Merce Cunningham: Beyond the Perfect Stage: Photographs by Stephanie Berger

by Stephanie Berger (Photographer), Trevor Carlson (Composer), Nancy Dalva (Afterword)

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”―including Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, Dan Flavin’s neon light installations, Sol LeWitt’s Minimalist white boxes and the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. 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.

96 pages, Hardcover

Published April 26, 2016

About the author

Stephanie Berger is passionate about spreading kindness. As an author and blogger, she writes about how easy and fun it is to do random acts of kindness. She inspires readers with ideas on how to give back to the community, bring joy to others, and shares easy ways to make memories with family on her blog, Time Well Spent (timewellspent.site). She graduated from Pepperdine University and lives in Northern California with her husband and two boys.