Unconventional dance

Isthmus features editor and dance critic Cathryn Harding previews a performance by Merce Cunningham's dance company at the Madison Civic Center. She says the father of avant-garde dance has "sought to strip dance of its conventions and let movement speak for itself." To achieve this, he breaks dance "from its traditional relationship to music and scenery, presenting each instead as autonomous and contemporaneous events, none lending 'meaning' to the other." Cunningham rejects theme-and-variations compositional methods and creates "nonlinear dances that were not about anything except movement." Cunningham dies in 2009. His company continues to tour. An homage to Cunningham and collaborator John Cage is now on exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Harding is currently the editor at C-Ville, the Charlottesville, Va., weekly.