Dancer Silas Riener is currently on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour, a Knight Arts granteee. Today he checks in with his first (of several) reports from the field.

I begin here a series of missives from the last six months of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Legacy Tour.  I will do my best to post at least once or twice a month, with some photos, a video if I can wrangle it and some thoughts you are welcome to dismiss, ignore or at least hopefully question.

Someone close to me mentioned offhand that she thought like we were the Elves of Middle Earth, heading toward the ships to pass into the west from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It feels like that sometimes, I’m sure many other metaphors apply.  Ronin, the feudal Japanese samurai whose lord or master has died. We are certainly the last group of dancers trained by Merce doing his work all over the world. And what a world it is! Below find some delightful pictures of our galavanting from Anna Finke (her blog here).  She is our resident tour photographer, costume designer, wardrobe specialist, Jane-of-all-trades.  And she has some incredible shots of the subway system in Moscow.

I did a TV interview with Kultura, the Moscow TV art station, which was quite a production. Many cameras, many people shouting in Russian, one interpreter, one interviewer.  Took a long time.  Some excerpts of the reviews,  interviews, and some footage of our premiere of “Rainforest” (1968)  can be found at these links:

• The performance review, with photos
• A radio piece
• Russian television spot

The interview was interesting, one repeated question I was asked was, “How do you think the Russian audiences will receive this work?” Which is a great question.  The Company has never performed in Russia before, and I think everyone was anxious to see what an audience with presumably little experience with anything other that ballet would take in a merce Cunningham show, which can be awkward, or imperfect, and certainly not conventional.  (One woman who had seen the show, who was a former Bolshoi Ballerina, thought the steps were terribly difficult, and some of them particularly “inconvenient.”  Which we loved.)  But it also begs the question, how do we ever think an audience is going to receive our work?  Is that really ever a mediating factor in how we deliver it?  Should it be?

We were there to deliver our product, a Cunningham experience.  We were able to do so, and it seems like people liked it okay, although I guess it’s always hard to tell.  The audiences were generous with their applause, and gracious when I spoke to at least a few of them.  I guess that’s about the best you can ask for.