Please join EAI for a special screening of two Merce Cunningham dances for camera as part of Migrating Forms, hosted by BAM.

EAI is pleased to partner with the Migrating Forms Festival to present a program of works that highlight Merce Cunningham’s choreography for camera, featuring his close collaboration with artist and former Cunningham filmmaker-in-residence Charles Atlas, with whom he created a new and influential hybrid art they called “video-dance.” The program will also include a collaboration with Atlas, Nam June Paik, and Shigeko Kubota, staged for public television.

Sunday, December 15, 2013
2:00 PM

Migrating Forms
at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music)
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Avenue
New York, NY 11217
www.bam.org

General Admission $ 13.00
Students & Seniors $ 9.00

A seminal figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde, American choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) engaged the boundaries of dance for more than seventy years. In the 1960s, he began collaborating with several experimental film and media makers to integrate their unique syntax of framing and editing in his dance choreography. Throughout his long career, Cunningham continuously experimented with the limits of human movement, always gauging the historic relevancy of his art, especially in relation to current technology and media.

Following the screening, Charles Atlas will be in conversation with EAI’s Director of Distribution, Rebecca Cleman.

Titles to screen:

Channels/Inserts
1982, 32:11 min, color, sound

Merce by Merce by Paik
1978, 28:45 min, color, sound

For more information about Merce Cunningham, click here.
For more information about Charles Atlas, click here.

About Merce Cunningham

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919. Over the course of his extensive career, Cunningham choreographed more than 150 dances and over 800 “Events” or dance collages, collaborating with numerous visual artists and musicians, including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, La Monte Young, and David Tudor. Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1953, while at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and danced in the company’s productions until the early 1990s. His many honors include Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, Italy's Porselli Prize and New York City's Handel Medallion. 

About Charles Atlas

Charles Atlas was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949. Atlas is one of the premier interpreters of dance, theater and performance on video. Working in film, video, installation, theater and performance for over four decades, he has created works for screen, stage, gallery, and television. He was the filmmaker-in-residence for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1978 to 1983. Since then, Atlas has worked on numerous international productions for television with choreographers, artists and musicians, including Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, Antony Hegarty, Yvonne Rainer, and New Humans (Mika Tajima and Howie Chen). Atlas was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

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About Migrating Forms

An annual, ten-day festival dedicated to new film and video, Migrating Forms developed from the New York Underground Film Festival (NYUFF), which ended in April 2008. Led by the former directors and programmers of NYUFF, Migrating Forms continues the tradition of presenting a program culled from a broad spectrum of moving image practices each Spring at New York's historic Anthology Film Archives. www.bam.org/MigratingForms

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About EAI

Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of video art and digital art. EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media works by artists. EAI's activities include viewing access, educational services, extensive online resources, and public programs such as artists' talks, exhibitions and panels. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and also features extensive materials on exhibiting, collecting and preserving media art: www.eai.org

Electronic Arts Intermix
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
t (212) 337-0680
f (212) 337-0679
info@eai.org

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