The Department of Performing and Media Arts is pleased to announce SHED: An Evening of Intermedia Dance in Three Episodes in culmination of its yearlong initiative, New/Futurism: Installation, Intermedia, Interactive & Immersive Dance and the 2025 Annual Spring Dance Presenting Series. This event will take place on Friday and Saturday, April 25-26 at 7:30 PM, in the Kiplinger Theatre, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Get your free tickets here.
SHED is an evening of intermedia dance in three episodes, featuring Cornell students performing 50 Looks etcetera, a Merce Cuningham MiniEvent arranged and staged by Patricia Lent, alongside original choreography by Olive Prince and Danielle Russo in co-creation with Cornellians studying Technology in Music Performance with Kevin Ernste and Warren Cross. SHED explores cycles of technological revolution and the existential transcendence, and at times, ruin and debris that can follow.
Experiments in “the mechanical” and humanmade connect the present with interdisciplinary legacies, like The Bauhaus and Fluxus, as well as Merce Cunningham, whose historic Events established the modern foundation for intermedia dance and co-creation as collaboration. Moreover, Cunningham and composer John Cage inspired the likes of the Happening, nudging artists and audiences away from the proscenium and instead towards a more democratic “stage” and approach, endeavoring site-specific, installational, and times, immersive experience as performance. Here, Cornell students had the privilege of working with esteemed company alumnus and The Merce Cunningham Trust Co-Director, Patricia Lent, in learning Cunningham’s 50 Looks and other iconic repertory, including choreography for San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square, originally for his 1968 made-for-television, avant-garde film in collaboration with Richard Moore. Ultimately, and cyclically, we return to the organic—the human form and essence—at times surreal, but always tangible in ways that urge us to reflect on how we wish to define our future.
50 Looks etcetera is a Merce Cunningham MiniEvent, incorporating material from 50 Looks (1979) and Assemblage (1968), arranged and staged by esteemed company alumnus and Trust Co-Director Patricia Lent. This iconic repertory will be danced alongside Olive Prince's Residue and Danielle Russo's Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks. The production features performances by Nicholas DeMayo, Ashley Dorais, Michael Fizdale, Molly Flanagan, Molly Hudson, Jini Li, Anna Rose Marion, Sara Mettner, Cate Moore, Taylor Janeen Pryor, and Avery Wang with motion sensor design by Becky Lee, and sound/music and projection designs by Eliot Burk, Jane Chen, Adowyn Ernste, Zeke Lawrence, and Annika Currie.
New/Futurism: Installation, Intermedia, Interactive & Immersive Dance is a yearlong activation of brand-new, cutting-edge curriculum, curricular and extracurricular events, guest artist exchanges, symposia, and performance and live-action engagements germane in the twenty-first century field of dance and its momentous innovations.
What is the practice, purpose, potential, and power of dance beyond the traditional proscenium stage? How does the meaning of choreography operate and expand as its format alters and transforms? How does the dancer exercise and prepare themselves to activate and to communicate their practice in new and different surroundings? Audiences? Technologies? “Rules” of Engagement?
Futurism first emerged in the early twentieth century as an effort to articulate the moxie and acceleration of modern thinking and making, emphasizing groundbreaking technologies and their lasting impact. In 1965, Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins followed by naming the simultaneous, inter-practice of multiple art mediums, traditions, and genres as “intermedia.” Still an increasingly interdisciplinary field, intermedia is ever-relevant–colliding, propelling, and entangling dance with theater, film, text, music, sound, projection, and scenic design in the emergence of new, redefined stages, studies, materials, methods, and careers in the practice and production of dance.
Embedded in this very legacy–and committed to preparing Cornellians for the realities of their industries and the knowledge and skill sets to shape their futures–the Department of Performing & Media Arts is thrilled to announce the course launch of PMA 3241: Choreography for Site-Specific to Immersive Dance Theater in Fall 2024 and PMA 2301: Screendance: History & Practice, alongside mainstay PMA 3350: Technology and The Moving Body in Spring 2025. The 2024-2025 school year also marks the beginning of new curricular and extracurricular collaborations with Michael Byrne–Research and Creative Lead for Tech, Arts, and Culture at Cornell’s technology campus, as well as co-leader for the university’s Milstein Summer Program in Technology and Humanity.
This event is made possible by The Merce Cunningham Trust in part with the generosity and support of the Department of Performing and Media Arts and curricular collaboration with the Department of Music at Cornell University.
