Laura Kuhn talks with Nancy Dalva, a writer well known in dance circles who has long resided in New York City. Nancy has had an almost lifelong relationship with the work of Mere Cunningham, and in 2012, three years after the choreographer’s death, she was appointed the Merce Cunningham Trust’s Scholar in Residence. Nancy produced and wrote the scripts for the web series “Mondays With Merce,” and also produced the videos in the “Mondays with Merce” Film Library, all of which are available on the Trust’s YouTube channel. Nancy’s work with the Merce Cunningham Trust also involves her in assisting scholars, researchers, dancers, and students, and she engages quite happily in the many associations, possibilities, and adventures Cunningham’s work still presents. Her current project has her knee deep in the beautiful footage captured at Cunningham’s Dia:Beacon Events, which took place in 2007-2009. These Events were part of the larger Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Hudson Valley Project, which took place in partnership with Dia Art Foundation, Bard College, and the John Cage Trust.

"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!