Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance / Edition 1

by Roger Copeland

Overview

Merce Cunningham and the Modernizing of Modern Dance is a complete study of the life and work of this seminal choreographer/dancer. More than just a biography, Copeland explores Cunningham's life story against a backdrop of an entire century of developments in American art. Copeland traces his own experience of Cunningham's dances-from the turbulent late '60s through the experimental works of the '80s and '90s-showing how Cunningham moved dance away from the highly emotional, subjective work of Martha Graham to a return to a new kind of classicism. This book places Cunningham in the forefront of an artistic revolution, a revolution that has its parallels in music (John Cage, and the minimalist composers who followed him), painting (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), theater (the happenings of the '60s), and dance itself (the Judson School of dancers). An iconclastic and highly readable analysis, this book will be enjoyed by all those interested in the development of the American arts in the 20th century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415965750
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/16/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Roger Copeland is Professor of Theater and Dance at Oberlin College. He is coeditor of the widely used anthology What is Dance? His essays about dance, theater, and film have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and many other publications including The Encyclopedia of Dance and Ballet.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 From Graham to Cunningham: An Unsentimental Education 2 Portrait of the Artist as a Jung Man 3 Beyond the Ethos of Abstract Expressionism 4 The Limitations of Instinct 5 Contemporary Classicism: Re-Discovering Ballet 6 Primitive Mysteries 7 The Sound of Perceptual Freedom 8 Cunningham, Cage, and Collage 9 Dancing for the Digital Age 10 Re-Thinking the Thinking Body: The Gaze of Upright Posture 11 Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Cunningham 12 Fatal Abstraction: Merce Cunningham and The Politics of Perception 13 Dancing in the Aftermath of 9/11 Index

Editorial Reviews

"Copeland's book about the sixty-year career of Merce Cunningham is also a brilliant sixty-year history of theater, dance, art, music and intellectual movements in America. . . ." — Sally Sommer, Professor of American Dance Studies at Florida State University.
"Examines the trajectory of Merce The Choreographer and places him just where I think he belongs—as a global artist of the twentieth century moving in all directions into the twenty-first." — Valda Setterfield, Member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 1964-1974
"Copeland's book will bring joy to Cunningham partisans." — Allan Ulrich, Dance Magazine

From the Publisher