’s director of choreography)—has the honor of dancing the role Cunningham himself originated in the piece 27 years ago. Swinston, who has been with MCDC since 1980, is also the only current MCDC dancer to have taken part in Roaratorio’s original version. His dancing, like the rest of the company members’, perfectly encapsulates Merce’s creative legacy.

By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

On Thursday morning, 16 L.A. County High School for the Arts (LACHSA) students gathered in a dance studio on the Cal State University Los Angeles campus, where the high school is based, for an eye-opening opportunity: To learn from Merce Cunningham’s 20-year right-hand man, Robert Swinston, MCDC’s director of choreography. Swinston joined the troupe in 1980, and was thus one of the original dancers to perform Cunnigham’s 1983 piece Roaratorio, to be danced this weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Over the course of the hour-and-a-half-long class, the LACHSA students, who ranged in age from 14 to 17, practiced their pliés, tendus, développés and jumps—all in Cunningham style. “Look straight out. Remember, you’re preparing for the stage,” Swinston reminds them. Practically every combination requires the dancers-in-training to retain control of their centers, balancing oftentimes on one leg while simultaneously bending the upper back and torso into a backbend or a forward curve. Swinston also asks the students to twist their head, shoulders and torso from side to side while keeping their hips facing forward.

Impossible though it may sound, such is the stuff of Cunningham technique and choreography.

To whet the students’ appetites for the company’s upcoming performances, one combination Swinston chooses to teach is a reel, an Irish folk dance that makes an appearance in Roaratorio. “The dance is a lot of fun,” Swinston notes of the choreography. “It has a lot of folk steps and jigs and reels.” When the piece went on tour in the 1980s, it was performed to live Irish music. “(The dancers) enjoyed hanging with the musicians because they’d play in the hotel all night after a show,” Swinston comments.

A final message Swinston imparts is that dance is its own language. “Let the body speak,” he says, before signaling the pianist to resume playing.

By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

A flurry of activity is taking place at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Costumes, hung on racks located offstage, await the arrival of the artists of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), who will don the outfits during the troupe’s highly anticipated June 4 to 6 performances of the 1983 piece Roaratorio. Out onstage, the technical crew tests lighting, and a white marley dance floor is being rolled out on top of a wooden base floor. Here to orchestrate the set-up is production manager Mark O’Donnell, who has overseen productions at the Music Center for more than five years.

O’Donnell first points out the wooden Harlequin dance floor. At seven layers thick, it’s springy, perfect for absorbing the impact of the dancers as they land jump after jump—Roaratorio is an especially bouncy piece, O’Donnell explains. But when the crew begins to unfurl the strips of marley, they find something unexpected.

Most of the time, dancers perform on black or grey marley; however, MCDC, a company as nonconformist as can be, will dance on white marley. Trouble is, sections of the rented floor are marred by black streaks, and a portion even appears to be burned. O’Donnell remains surprisingly calm while the crew rubs ammonia on the smudges of black. The burned strip, however, will have to be replaced.

O’Donnell is used to the high-pressure job; his 20-year career as a production manager for several rock ‘n roll bands prepared him well, though he says with a smile, “raising two teenaged daughters” is the ultimate test of patience.

O’Donnell and his crew of 30 are pulling two 16-hour days, plus another day of technical rehearsal, in anticipation of MCDC’s June 4 opening night performance. A typical “load-in” (theater term for bringing in the production elements for the engagement) for a dance company requires 80 to 90 crewmembers—such is the case for American Ballet Theatre’s July performances at the Music Center—but because MCDC isn’t using backdrops or sets, a smaller crew is sufficient.

MCDC’s backdrop, then, is the natural space of Disney Hall. Because the concert hall is very rarely used to showcase dance due to its lack of a proscenium stage, some technical modifications are needed to present MCDC. Audiences will sit on three sides of the stage instead of four; an eight-channel surround sound system has been installed to better broadcast the recorded music; and additional custom lighting units have been placed on the sidewalls of the theater to supplement the ceiling lights.

O’Donnell says accommodating MCDC in Disney Hall is proving an easier task than it was to host Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2007, the first dance company to perform in the then four-year-old theater. “I had to create a black box theater without touching the existing wood,” O’Donnell notes, adding that it cost $40,000 to drape black fabric that hung a quarter of an inch away from the wooden walls of the theater. Additionally, all backstage areas had to be covered in plastic because, as O’Donnell explains, the dancers were performing onstage with paint—“We didn’t want them to track paint everywhere when they exited the stage.”

The only backstage set-up required for MCDC is two warm-up spaces for the dancers. Directly offstage is a small wooden sprung floor where dancers can ease into their jump routines. Behind the stage, in Choral Hall, is an entire room dedicated to the performers, featuring a grey marley floor and ballet barres.

MCDC’s performances in Disney Hall fulfill a dream of Merce Cunningham’s, whose unique choreography oftentimes craves unconventional performance spaces.

In anticipation of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s performances of Roaratorio at the Music Center, LA Times music critic Mark Swed writes about the piece’s Irish roots from James Joyce’s “readably unreadable” Finnegans Wake. Click on the blue link above to read this informative preview.

The legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company is set to perform Roaratorio at the Walt Disney Concert Hall June 4 to 6.

By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

Viewers can experience dance on film in two distinct fashions, depending on whether the choreography is made for cinema or the theater stage. On Sunday, Merce fans at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) had the opportunity to see three Merce Cunningham Dance Company pieces on film—the first, Story, was recorded as performed onstage in Finland during the company’s 1964 world tour; the second two, Melange (2008) and Beach Birds for Camera (1993), were created for film.

Merce on Film, made possible by a partnership between Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center, MOCA and Dance Camera West, kicked off with the never-before-screened Story. Set amidst an industrial set, it features Cunningham himself along with nine of his dancers moving to the impromptu, rugged sounds created live by Cunningham’s longtime collaborator, composer John Cage.

The choreography of Story changed slightly every time it was performed, in typical Cunningham style. The theater at which this particular recording was made featured a moving circular platform on the stage, which comes into play halfway through the piece.

Balance is of the utmost importance in Cunningham choreography; his dancers perform torso bends in all positions—front, back and side-to-side—and are often on the balls of their feet. Several dancers demonstrate their core control in Story when they plunge into ponches on the rotating stage, standing on one leg with the other fully extended behind, then diving the head down to the floor.

The made-for-film Melange couldn’t be more compositionally and visually different from Story. The 2008 piece features jump cuts between three separate scenes of dance, all filmed on location in Paris. The work represents one in a series of collaborations that took place over the course of four decades between Cunningham and video artist Charles Atlas, a pioneer in dance for camera.  

1993’s Beach Birds for Camera is an adaptation of a choreography originally made for the stage. At the beginning of the nearly thirty-minute film, Cunningham discusses the differences in developing works for film versus the stage. Detail, he points out, is ever more important in cinema, where the close-up reveals the tiniest of flaws.

Set to Cage’s Four³, Beach Birds for Camera features a group of 10 dancers with arms extended horizontally in wing-like fashion. They don white unitards with black sleeves, dancing to the music of a piano interspersed with the sounds of running water. The dancers occupy an airy studio with high ceilings and large windows that let in sunlight.



It is easy to get lost in the moment—one is transported to the beach on a lazy Sunday morning to watch a congregation of seagulls go through its daily routine. Each bird (a.k.a dancer) has individualized movements, yet the flock moves as a cohesive unit. The camera zooms in on individual body parts, and head bobbing and torso wiggling gives way to balances on one leg, the other extended forward to be shaken. The viewer revels in these poses; it’s about making shapes that will be forever imprinted in the audience’s memory.

Cunningham’s enthusiasm for putting dance on film can be summed up by one of his opening remarks to Beach Birds for Camera: “The use of camera has extended the sense of what dance can be,” he concludes.  

By Claire Spera, E-Correspondent

The legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), directed by Cunningham until his death in 2009, is set to perform Roaratorio at Walt Disney Concert Hall June 4 to 6. Renae Williams Niles, Director of Dance Presentations at the Music Center, remembers the last time the groundbreaking company performed at the Center.

“They came in the spring of 2005 to perform at the Ahmanson Theatre,” she recalls. “It was during that engagement that I was able to show Merce the Walt Disney Concert Hall.”

Cunningham, whose company has performed in many of the world’s most prestigious performance spaces, had not yet been inside the iconic Disney Hall.

“We entered…from the stage. (Merce) came in…and was able to look out at the house…I did see some brightness in his eyes. He said, ‘I think we can do something here.’ He immediately saw the possibilities of the space.”

This anecdote is made bittersweet by the fact that Cunningham, one of the most important modern dance choreographers to have ever lived, died in July at age 90. Upon his death, MCDC embarked on its two-year Legacy Tour, offering audiences a final chance to see Cunningham’s choreography as performed by the dancers he personally trained.

MCDC’s performances of 1983’s Roaratorio, made possible by Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center, mark the last time the company will perform at the Music Center before its dissolution in December 2011. Instead of performing in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Ahmanson, which both offer the typical proscenium stage that dance so often requires, MCDC in conjunction with the Music Center will fulfill a dream of Cunningham’s: to dance in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“Dance has always been a part of the Music Center’s history, dating back to the 60s, but it was brought in by outside presenters,” comments Williams Niles. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic moved to Disney Hall from the Dorothy Chandler, the Music Center “really started to look at the missing element, which was dance,” Williams Niles explains.

Beginning with the 2003-2004 season, the Music Center started to place more importance on dance programming, which subsequently led to the awe-inspiring performances of world-class dance companies at the Center that Los Angeles theatergoers have come to expect.

MCDC, an internationally-recognized troupe, will not be the first dance company to perform in Disney Hall; that honor went to Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2007 when the company utilized the unconventional space to fire up audiences’ imaginations. Mark O’Donnell, Production Manager at the Music Center since 2005, says the unorthodox design of Disney Hall is perfect for hosting MCDC. “Merce is always out there. Everything he did was different,” he says.

Roaratorio is “all about the dancing,” O’Donnell notes. Lighting, set design, backdrops and props are not critical, unlike in a traditional ballet. The music, however, bears equal weight with the choreography.

Composer John Cage, Cunningham’s longtime partner and artistic collaborator, created the piece’s music. O’Donnell explains the hall will feature eight channels of surround sound to maximize the impact of Cage’s music on audiences, who will sit on three sides of the Disney Hall’s stage, becoming immersed likewise in the choreography.

Williams Niles points out that programming the Music Center’s seasons is a lengthy process. “I have to look out three to four years in advance…In this case, this really did start to be talked about in 2005. I hope (audiences) love it and are inspired by it.”