Seeing the same things as if they were a surprise every time: isn’t that what normally happens to us when we look at the reality that surrounds us?
Merce Cunningham
Among the countless inventions attributable to Merce Cunningham is that of the Events, a real repertoire of dances with a fixed duration of one hour and thirty minutes that runs parallel to the shows created for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company without having been catalogued, if not in part. The reason for this choice is simple: the Events are not original creations, but rather ever-changing collages of pieces extracted and often repeated several times from many shows. This formula was tested in 1964, in Vienna, when the choreographer was asked to give a show in the Museum of the Twentieth Century - a place without a curtain, without wings, without the possibility of connecting lights or building scenes - and he proposed, instead of an impossible program of predefined choreographies, a performance of another type: precisely the mixing of extracts from the repertoire or even complete dances to be placed simultaneously in different areas of the museum. Thus was born, to music by Cage (Atlas Eclipticalis) the first Event, known as Museum Event. From then on Cunningham set up this kind of choreographic "cocktail" in the most diverse spaces, each time exploiting the characteristics of the place, with music composed and performed ad hoc and as a rule without a scene other than that provided by the place itself, by the invention of the moment and with the unexpected, so in tune with his poetics, that could arise from it.
At the beginning the Events were numbered and the cataloguing continued until 2000 when they reached 400 units. Then however the choreographer preferred to suspend the count as it had become, in his opinion, an almost mechanical fact. So he began to associate the new Events with the cities or places where they were performed but even this listing ceased. Especially since the Events, created for the most diverse and open spaces and to be enjoyed by an audience that was not necessarily immobile or placed only on one side of the stage, were increasingly welcomed in traditional theatres. But even here the formula did not lose its freshness: each Event has always been set up starting from the observation of the peculiarities of the stage on which it was to be performed and without any furnishings. Tonight’s Event is an exception because it boasts, in addition to the music of Takehisa Kosugi, the musical director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a backdrop by Robert Rauschenberg, entitled Immerse, which can be defined as “historic” in that the famous artist who from 1954 to 1964 was the director of the Company’s stage settings and since 2000 has been alongside the choreographer again for certain very special occasions (for example the ballet Interscape, in 2001) conceived it specifically for an Event. Cunningham himself at the time justified this variant – introduced starting in the second half of the Nineties – in the staging of certain Events on stage with his usual simplicity. “We now know that there is an interest in hosting Events in conventional spaces, although this type of performance was developed for places that could not accommodate our usual repertoire… So, once again, we chose to introduce scenic elements, starting with a backdrop entitled Immerse and designed, in 1994, by Rauschenberg”.
