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Timeless dance

There's still about a month before the Merce Cunningham Dance Company arrives in town to perform Nearly 902 as part of its two-year, grand-final Legacy Tour. Moving images of the troupe and Cunningham himself, however, can easily be accessed online now.

The most extensive programme is probably the company's own Mondays with Merce series (www.merce.org/about/mondays-with-merce.php), which began before the dancer-choreographer's death last year and comprises webisodes of documentaries about the creative processes behind some of his key pieces.

Shot in high-definition video, the pieces provide a crisp visual chronicle of the man's work through interviews (including several with Cunningham himself) and archival footage. The latest entry on the site explores the revival of Roaratorio, Cunningham's 1983 piece which applies John Cage's sonic take on Finnegan's Wake to a dance performance. There's also a piece which contains vintage footage of Cunningham in class in 1961 and 2001, the man talking about pedagogy (he actually says 'I hate teaching' - in the conventional mentor-and-protege sense, of course) and sequences from the company's performance a week after their leader's death.

Over at the avant garde portal Ubuweb, Cunningham appears in Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art (Part I) (www.ubuweb.com/film/cunningham_time.html), a recording of a 1978 symposium in which the choreographer ruminates over contemporary art's deployment and representation of time and space alongside Cage, writer Richard Kostelanetz and video artist Nam June Paik.
And then there's Point in Space (www.ubuweb.com/film/cunningham_points.html): again a collaboration between Cunningham and Cage, this time also with filmmaker Elliot Caplan, the 1986 joint venture between the company and the BBC.

It begins with a documentary about the preparations and rehearsals for the titular piece, then switches to the full-fledged performance itself - a landmark project, as it is choreographed especially for television, with the limits of the small screen in mind.

More than 25 years later, Point in Space remains a vivid piece - and who would have thought it would fit 21st-century viewing habits, when watched through computer screens at home or on the run?

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