This year Brenau dance students had an opportunity to work with a student of a pioneer in the American modern dance movement, to perform in New York and to be immersed in a collaborative culture that helped form such artists from the Black Mountain College as Merce Cunningham, Josef Albers, John Cage, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

For the Merce Cunningham Project, Vincas Greene, an associate professor of dance at Brenau who studied at the Cunningham studio, asked a former colleague there, Carol Teitelbaum, to put together a minEvent with some

Brenau students. The former studio faculty chair and company dancer spent two weeks on the Brenau campus teaching classes and working on specific choreography with a select group of students. 

The program comprised pieces of Merce Cunningham’s choreography from different dances blended into a performance that could take place in a nontraditional space – like a small art gallery.

That was good because Brenau Galleries personnel were busy curating and hanging work from the university’s permanent collection by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Josef Albers. Along with Cunningham and others, they were part of the experience at the experimental colleges in North Carolina where study of the arts was regarded as the most important aspect of higher education. Cunningham formed his modern dance company there in 1953. Along with the dance and art exhibit, Brenau vocal performance senior Arielle Crumley learned pieces from composer John Cage, who also worked with Cunningham at Black Mountain.

Crumley and the dance students travelled to New York to perform and take classes at the Merce Cunningham Trust. Back in Georgia they performed in the Castelli Gallery surrounded by the Black Mountain College Experience show.

The immersive program left a big impression on Brenau’s Amanda Bonilla, WC ‘14,  who said she wishes she had been exposed to this type of dance at an early age.

“When we are growing up and we start dancing, we have this small idea of what dance is,” says Bonilla. “It’s about being pretty and having a nice dress on, but it’s not always about that. The spectrum of dance is so large that it’s important for dancers to see all of it and not just a portion of it.”