Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event

The Wexner Center is thrilled to present this evocative film project, which captures Merce Cunningham rehearsing with his company, in conjunction with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour performance this evening.

Dean, one of the most thoughtful and talented artists working in film today, spent three days in the fall of 2008 filming Cunningham and his dancers developing an “Event” (the company’s term for a performance composed of movement phrases from past works) in a former Ford assembly plant on the waterfront in the Bay Area. The resulting 16mm feature marks Cunningham’s final appearance on film and was constructed by Dean from seventeen hours of footage. She observed and filmed every stage of the Event rehearsals, from the time Cunningham first walked into and surveyed the space. His interactions with the dancers, the dancers’ own actions, and the changing patterns of daylight in the enormous space, come together in a multilayered evocation of time, space, and movement. All these qualities both fascinate the filmmaker and are inherent parts of the late choreographer’s sensibility.

Cunningham developed this site-specific Event as part of series of performances for the University of California at Berkeley’s Cal Performances program in 2008. The stunning locale in Richmond, California, now known as the Craneway Pavilion, was designed by leading industrial architect Albert Kahn and opened in 1931. The factory produced tanks, trunks, jeeps, and other military vehicles during WWII and was closed by Ford in 1955. The Craneway Pavilion, occupying the gigantic, open “craneway” where finished vehicles were hoisted on cranes in preparation for loading on railway cars, has many of the hallmarks of Kahn’s architectural design, including the extensive use of natural light. Its floor-to-ceiling windows now offer spectacular views over San Francisco Bay.

Tacita Dean, a 1999 Wexner Center Residency Award artist in media arts, previously worked with Cunningham on Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS, which shows Cunningham performing to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson in New York City, in April 2007. That project exists as both a series of films (subtitled six performances, six films) and an installation (subtitled in three movements). Dean’s Craneway Event premiered in New York in November 2009. Special thanks to Rose Lord at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, for making this screening possible.

Full image credit:

Tacita Dean
Craneway Event, 2009
108 mins., 16mm color anamorphic film
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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