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 a report from Paris. By Silas Riener, Merce Cunningham Dance Company

We have arrived in Paris.  Final city on our 2-year legacy tour.  Ten performances of two programs now separate us from the Armory Event.

I feel like I’m getting worse at this.  Worse at talking about it, worse at thinking about it, feeling about it.  I feel like we are all getting to that point where all we can do is do it.  Merce said that once, “the only way to do it, is to do it.”

We arrive here on the tails of farewells in Washington DC (Kennedy Center) and New York (BAM), which have done a strange thing to me, made me feel heavier and lighter at the same time.  As a DC-native and a New Yorker, my two homes have come to see the last of it.  It feels great that I would get to share something that has been so important to me with people that are so important to me.

It feels like all I do is say goodbye.  Goodbye to each repertory piece, goodbye to each city, goodbye to the work (I don’t think I will ever really say goodbye to the work.  At least I hope not.)

Being part of it, on the dancing side, I wonder what the role of our emotionality at such a poignant, underscored moment could necessarily be.  How does it fit into Merce’s work, which was always about, well, work?  Or the individual? Or the steps?  Does it fit at all?

Not that there is really room to go through any sort of complicated emotional awareness at the time.  This is something that I didn’t anticipate about these final moments.  There’s no room to really feel them while they are happening (for one thing, the steps are just too darn hard to be blinking back tears with one leg in the air and every other limb who-knows-where) so I have found I end up feeling things before they happen, or well after.  Which is really strange as an emotional experience.   Sometimes they happen too fast.  Sometimes too slow.

There are some writings about the company below.  I don’t think any of us are used to getting this much attention, but it has given us a chance to really think and talk about our work with Merce.  Which is great.  Because if not now, when?

• Merce Cunningham News in The New York Times
• apollinaire scherr’s review of BAM
• The Brooklyn Rail.  The entire dance section given over to Merce.  Containing tons of things, including an excellent piece by Robert Swinston, and an interview between myself, Claudia LaRocco and Rashaun Mitchell
• Merce Remembered by his collaborators, in ArtInfo
• Star-Ledger review of Roaratorio @ BAM
• Review of BAM season by Marina Harss
• Kennedy Center review
• Steve Paxton
• Merce’s former dancers talk to WashPo