A documentation of : Life A love letter to Merce Cunningham
£20.00
A documentation of Life: A love letter to Merce Cunningham
Co-published by Dolly Brown and Gandini Press, London, 2022.
In December 2021 and January 2022 photographer Dolly Brown spent time with the contemporary circus/dance group Gandini Juggling in the final month before their piece "Life: A Love Letter to Merce Cunningham" premiered at Sadler's Wells in January 2022 as part of the penultimate London International Mime Festival. The piece came to fruition over many months of research and rehearsal which took place in various locations, including online, during the height of the COVID pandemic. The result is a photobook/zine titled "Fractions Ruse in the Untroubled Unavailable Dawn Waltz", which takes its title from the first three lines generated by a random 'juggling' of all the words in the title of every single dance work that Merce Cunningham made during his career. "Life" is the answer to the question: what would happen if you took the spatial information from the dances of Merce Cunningham and overlaid it with juggling passing patterns? The answer, as devised by Sean Gandini and Kati Yla-Hokkala, the founders of Gandini Juggling, is a piece for 9 performers - a mix of jugglers who dance and dancers who juggle (including the ex-Cunningham dancer Jennifer Goggans, who in the course of working with the Gandinis in her capacity as a liaison for the Cunningham Trust, learned to juggle well enough to become a part of the piece) - which quotes from some 30 Cunningham dances over the course of 65 minutes, during which balls, clubs and rings are juggled, thrown and manipulated in precise mathematical patterns. The piece, like many Gandini creations, is a puzzle that requires no solution - it simply is. Brown had long been fascinated by the Gandinis and their work and was invited to document the final month of rehearsal, creating a series of images in studio and on stage which reflect both the collective endeavour of the work and the shadow under which it was made - would the show go on in spite of COVID continuing to threaten the performing arts? The book was designed by Ben Weaver Studio and in keeping with the spirit of Cunningham, the designers created a publication which contains its own internal collages and chance operations. The result is an object which is more than the sum of its parts - not merely a vehicle for displaying images, but a tangible metaphor for the collaborative enterprise that is performance.