Merce Cunningham Centennial: Program 7—Dance Critic Alastair Macaulay In Person

• Film
• Performing Arts

Introduction and Q&A by Alastair Macaulay, Chief Dance Critic of the New York Times!

Charles Atlas BIPED 2005, 52 min, digital.

Dancers: Lisa Boudreau, Thomas Caley, Holley Farmer, Maydelle Fason, Jean Freebury, David Kulick, Matthew Mohr, Banu Ogan, Glen Rumsey, Daniel Squire, Jeannie Steele, Derry Swan, Robert Swinston & Cheryl Therrien.

Music: Gavin Bryars, “Biped.”

In his New York Times review of a staging of BIPED at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011, following Cunningham’s death, Alastair Macaulay wrote, “BIPED, the most sensationally imaginative work of Cunningham’s last 20 years, is at once a triumphant outpouring of pure dance invention and a masterpiece of theatrical poetry[…]Stylistically, the choreography is the most heroic flowering of the late period in which Cunningham, devising dances on his computer, made novel and rigorous combinations of the movements of his dancers’ legs, torsos and arms. The work’s fatefulness – greatly heightened by Aaron Copp’s changing-chessboard lighting; the computer-generated imagery on the décor by Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser; the metallically shimmering costumes by Suzanne Gallo; and the shifting moods of lyricism, chance and doom in Gavin Bryars’s music – is powerfully juxtaposed by the energy of the dancing.”