It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. So even prior to (or outside of) the physical dance, there was already a parallel conceptual-art project that was an intense durational-performance work, an almost literal dance with death, a mourning ritual, an explosion of life within death, and an enlightened embracing and letting go of time all at once.Ĭunningham famously said, “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It would culminate with final performances in New York. Prior to his death, Merce Cunningham created a remarkably prescient and meticulous legacy plan which, after his passing, would send the company on a two-year world tour.

These were the final dance performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on the nights of December 29th, 30th, and 31st in 2011.

A dance performance I know I once felt was a pinnacle of experience I now can only vaguely hold in mind, like a summer in a foreign city where you carried out a painless and shimmering affair-that is, something idealized and maybe romantic but shrouded and perhaps no longer real. On the few last nights of 2011, I saw a series of performances that so moved and changed me that I thought to myself, This is the greatest experience of art I’ve ever had!Īnd yet because I didn’t have the training or the critical terms to note the details of what I’d seen-and even if I’d had them I’m not sure the soft muscles of my memory would have retained them-I have only emotional and murky impressions. Jones remembering Merce Cunningham, on NPR. JONES: Well, you know, sometimes, when I’ve had one tequila too many and I’m lying on the floor, I feel pretty obliterated in space and time. CONAN: How do you obliterate space and time?

Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim