Stephanie Berger, Merce Cunningham: Beyond the Perfect Stage, Bologna, Damiani Editore, 2016, 96 pages.
Merce Cunningham changed the way people dance and the way people see dancing in the same way that Picasso and the Cubists changed the way people painted and the way people see painting. He took dance apart and put it back together again, leaving out all but the most essential.
In 'Beyond the Perfect Stage', Stephanie Berger captures the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in a series of site-specific “Events” from 2008 to 2011 from a multiplicity of perspectives, creating a photographic choreography that combines the “Events” in a new way. The Cunningham dancers warm up and then perform in various situations – as Cunningham called the galleries and the especially constructed stages for each “Event” – environments that include Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, Dan Flavin's neon light installations, Sol LeWitt’s minimalist white boxes, and Imi Knoebel's color-shaped paintings. Berger captures Cunningham’s evanescent art, constructing a new experience while at the same time preserving the original, thus operating very much within the aesthetic framework Cunningham himself proposed. Vivid, immediate, unmediated yet curated, her photographic “Event” contextualizes the dances in a personal but entirely available form.