NYU Skirball Presents IN CONVERSATION WITH MERCE

As a part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial festivities throughout 2019, NYU Skirball will present In Conversation with Merce, a celebration of Cunningham's legacy through world premiere commissions of contemporary artists, running Friday, May 3 and Saturday, May 4 at NYU Skirball.

In Conversation with Merce aims to engage the public in theoretical, practical and experiential approaches to examining Merce's cultural and artistic contribution and is curated by Rashaun Mitchell, a former Merce Cunningham Dance Company dancer and a Trustee of the Merce Cunningham Trust. Choreographers Moriah Evans, Mina Nishimura and Netta Yerushalmy will each present responsive experiments that draw connections of lineage to the celebrated choreographer. Drawing on conceptual, formal and personal affinities with Cunningham, the three distinctive choreographers converse with his simultaneous presence and absence. In addition to the three commissioned works, select pieces by Merce Cunningham will be performed by Shayla Vie Jenkins and Keith Sabado. Lighting design is by Davison Scandrett.

Merce Cunningham is widely considered one of the most important choreographers of all time. Throughout his 70-year career, he continued to innovate, helping to drive the evolution of the American avant-garde and expanding the frontiers of contemporary visual and performance arts. His collaborations with artists from every creative discipline yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music and visual art. In Conversation with Merce is part of the 2019 world-wide Merce Cunningham Centenary festivities. mercecunningham.org

Rashaun Mitchell is a choreographer, performer and teacher living and working in NYC. He is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2012 NY Dance and Performance Award (Bessies) for "Outstanding Emerging Choreographer." Other awards include a 2007 Princess Grace Award: Dance Fellowship, a 2013 Foundation for Contemporary Art "Grant to Artist," and a 2011 New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Award for "Sustained achievement in the work of Merce Cunningham 2004-2012." He is a Cunningham Trustee and licensed stager of the repertory. Mitchell has taught master classes throughout the country and is currently the Associate Chair of the Dance department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Moriah Evans is an artist working in and on the form of dance. Her choreographies navigate utopic and dystopic potentials and tendencies within dance, approached as a fleshy and matriarchal form sliding between minimalism and excess. She initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography, a collective apparatus involved in research processes and practices to investigate participatory images of performance and systems of choreography. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal and Curatorial Advisor for the Tanzkongress 2019: A Long Lasting Affair. She received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2017) and a Bessie Award nomination for Emerging Choreographer (2015).

Moriah's work takes the form of a choreographed dialogue-featuring Cyril Baldy, Silas Riener, and Carlo Antonio Villanueva. The piece features live music by David Watson, with John King and Sam Kulik.

Mina Nishimura, from Tokyo, was introduced to Butoh through Kota Yamazaki. She has been working and collaborating in dance, theater and film with various artists; in most recent years with John Jasperse, Dean Moss, Rashaun Mitchel +Silas Riener, SIA, Celia-Rowlson Hall, Vicky Shick, Neil Greenberg, Nami Yamamoto, Ursula Eagly, Ellen Fisher and Kota Yamazaki. She was Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in 2011, at Chez Bushwick in 2013, at Movement Research in 2013-15 and at The Camargo Foundation (France) in 2017. She is a current Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and Movement Research, and is a 2019 recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award.

Nishimura's work, entitled Hi, Merce! I Have a Question., is an intimate self-dialogue with Merce Cunningham based on Nishimura's 4-year experiences as an international student at Merce Cunnigham Studio. Through this work, Nishimura investigates and fantasizes how Merce's philosophies and practices meet and are integrated in her own butoh-based dance practices. Samuel Hanson, Lydia Chrisman, Martita Abril, Jonathan Burklund, Niko Tsocanos, Ilana Stuelpner, Emily Climer, Tyler Rai, Maho Ogawa, Anna Rogovoy and Kota Yamazaki with a lighting designer Davison Scandrett will join Nishimura to shape the rather, partly, delusional work.

Netta Yerushalmy received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, LMCC's Extended Life, a NYFA Fellowship, a Research Fellowship at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, among other awards. She is a Toulmin Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts, a NY City Center Fellow, and In 2019-21 will be a Princeton Arts Fellow. Her work has been presented by Jacob's Pillow, American Dance Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Foundation. She has collaborated extensively with scholars from various fields, most notably in her acclaimed Paramodernities series.

Netta's conversation with Merce takes place by inhabiting, cataloging, reducing, boomeranging, and interpolating 100 single movements taken directly from Cunningham works. This experiment is performed and created by a heterogeneous cast of seventeen dancers: Marc Crousillat, Tito del Saz, Elizabeth Dement, Tess Dworman, Brittany Engel-Adams, Stanley Gambucci, Colin Heininger, Jennifer Lafferty, Jennifer Nugent, Jordan Lloyd, Maile Okamura, Ambika Raina, Antonio Ramos, Missy Robinson, Stacy Spence, Wallie Wolfgruber, and Yerushalmy herself.

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