Federmayer Eva Fulbright Blogja

Important for folks in Urbana (including me) is the fact that the first public performance of Cunningham DC took place in Freer Gymnasium, Urbana.
Fascinated by the artistic and philosophic potentials of chance and contingency, the music for the Merce Cunningham DC' (MCDC) second performance on Oct 9, 07 at Krannert CPA, entitled eyeSpace (2006), was composed and arranged for iPods so each patron had his/her individual music to which the artists danced on the stage.

One of the most famous American dance companies, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was established in 1953, when Cunningham took a group of dancers who had been working with him in New York to Black Mountain College, the progressive liberal arts school near Asheville, North Carolina. The company's music director was Cunningham's partner, John Cage until his death in 1992. Largely ignored in the New York Press after an off-Broadway theater performance, there were only occasionally seen on stage. (They set off on their first long world tour of 6 months in 1964). The company famously toured in a Volkswagen bus with room for 6 dancers, including MC, 2 musicians, and the stage manager Robert Rauschenberg, who became the company's resident designer in 1954 (until 1964). Cunningham has continued and extended the practice of commissioning decors from contemporary visual artists. Cunningham has also worked extensively in film and video, in collaboration first with Charles Atlas and later with Elliot Caplan. (See the documentary Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance, 1999). Cunningham's interest in contemporary technology has led him to work with the computer program DanceForms, which he has been using in making all his dances since 1991.

http://www.merce.org/; http://greatdance.com/danceblog/archives/dancers/000697.php

Oral histories of three Urbana-Champaign women participating in the war on a panel mediated by UIUC history professor. Iris, who was trained as a navigator (even learning stellar navigation), is the lady in green in my picture. But here is her photo in the war, in uniform:






http://will.atlas.uiuc.edu/index.php/WWII/events/

http://urbanafreelibrary.org/index.html