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"One of the Best Films of 2012" - Artforum
On December 29, 30 and 31, 2011, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company returned to New York City- its home since it was founded in 1953- to present six valedictory performances at the Park Avenue Armory before disbanding. Performed across three stages spanning the Armory's soaring drill hall, the Park Avenue Armory Event marked the conclusion of the Company's Legacy Tour and the culmination of nearly 60 years of cross-disciplinary innovation.
Throughout its history, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company mounted over 800 of these signature site-specific Events in unusual locations around the world. Events, as Merce Cunningham described them, "consist of complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time to allow not so much an evening of dance as the experience of dance."
This three-DVD set was designed to give viewers the opportunity to create their own- and complete- experience to witness MCDC's historic final performances. For the first time, uncut shots from each of the three stages show the full performance from every perspective with notes detailing the dances performed (disc two) alongside a beautifully edited film of the final performances captured in a fourteen-camera shoot by two film crews (disc one). As an added bonus, a DVD with recent and archival excerpts from each of the repertory works featured on the Legacy Tour is included to illustrate the full spectrum of Cunningham's artistic legacy (disc three). The DVDs are accompanied by an illustrated essay by noted curator and critic Douglas Crimp.
| Catalog Number: MC-1327 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Dance, Art / Artist |
| Copyright: 2012 |
Length: 279 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC/EAN: 880198132796 |
| Label: Artpix |
Rating: Not Rated |
This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.
Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-1327 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750
Exhibition:
Microcinema is not authorized to represent this title for exhibition. Write us for this contact information.
2013-05-07 Blogcritics
By Pat Padua
The work of the late choreographer Merce Cunningham, who passed away in 2009, was well documented by videographer Charles Atlas. Cunningham's work can be found on Microcinema’s three-disc set Merce Cunningham Dance Company: Robert Rauschenberg Collaborations. Atlas shot dancers in static, uninterrupted takes, and this theatrical simplicity captured sets and costumes in a controlled if somewhat clinical setting. In motion picture terms, Atlas’s work sometimes felt more like a document than art.
Perhaps a better tribute to an artist who threw the I Ching and thrived on serendipity is Microcinema’s release of the 3-DVD set Merce Cunningham Dance Company Park Avenue Armory Event. The surviving company performed six pieces across three stages in the round in the Park Avenue Armory's drill hall. The event took place in the days before New Year’s Eve 2011, and the resulting video captures the spectacle that rang out the old year and sent off one of the great choreographers.
The filmmakers convey the excitement of that performance by taking an approach far from the clinical work of Atlas. Two camera teams operating 14 cameras filmed the event from a variety of angles, alternating distant views of the action appearing on all three stages with closeups that focus on the featured dancers on a single stage. In other words, cinema.
The documentary begins with behind-the-scenes excitement: closeups of the printed program, shots of taxis depositing attendees and moving away into an artfully blurred Manhattan nightscape. This approach reveals more of the art by sometimes looking away from it.
The first disc is an edited one-hour summation of the Park Avenue shows, but two generous bonus discs provide both single-shot versions of each of the pieces performed and bonus repertory performances from the tour. These last include footage shot by Charles Atlas, which are a starkly academic contrast to the main event. These repertory excerpts include the challenging "CRWDSPCR," a piece that demands a dynamic visual approach. The static camera that Atlas points at the dancers records the work but does not engage with it. I'm glad I have Atlas's dance videos on my DVD shelf, but when I want to watch some Merce Cunningham, I'll put on the Park Avenue Armory Event.
| 2020-12-12 Artforum
By David Velasco
ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF 2012 was not released in theaters or shown at any festivals or streamed on Netflix or anywhere really but is only available on DVD through a small San Francisco–based nonprofit art-film distributor. The Park Avenue Armory Event, a capstone of one of the great achievements in art of any era—the technique and choreography that travels under the vulpine name “Merce Cunningham”—is now viewable on a three-DVD release from Artpix.
Park Avenue Armory Event: Six performances featuring fourteen dancers dancing “excerpts” of fifty years of choreography on three separate stages in that massive, titular space over the course of three nights, December 29–31, 2011. It was the final performance of the Cunningham Company and a goodbye to modern dance. It was a delirious, historic occasion. Lessons in seeing. Lessons in getting lost. Lessons in coming up for air and finding that not all air is like every other air. It was the sort of thing you can get all glowy about. There will never be anything remotely like it again.
The Artpix release, produced by the Cunningham Dance Foundation and accompanied by a pitch-perfect essay by Douglas Crimp, is as smart and elegant an homage to the actual events as one could have hoped for. It’s a miracle the filmmakers were able to do Park Avenue Armory Event justice at all. That they’re able to capture it this vividly is remarkable. Dancer and videographer Nic Petry edited footage culled from nine cameras and two performances into a single, fifty-minute film synthesizing the action on all three stages. The camera-eye is different from the human-eye, and the dancers it anoints for history are different than the ones my own memory chose. I wonder, too, if the camera-eye will eventually overwrite my mind’s-eye. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Let my memories and these edit-memories mingle and swell.
If you feel cramped by the jump-cuts, disc two features uncut views of the dancing from each of the stages. Disc three includes excerpts from sixteen dances—from Suite for Five, 1956–58, to Nearly Ninety², 2009—reprised during the Cunningham Company’s two-year valedictory Legacy Tour. Here’s original footage from RainForest, 1968, where you can see Cunningham himself dance his mad, inimitable solo, swiping at and about Warhol’s sublimely in-the-way silver balloons. It all makes a perfect companion to Aperture’s iPad-only release from this summer, Merce Cunningham: 65 Years (a crucial update to the classic Merce Cunningham: 50 Years). A compendium of journal entries, videos, drawings, essays, and photos—all chronicled by Cunningham’s longtime archivist David Vaughan—the App is its own special event, an engaging history/biography/information-bank that really fulfills the promise of “multimedia.” The trove includes (among many great moments) a dusty film clip of a young and buoyant Cunningham dancing with Martha Graham and Eric Hawkins in Graham’s Every Soul is a Circus, 1940. That Cunningham feels a million miles away from the Cunningham memorialized in Park Avenue Armory Event feels a million miles from the land of no-Cunningham now.
— David Velasco
The Park Avenue Armory Event DVD box set is now available through Artpix and Microcinema International. Merce Cunningham: 65 Years is available from Aperture.
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