Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?): Lord Have Merce: Sonic Youth Plays Merce Cunningham’s 90th Birthday Bash (NYC)

Friday, April 17

Lord Have Merce: Sonic Youth Plays Merce Cunningham’s 90th Birthday Bash (NYC)

By Joshua David Stein for New York Press:

Sonic Youth wouldn't seem like a good birthday party band for most 90-year-olds. But Merce Cunningham isn’t your average nonagenarian. He doesn’t go in for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and pudding. But what more would you expect from the man who continually reaffirms his relevance as the most important modern dance choreographer since Martha Graham?

For his 90th birthday, Merce has invited some friends—among them Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth—to drop by BAM for three days from April 16 to 19 for a jam, and maybe some tea and biscuits too.

Also stopping by: Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and mixed-media sound composer Takehisa Kosugi. Oh, and of course, the Merce Cunningham Company dancers.The event also functions as the pre miere of Nearly Ninety. It’s 89 minutes long. Ol’ Merce is pretty funny for an old guy. Read more here.

Sonic Youth has performed in Buffalo 3 times (not counting individual members' solo appearances and performances as part of Glenn Branca's band), on: 6/22/86 at the Polish Cadets hall; 10/16/92 at Buffalo State College's Houston Gym; and 8/7/04 at the Towne Ballroom.

Merce Cunningham danced twice as part of the legendary Buffalo Festival of the Arts in 1968. On March 10 the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed Walkaround Time with music by David Behrman and more memorably, on March 9, the company performed RainForest, with music by David Tudor, set design by Andy Warhol and costumes by Jasper Johns.

I was unable to find a clip of this performance online, although it is one of the most interesting artifacts in the Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol's Work show, which I saw at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in January. Warhol Live will be presented at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh June 10 to September 15, 2009, and although I found the show somewhat problematic overall, it's always good to visit the Warhol Museum and Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and this show is as good a reason to do so as any.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?)

Choose Your Own Adventure

Friday, April 17

Lord Have Merce: Sonic Youth Plays Merce Cunningham’s 90th Birthday Bash (NYC)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive

Family and Friends

Contributors

Followers

Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

Search This Blog