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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
At the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's recent show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the average age of Cunningham's audience seemed to have dropped by about thirty years, and that is because the troupe, normally a rather egghead enterprise, chose to perform to rock music this season. Cunningham was one of the creators of America's mid-century modernism, as, more famously, was his lifelong collaborator, John Cage, who died eleven years ago. Accordingly, the Cunningham company, for most of its history, has performed to the sort of arrhythmic, ametric, amelodic "new music" that Cage and his cohort produced: somebody making electronic static, somebody shaking beans in a jar, somebody mumbling into a mike. So when it was announced that the big new piece this season, the company's fiftieth, would be accompanied by two rock bands--Radiohead, the very hot British ensemble, and Sigur Ros, from Iceland--there was considerable head-scratching. Were Cunningham's dancers going to perform to something as normal as song? Were they going to dance to a beat? Why use rock anyway? Trevor Carlson, the company's general manager and the person whose idea this was, told the Times why: to bring in people previously unexposed to the company--in other words, to sell Cunningham to the young.
Among the unenlightened, it turned out, were the bands. Neither Sigur Ros nor Radiohead had ever seen Cunningham's company. (And Cunningham, who is eighty-four, didn't know who they were until Carlson told him.) Thinking that at least one band would say no, Carlson had sent both invitations at...
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