Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 107

By 1945 he had withdrawn from the company and was working out Ms own way of dancing When he had given the first recital of his new way of working the previous year dance critic Edwin Denby wrote His (wild resembles that of the juvenile of early Picasso and found the effect of the dance of excessively elegant and irreproachable After that Cunningham worked more and more at freeing the rather stiff ballet torso for ever looser and lwger movements incorporating chance and moments of stillness ana was not again called either or These days he even allows the dancers themselves to determine some of their own movements In the summer of 1952 at Black Mountain College a breeding mound for the avant-garde of the 1950s in North Carolina Cunningham Cage and Rauschenberg came together In the main dining room of the college Cage that summer organized a During the 45 minutes of the performance Cage read one of his lectures from the upper rungs of a stepladder Cun-hingham danced into the audience someone played the piano someone else read poetry and Rauschenberg played scratchy records on an old wind-up phonograph while two persons projected movies onto the wall all this simultaneously It was the prototype of the that were to galvanize the 1960s That was 25 years ago Cunningham Cage and Rauschenberg are still all growing and changing But Cunningham is 57 now As late as three years ago he would tell people who asked him when he would stop dancing Heavens just got a running start But now he says not at the start I'm in the and matched for Andy Warhol who calls Cunningham best chorooipapher made Mylar floating pillows for And Johns himself adapted Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors for the stage That was fitting since many of the ideas those avant-garde artists share with Merce Cunningham are direct descendants of the anti-art concepts that Duchamp propounded in the 1930s when he took manufactured items like a shovel or bicycle wheel mounted or signed them and pronounced them works of art Artists have done more than make sets for Cunningham They were his first audience In 1962 80 'artists from de Kooning to Duchamp to Marie Rothko Barnett Newman Robert Motherwell and Saul Steinberg brought in $45000 from a special benefit sale of their works to help finance a Cunningham Broadway season When plus for Broadway fell through they agreed to let Cunningham use the money for a world tour Cunningham was bom and reared in Centralia Wash' about 50 miles south of Tacoma His father practiced law there When he graduated from high school in 1937 he headed for the Cornish School Seattle an arts-centered organization with the idea of becoming an actor But he got deeper and deeper into dance there and also met Cage who was teaching and playing piano for dance classes Cage urged him to enroll at Mills College in Oakland where one of the guest teachers was Martha Graham She saw him dance in one student program invited him to come to New York and work with her and when he did much to her surprise she immediately gave him a major solo in her new dance Soul is a He was highly praised from the first Feet on stage Continued from Page 5 the street and have a good he said Then the company had an extended run in London and soon he had picked the neighborhood dry So he began assigning himself a series of activities to complete on stage during the dance Once he painted a painting finishing it in the last performance Once he dyed clothes many colors then hung them to dry on an onstage clothesline where they dripped into buckets while the dancers danced But his favorite design is the costumes he did for the comic Cunningham asked him for a sweater with four sleeves which he designed and Cunningham and company knitted for Cunningham to manipulate over his body in the dance In another element of one dancer wore a nightgown that Rauschenberg had found in a thrift shop and sat in a chair strapped to back In 1964 Rauschenberg became the first American to win first prize in painting at the Venice Biennale and that year he and the company split The two events were not connected As artistic director Rauschenberg suggested his friend Jasper Johns more formaltempenunent did not allow him to travel with the company in stage-manager capacity (Cunningham still believes that one of the joys of the tour for Rauschenberg was that he liked to play Scrabble with Cage) So instead Johns persuaded other artists to take on temporary duties as set designers Frank Stella designed colored banners and costumes that mixed I- making writing and architecture There are 1800 entries and the paperback is available at libraries or for $1395 from Washington International Arts Letter Box 9005 Washington DC 20003 as some by Luminere and Edison film pioneers at the start of the century So far program and dates haven't been finalized but it will probably start in late March Guidebook on grants That most difficult problem facing practitioners of all the how to Keep going without financial is more and more being at least addressed if not solved these days by grants Everybody knows about the most prestigious and hardest to get like the Guggenheim fellowships and New York State Council on the Arts or National Endowment for the Arts aids But there are many many others To help artists find out about them National Directory of Grants and Aid to Individuals in the Arts has been updated for the first time in five years The 221-page guidebook lists funding sources in the fields of crafts music dance -JbqlkL filnij JV heater painting sculpture prinl-JO I iCJiirtJtt 4 i-v Ml HTOk-OT 'UZ'1 SHORT Film festival from Paris The Cinematheque Francais Henri world-famous museum of the cinema has a home of its own in Paris But for some years now it has been marching for a New York base For a time it seemed that it had found space under the Queensboro Bridge and announcements were made about the grand film center that would be built there But that plan fell through In 1970 City Center and the Metropolitan Museum collaborated on a Cinematheque film festival at the museum which ran' a good part of the summer But any hopes that the film center might have become part of City Center were soon dashed as well fin lack of fluids Although still no closer to finding a New York home the Cinematheque has surfaced again The Metropolitan Museum is giving a six-week festival of films from the Cinematheque library such I HD K333AO W3 Chinese culture show Now on view through March 6 at The Queens Museum is of the Brush: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from the 16th to the 19th Century Most of the works include poems and inscriptions which help in their understanding and Leon LY Chang visiting professor of Chinese art and culture at St University who organized the show has written an illustrated catalog Films on Chinese art and culture will be shown daily There will be special films at 2:30 today Jan 30 Feb 13 and Feb 27 and a shadow puppet play at 3 PM Feb 20 The museum is in the New York City Building in Flushing Meadow hours Tuesday through Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM Sunday 1 PM to 5 PM Closed Monday a IOZ 7 3 JM.