Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College
This talk addresses dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham and explores why Black Mountain College was the site of his dance company’s 1953 foundation. Between 1948 and 1953, Cunningham visited the College six times, and from his initial visit to the North Carolina enclave with composer John Cage, there was a sense of affinity with the school. This lecture suggests that the choreographer and the college community developed a mutually productive rapport based in a shared vision of joint work and, further, that Cunningham’s 1953 residency at Black Mountain facilitated the consolidation of his nascent approach to choreography for a company. The dances that premiered in North Carolina at that residency’s end, particularly Septet (1953), embody the understanding of the relationship between individual and group that informed Cunningham’s company work and paradigmatically highlight how his choreography related to models of collaboration operative within the college community.
Katherine Markoski, Director of the Kohl Gallery and Lecturer in Art History at Washington College
Katherine Markoski is the Director of the Kohl Gallery and Lecturer in Art History at Washington College. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University, having completed a dissertation on Black Mountain College. A recipient of the Dedalus Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a Smithsonian American Art Museum Postdoctoral Fellowship, she has worked as a curatorial assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and has also taught courses on modern and contemporary art at American University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Oberlin College. She has written essays on John Cage and Jasper Johns, and she contributed an entry on the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to the exhibition catalogue for Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957. Currently, she is transforming the dissertation into a book manuscript tentatively titled “The Imagination of Community: Artistic Practice at Black Mountain College.”