Related Features
POSTCARDS: Clark Center NYC on Keeping Charles Moore's Name Alive with From The Horses Mouth
POSTCARDS: Visions from Abroad: The Paris Opera Ballet School
POSTCARDS: Site-Specific Dances Presents "Love Letters: Cage to Cunningham" at Guild Hall of East Hampton this November 8th
A Celebration of the Radical, Queer Collaborative Partnership That Shaped Our Definition of Interdisciplinary Art
Saturday November 8 Guild Hall of East Hampton 7 pm, For tickets and more information, click onto the Guild Hall website here
Love Letters: Cage to Cunningham is a new dance and media performance from Site-Specific Dances, inspired by Love, Icebox—the intimate letters between composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Known for rejecting emotion in their art, these private words reveal desire, humor, jealousy, arousal, loneliness and tenderness, emotions specific to the letters but also universal to human experiences of love and longing.
By bringing the letters to the stage (as immersive typography and dance videography, in conversation with live dance and music), the piece reclaims a hidden chapter of queer history, celebrating a radical queer collaborative partnership that shaped interdisciplinary art as we know it today .
Thoughts about working on this production from our team:
“Our company interweaves our two disciplines - dance and design . We also find ourselves interweaving our romantic relationship ( we’re a gay-married ) with our artistic partnership as directors of Site-Specific Dancers. It not always easy !
In this we’ve found a really poignant parallel with John and Merce available to us through their recently published letters. Even though John and Merce rejected emotion in their artistic work together, Love Letters reclaims an erased queer tenderness previously hidden from view”
Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis, Artistic Directors Site-Specific Dances
“ The process for Love Letters has been so creatively fulfilling and rewarding. Diving into the personal history between Merce Cunningham and John Cage has shown that even the most brilliant artists experience the basic need for love and companionship. Their story is so relatable and has given me a lot to connect to “
Shawn Lesniak , dancer
“ As a Graham dancer, it feels good to bring forward the modern lineage, unveiling a different perspective on geniuses from the modern era, diving into different movement languages, enjoying the similarities and differences. It also feels empowering to tell a queer love story today, at a time where we have more freedom of expression. It is important to keep the stories alive in order to keep educating and not regressing in human evolution “
Lorenzo Pagano, dancer
“The process of creating a new work is one of my favorite parts of being a performer. Learning about the intimate relationship between Cunningham and Cage and bringing snippets of it to life through various mediums has been such a unique and informative experience. Doing so with other queer artists makes it even more special!”
Tracy Dunbar, dancer
“ Being a part of Love Letters has been eye opening. It’s really humbling to see how intimate, fraught, and fragile someone like John Cage could be, someone we lionize. Reading Love, Icebox for this project was a window into Cage’s queer inner life, and it’s been really exciting to embody that queerness with the other amazing dancers on and off stage, in and out of rehearsal.”
Julian Donahue, dancer
Attend Our Benefit at Stonewall on November 13th
