Process to Performance: Merce Cunningham and Richard Hamilton

The collaborations made between Richard Hamilton (1919–2011), an English painter and collage artist, renowned for Pop art, and the influential American choreographer, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) who redefined the boundaries between modern dance, art, and technology, culminated in an event that was held at the Barbican Theatre in 2019, titled Night of a 100 Solos: A Centennial Event. Both Hamilton and Cunningham were influenced by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), a French painter associated with Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Futurist movement on conceptual art. Cunningham and Hamilton are also closely associated with the art movements of avant-gardism, abstract expressionism, and Pop art. Their main point of reference is that they all worked in a way that meant the ‘process’ of making art became more important than the art form, explicit in the finished product and was of equal value. The primary stagers of Night of 100 Solos were the individuals entrusted with imparting knowledge of Cunningham’s repertoire and restaging it for an international dance community. Dance companies were not authorised to perform his repertoire until after the initiation of the Legacy Plan by members of the Cunningham Dance Foundation in 2009. One question arising from this research is what does this new choreographic reconstruction reveal in terms of Cunningham’s legacy, specifically by using dancers from various international dance companies not trained by him. In my approach to expatiate the interrelations and procedures followed by Hamilton and Cunningham, I aim to uncover an emerging paradigm for future reconstructions of visual art and dance and their subsequent replications in live performance contexts, including issues of legacy.