As a dancer and choreographer, 86-year old Merce Cunningham has always pushed the envelope, by incorporating everyday movements and chance arrangements into his works, collaborating with innovative artists from John Cage and Andy Warhol to Radiohead and Sigur Ros, and using video projections and choreographic computer software in his works. As mnartists.org writes, the Merce Cunningham Company’s next visit, November 4, is accompanied by a low-tech and comparatively conventional showcase of his work, an exhibition of pen, pencil, and crayon drawings. Exercises, on view through November 10 at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery, features works that have “a childlike honesty” and “a sense of curiosity and wonderment,” according to that show’s curator, Tom Rose, but Cunningham says that, rather than springing from the same impulses as his choreography, drawing is merely a hobby: “I just enjoy drawing. I don’t do it with any sense of it being art. I’m very pleased that people want to see the drawings. But I don’t push that.”
More on Merce:
The Gertrude Lippincott Talking Dance Series: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Sage Cowles, Wednesday, November 2, 2005
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, November 4, 2005
Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones, Walker Art Center, 1998
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