Thoroughly modern match up - choreographer Merce Cunningham and designer Rei Kawakubo

Interview, Oct, 1997 by Brad Goldfarb

On the fourteenth of this month, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, two of the modern world's great modernists will join creative forces for a series of performances that promise to push the limits of dance, set design, costuming, lighting, and collaboration into a new stratosphere, or at least somewhere closer to it than anyone has come in a long time. The collaboration, entitled Scenario, is the creation of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and Comme des Garcons designer Rei Kawakubo - two individuals long committed to seeking new forms of creative expression in their respective fields. Not only has their boundary-breaking work changed the vocabulary in the territory in which each of them has made his or her mark, but it has prompted new ways of understanding the body and beauty.

For the BAM performance, Cunningham has created a new, forty-minute work to be performed by the dancers of his own Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with an original score by the company's music director, Takehisa Kosugi. The program, which consists of thirteen sections, features a variety of costume changes, all designed by Kawakubo. She will also conceive the lighting and special set.

Given Kawakubo's and Cunningham's unique place in the arts, their collaboration would seem to be a natural. The genesis came with a visit by Cunningham to the Comme des Garcons store in New York City - intrigued by the construction of a jacket, he began a dialogue with Kawakubo that has continued over the past year, culminating in this month's performance at BAM (the work will have its European premiere at the Palais Garnier in Paris on January 8, 1998, with further performances scheduled for the U.S. and Europe later in the year). Besides their soul-mate aesthetic visions, the two share a history of taking risks, of playing with the expected, of questioning and redefining. They have essentialized what it means to be avant-garde: ahead. And they have never underestimated what is in the head: the mind. One can only imagine what transcendent brew they will cook up.