Event2 For Jasper Johns
Tues, Sept 29, 2020
12 pm
Still from Event2 For Jasper Johns, 2020.
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Online, via YouTube
In celebration of Jasper Johns's ninetieth birthday in May 2020, seventy former members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company joined together virtually to create Event2 For Jasper Johns. This work for camera is composed of dance and music recordings submitted by the dancers, each isolated under quarantine in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. It comprises excerpts drawn from thirty-eight dances spanning six decades, along with exercises from the Cunningham Technique.
The title of the film references Event For Jasper Johns, which was choreographed by Johns's close friend Merce Cunningham and performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Westbeth in New York on October 20, 1996, on the occasion of the opening of Jasper Johns: A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Johns has given permission for the work to be shared with the public by the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of American Art in honor of the upcoming simultaneous retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, opening on September 29, 2021.
Event2 For Jasper Johns was available on the Whitney's YouTube channel through October 6, 2020.