Celebrating both the 10th anniversary of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and a 35-year relationship with the legendary world-renowned choreographer Merce Cunningham, the Walker Art Center presents Event for the Garden at 2:15 pm Saturday, September 12, as part of the museum's free daylong birthday party A Cherry Jubilee. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company visits Minneapolis in conjunction with the Walker exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones , on view through September 20. Cunningham will join Walker curators Philippe Vergne and Philip Bither in an informal conversation about his career at 8 pm Thursday, September 10. The Talking Dance program will take place in the Walker Auditorium.

Cunningham's signature Events are performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company that combine sections from existing repertoire, rearranged with newly composed music and decor. Event for the Garden is a special tribute to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and incorporates Jasper Johns' set pieces for Walkaround Time (1968), after Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass. The music is created and performed by Merce Cunningham Dance Company Musical Director Takehisa Kosugi, experimental composer Christian Marclay, and Chicago-based composer-performer Jim O'Rourke. In case of rain on both Saturday and Sunday, The Event will be performed at Northrop Auditorium at 2:15 pm on Sunday, September 13.

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 Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, and Andy Warhol, among myriad others in music and the visual arts, breaking down the hierarchy between these disciplines and freeing dance from its traditional molds.

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.

Jim O'Rourke was born in Chicago in 1969. His career activities include work as an improvisor, with Derek Bailey, Mats Gustafson, Henry Kaiser, Gunter Miller, Eddie Prevost, and Voice Crack, among others; as a collaborator, with Tony Conrad and John Fahey; and as a performer with groups including Gastr del Sol and Red Crayola. He has remixed the music of Microstoria, Smog, and Tortoise, and recorded music by Maple, Palace, and U.S. His music can be heard on the soundtrack recording Picture of Light .

Christian Marclay was born in San Rafael, California, in 1955 and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Superieur d'Art Visuel. In 1977, he moved to Boston and attended the Massachusetts College or Art, where he took sculpture and performance courses. In 1979 he began using phonograph records as "musical instruments." Throughout the 1980s, he performed as a soloist and in groups, mixing records on multiple turntables, fragmenting and repeating sounds, playing the records backwards, altering speeds, etc., in a display of precise and abusive manipulations. In addition to recording his own compositions, he has collaborated with many "downtown" composers and improvisers, such as Elliot Shar, John Zorn, Lawrence "Butch" Morris, David Moss, and others. Parallel to his musical activities, Marclay's sculptures and sound installations, which focus on the meeting place of sound and sight, have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.

Born in Tokyo in 1938, Takehisa Kosugi graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1962. From 1965 to 1967 he lived in New York, creating multimedia performance works and giving concerts with Nam June Paik and other Fluxus members. In 1969 he founded the Taj Mahal Travelers in Tokyo, a collective improvisational group giving intermedia presentations. He has been a composer/performer with Merce Cunningham Dance Company since 1977. In 1991 Kosugi received the John Cage Award for Music from the Foundation for Contemporary P. Performance Arts .

Tickets for Merce Cunningham's Talking Dance program are $8 ($4 Walker members.) and are available by calling the Walker box office at (612) 375-7622 (voice); (612) 375-7585 (Telecommunications Device for the Deaf). Accommodations are available upon request.

Related performances and residency activities in conjunction with Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones 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.

The 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.