Totally Unauthorized

If you love a restaurant named SR24, and you love a friend named SR, it’s only natural to get the two together. So last night, that’s just what we did.

Party, party, party

We had all the usual things—tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich, pork belly, chicken pot pie.  The food is excellent and the service is just as good.

Then we were off to Zellerbach Hall for the farewell tour of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  Cunningham died in 2009, at the age of 90, and his troupe is making one least national tour before disbanding.  The final performance, in New York, will be priced at only $10/ticket, as specified in his will.

Here’s a paragraph from the program:

Of all his collaborations, Mr. Cunningham’s work with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940’s until Mr. Cage’s death in 1992, had the greatest influence on his practice.  Together, Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the realtionship between dance and music, which they concluded may occur in the same space and time, but should be created independently of one another.  The two also made extensive use of chance procedures, abandoning not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax.  for Mr. Cunningham, the subject of his dances was always dance itself.

 

What this means is that the dance was too hip for the room–okay, some of the room.  Well, us.  Beautiful people moving around a stage while Brian Eno’s ambient music was playing, with no plot or purpose.  Music with no theme or rhythm.  I like modern dance, and it was way too cool for me.  We left after the first movement and were home in time to watch Burlesque on the TV–not a good movie, but music and dance you can relate to.

I’m such a hick.