The Trust Program Director, Jennifer Goggans (MCDC 2000-11), has been busily confirming our summer schedule of Fellowship activities. This year, there will be three intensive workshops, led by former MCDC dancers digging into very different works. First, in June, Neil Greenberg (MCDC 1980-86) and Joseph Lennon (MCDC 1978-84) will take a look at 10s with Shoes (1981), which is built entirely with eight count phrases. In July, Marcie Munnerlyn (MCDC 2004-11) and Andrea Weber (MCDC 2004-11) will delve into Merce's penultimate choreography Nearly Ninety which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Merce's 90th birthday, April 16, 2009. Completing the trio, Kimberly Bartosik (MCDC 1987-96) and Brandon Collwes (MCDC 2006-11) will explore the particular issues and intricacies of staging of an Event, of which Merce created almost 800 in his lifetime.
There is no need, however, to wait until the summer to see something Cunningham. This month, Trust stager Melissa Toogood (MCDC 2008-11) is staging Field Dances (1963) at Seet Dance, who will perform the work as part of March Dances' New York Conversationprogram in Sydney Australia. Closer to home, Ian Spencer Bell will perform a solo from Roaratorio (1983) as part of an evening of solos at Westbeth.
In April, for the first time since 1979, we will have a chance to see a fully staged version of Travelogue, which premiered in 1977 and features designs by Robert Rauschenberg, entitled Tantric Geography. Originally planned for 2020 and delayed by the pandemic, Marcie Munnerlyn and Andrea Weber are staging the work for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Adam Tendler is overseeing an adaptation of John Cage's score for the work, Telephones and Birds.
Gandini Juggling's homage to Cunningham, Life: A love letter to Merce Cunninghamcontinues its run with a performance in Brussels in late April, where Jennifer Goggans will join the troupe for the show. In late May, Jeannie Steele (MCDC 1993-2005) will offer a professional development program for dance teachers in London at The Place under the auspices of the London Contemporary Dance School. In June, Paige Cunningham (MCDC 2000-04) and Silas Riener (MCDC 2007-11) will conduct a two-week intensive workshop offering an immersive dance experience in Cunningham’s technique, repertory, and choreographic processes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
For those of you who take classes with us, we are excited to announce that at the end of this month, our Tuesday and Thursday classes will move to Joyce East, located in the East Village. The building was originally the home of the Boys' Club of New York City, and is now leased by the Joyce Theater who hopes to create a center for dance there.
And there is lots more to come, so watch our newsletter and website in the coming months.
|