Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham changed the way people dance and the way people see dancing in the same way that Picasso and the Cubists changed the way people painted and the way people see painting. He took dance apart and put it back together again, leaving out all but the most essential. He stripped dance of conventional narrative and continuity, he conceived it without music and without decor. He took it out of the proscenium (but later put it back) and exploded the stage picture into fragments. -Nancy Dalva BEYOND THE PERFECT STAGE captures the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in a series of site-specific Events in the art galleries of Dia:Beacon in 2008-2009 and in their final in New York City, on New Years Eve, 2011. From a multiplicity of perspectives, Stephanie Berger captures the dancers within the frame of her lens, creating a photographic choreography that combines the components of the Events in a new way. As the book unfolds, you see the Cunningham dancers warming up, and then performing in various situations (as Cunningham called the galleries and the especially constructed stages for each Event), including Richard Serras steel sculptures, Dan Flavins neon light installation, and Sol Lewitts minimalist white boxes. Merce Cunningham here, as throughout his career, presented his work alongside contemporary artists of stature and significance, proposing dance as a visual art. The book concludes with the companys final performances inside the vast Park Avenue Armory in December 2011, two years after the choreographers death, in the grand finale of the great Modernist dance company of the 20th-- century. Stephanie Berger captures Cunninghams evanescent andas he called itimpermanent art, proposing a new experience while at the same time preserving the original, thus operating very much within the aesthetic framework Cunningham himself proposed. Vivid, immediate, unmediated yet curated, her photographic Event is an entirely contained experience, contextualizing the dances in a personal, but entirely available form.