The multimedia and interdisciplinary work of three essential innovators in the performing arts will be presented for the first time in a major museum exhibition when the Walker Art Center premieres Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones June 28 through September 20. Recognizing the critical contribution each artist has made to the history of 20th-century performance, the exhibition weaves together music, movement, objects, and moving images to create new landscapes out of props, costumes, stage sets, film and video projections, audio recordings, and photographs. In a gallery setting, visitors can experience the aesthetic drama of each artist's unique and highly visual performance-based work. Art Performs Life is curated by Siri Engberg, Walker Assistant Curator; Kellie Jones, guest curator; and Philippe Vergne, Walker Curator.

Each artist and his or her full company will visit Minneapolis during the run of the exhibition to showcase new or recent work, to conduct workshops, or to participate in artist talks. Opening-weekend events feature a concert by Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble highlighting 30 years of Monk's pioneering music, followed by a conversation with the composer; a lecture by dance historian Sally Banes; and a free performance of Monk's ritualistic music-theater work A Celebration Service. In the closing weeks of the exhibition, performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will take place. Other related programming includes lectures, gallery talks, film screenings, family programs, and a Web site.

Merce Cunningham
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Merce Cunningham changed the language of contemporary dance by experimenting with chance arrangements and incorporating everyday movements into his choreography. His experiments were extended to his collaborators in music and the visual arts -- artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, and Andy Warhol, among myriad others -- breaking down the hierarchy between these disciplines and freeing dance from its traditional molds. Art Performs Life will feature major notations, scores, sets, costumes, and videos chronicling critical works from the company's repertoire.

The exhibition includes two major collaborations with Rauschenberg: his set for Minutiae (1954), and an abstract, pointillist backdrop from Summerspace (1958) executed in Day-Glo paint with the help of Johns. Also featured are Rainforest (1968), with its floating aluminum pillows designed by Warhol, Johns' Marcel Duchamp-inspired set for Walkaround Time (1968), Ground Level Overlay (1995), an intricate sculptural set designed by Leonardo Drew, and an installation about recent collaborations with fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. The set elements for Walkaround Time, designed and supervised by Johns after Duchamp's well-known work The Large Glass (1916 1923), are composed of sections from Duchamp's work printed onto seven transparent plastic inflatable cubes. The performance itself, an homage to Duchamp, focused on the awareness of time, "the sense of stopping and moving at the same time."

Cunningham's work with video artists and filmmakers Nam June Paik, Charles Atlas, and Elliot Caplan will be featured as well as recent experimentation with the Life Forms computer program with which CRWDSPCR (1993) was choreographed. An interactive computer station will allow visitors to experiment with Life Forms .

Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington, and received his first formal dance and theater training at the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle. From 1939 to 1945, he was a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company. At the same time, he began to choreograph independently, presenting his first New York City solo concert with John Cage in April 1944. Since forming the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College in 1953, he has created nearly 200 works for his company. In addition his works have been included in the repertoires of numerous ballet and modern dance companies around the world.

Cunningham has collaborated on two books about his work: Changes: Notes on Choreography , with Frances Starr (Something Else Press, New York, 1968) and The Dancer and the Dance , interviews with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (Marion Boyars, New York and London, 1985). The latter,

originally published in French, has also been translated in German and Italian. Merce Cunningham/Dancing in Space and Time , a collection of critical essays edited by Richard Kostelanetz, was published in 1992 by A Cappella books. A chronicle and commentary by dance historian David Vaughan -- Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years -- was published in 1997 by Aperture.

Meredith Monk
Since Meredith Monk's early groundbreaking work of the mid-1960s, she has forged a singular vision of performance working as a composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, and director. A pioneer in interdisciplinary performance and using a unique non-verbal approach to vocal music, she has created more than 100 works and received wide critical acclaim, heralded by The New York Times as "one of America's most brilliant and unclassifiable theatrical artists." Her section of Art Performs Life will focus on the extraordinary marriage of performance, music, dance, film, and art objects in her work.

Included in the exhibition will be films, sets, costumes, artifacts, and other primary and documentary material from such works as 16 Millimeter Earrings (1966), an early solo; Juice (1969), one of Monk's most important site-specific works; Quarry (1976), her Obie Award-winning opera about World War II; and Atlas (1991), a full-scale opera co-commissioned by the Walker. Through installations she conceived for the Walker's galleries, the exhibition explores a full range of Monk's performance activity, from her groundbreaking site-specific pieces to her work as a composer and filmmaker to large-scale music-theater productions. Key works originally conceived as art installations, such as Silver Lake with Dolmen Music (1981), will also be included, as will several new pieces created specifically for the exhibition. Documentary photography and video, as well as a range of Monk's musical notations, scores, storyboards, and drawings will illuminate the space for the viewer.

Born in 1942, Monk graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964 with a combined performing arts degree, and in 1968 founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. She formed Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble in 1978 to tour and perform her unique musical compositions. Her more than a dozen recordings include her full-length opera, ATLAS: an opera in three parts (1991) and Volcano Songs , released in 1997. In 1996 the American Guild of Organists commissioned Monk to create A Celebration Service, a non-sectarian worship service melding her haunting vocal music and movement with spiritual texts drawn from two millennia.



Monk's achievements have been recognized with numerous awards throughout her career, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, three Obies (including an award for sustained achievement), and a Bessie for Sustained Creative Achievement. In 1995, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1997, the Johns Hopkins University Press published Meredith Monk , a collection of key writings on Monk's work edited by Deborah Jowitt. Art Performs Life marks the first full-scale museum presentation of Monk's work.

Bill T. Jones
Since forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982, Bill T. Jones has created numerous works, many in collaboration with his late partner and fellow dancer Arnie Zane (d.1988). Jones' style, while clearly rooted in modern dance, has been inspired by African and popular forms as well as contact improvisation, a system of counter-balanced movement that he explored in early intricate duets with Zane. His performances often transgress the traditional boundaries between public and private through the themes explored -- sexuality, gender, race, spirituality, life, and death -- as well as by the use of non-artists as performers in his works. Art Performs Life will feature pieces that reflect the mixed-media nature of Jones' recent works, often collaborations with well-known artists of the past two decades, including video artist Gretchen Bender, composer Julius Hemphill, and visual artist Keith Haring. On view will be works that combine movement, music, and spoken word.

Throughout Jones' section of the exhibition, stage props, music, costumes, photographs, and video will document many works in the artist's repertoire, including Long Distance (1983), a collaboration with Haring in which Haring paints on the wall while Jones dances; Untitled (1989), a solo piece about loss made for television; the recent Ursonate (1996); and key early works such as Animal Trilogy (1986), Valley Cottage (1981), and Monkey Run Road (1979).

Secret Pastures (1984), one of the company's first major works, featured sets by Haring, music by Peter Gordon, and costumes by Willi Smith. On view in the exhibition will be a tent and backdrop by Haring, a selection of costumes, and a video of the original production. Another collaboration with Haring, in which he painted on Jones' body, is documented in the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi as well as in a video by Zane of the process. Blauvelt Mountain (1980), an early duet by Zane and Jones, will be represented by a reconstruction of the cinder-block set that was integral to the performance. In addition a project with artist Jenny Holzer, inspired by her Truisms series, will be represented by a print and a selection from Michael Blackwood's film Retracing Steps: American Dance Since Postmodernism documenting Jones' use of her signature phrases.


Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), a major work co-commissioned by the Walker and inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous 19th-century anti-slavery novel, through an examination of divisive forces (fear of the other, hatred, and religious beliefs), attempts to make a leap of faith and express an acceptable vision of communality. The exhibition will feature props from the production -- African-inspired masks and furniture -- designed by Huck Snyder, the original musical score by Julius Hemphill, and a video of the performance. Still/Here (1995), the choreographer's most renowned and widely discussed work about life, death, and perseverance, will be represented by drawings done by members of the Survival Workshops Jones conducted while creating the piece, as well as by the video environment created by Bender for the stage production.

Born in 1952, Jones began his dance training at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY) and continued at the State University College at Brockport. In 1974, he became co-founder of the American Dance Asylum. Before forming Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (then called Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company), Jones choreographed and performed nationally and internationally as a soloist and with Zane. Recently Jones served as choreographer-in-residence at the Lyon Opera Ballet (1995 1997) and has directed projects for theater, including Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain at The Guthrie Theater in 1994.

In addition to a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1994, Jones has received a number of awards throughout his career, including Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards, an "Izzy" Award, and the Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award. Last Night on Earth , part memoir, part meditation, and part performance, was published by Pantheon Books in 1995. An in-depth look at the work of Jones and Zane can be found in Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane , published by Station Hill Press. With Gretchen Bender, Jones co-directed a television adaptation of Still/Here produced with KTCA-TV in St. Paul and Amaya in Paris. It won two awards: the FIPA Palme d'Or Biarritz (1996) and the Grand Prix, Scenes d'Ecrain, Bruxelles (1997).

Exhibition Publication
A 176-page fully illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition will include an introductory essay by Sally Banes, Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison; interviews with the artists conducted by Ann Daly, Associate Professor of Dance History/Criticism at the University of Texas, Austin; Thelma Golden, Curator and Director of Branches at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; novelist-

poet-critic Jamake Highwater; dance critic-teacher Deborah Jowitt; and Laura Kuhn, Executive Director, John Cage Trust, New York; and artist chronologies. The softcover book is available at the Walker Art Center Shops for $29.95 ($22.45 Walker members).

WEB SITE
Visit the Walker Web site for more information about the artists and their projects using dance and computers. View images from Merce Cunningham's notebooks and gain access to Life Forms the human-figure animation software that the artist has been composing dance sequences with for several years. Meredith Monk's wax installation in the Walker lobby will be chronicled on the Web site and Riverbed Productions' re-creation of the Keith Haring and Bill T. Jones collaboration is also featured with Haring's paintings and three-dimensional moving images of Jones dancing. See it all at /programs/apl/.

Funding
Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones is made possible by generous support from AT&T.

Additional support for this exhibition is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Dayton's Frango Fund, Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Voyageur Companies.

Related performances and residency activities are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Sage and John Cowles, Arts Midwest Performing Arts Touring Fund, Heartland Arts Fund, Martha and Bruce Atwater, Roger L. Hale and Eleanor L. Hall, Harriet and Ed Spencer, Penny and Mike Winton, Gertrude Lippincott Fund, Martha Ann Davies, Constance Mayeron and Charles Fuller Cowles, Joanne and Philip Von Blon, Margaret and Angus Wurtele, Suzanne and Ted Zorn, Judith and Jerome Ingber, and Priscilla Goldstein.

This exhibition and related residencies are part of the Walker Art Center's "New Definitions/New Audiences" initiative. This museum-wide project to engage visitors in a reexamination of 20th-century art is made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.

Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, The Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Target Stores, Dayton's, and Mervyn's by the Dayton Hudson Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, the General Mills


Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the American Express Minnesota Philanthropic Program, the Honeywell Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, The Regis Foundation, The St. Paul Companies, Inc., U.S. Bank, the 3M Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center.

Northwest Airlines, Inc. is the official airline of the Walker Art Center.

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