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 about the tour’s recent stops in London and Seattle. By Silas Riener, Merce Cunningham Dance Company

London The London shows are reviewed here in  the Guardian and here in the Telegraph

London is easily one of my favorite places.  I have performed there with the company three times now, and have had the opportunity to get to know the city.  A good friend who runs a supper club (Arno Maasdorp, eatwithyoureyes.net) hosted a wonderful dinner for the company in Brixton, which is very near where David Vaughan, the company’s Archivist, was born.

The shows, first at Stratford Circus, then at the Barbican, went well.  We did a version of Merce Circus with Squaregame that was similar to the Lincoln Center show, with accompanying activities.  At the Barbican it was Roaratorio, BIPED, Antic Meet, Pond Way, Rainforest and Secondhand.  London has one of the most supportive audiences, which also contains the most caustic critics.  We always get some of the worst reviews.

Our final show in London still haunts me, because it started the chain reaction that I think has been present all along, but is now all too apparent and too immediate to ignore any longer.

This is ending, and we are saying goodbye with a kind of finality I am only marginally comfortable with or prepared for.  And the audiences are saying goodbye too. Which may be just as important.  It’s also a farewell to cities, like London, which have supported the company for decades. We did something like 15 curtain calls.  They screamed every time the curtain came down, we all cried.  It felt surreal.  I have never felt a reaction from an audience like it.

Seattle The Seattle show was previewed here and reviewed here

After two short weeks in New York, we are back on the road, spending late October in Seattle performing at the Paramount.  We now have two different kinds of work in the repertory of the company: pieces that we worked on with Merce which we continue to perform, and revivals staged after his death.

It’s interesting to me to feel the sensitivity and differences between them.  I’m not sure everyone would agree, but the work that we did with Merce, for the most part, feels categorically different than the work we have brought back since his death.  For works like Nearly Ninety, BIPED, and Split Sides, which have not left the active repertory since they were created, and still have original performers (or at least direct second-generation performers) there is a sparkle to the work that makes me think of Merce, a twinkle in his eye.  Something he did when he was in the room that made the dancer or the dance somehow different.

It’s harder to achieve that in his absence, although a great deal of credit is due to Robert Swinston, Trish Lent, Carol Teitelbaum, Meg Harper, Gus Solomons Jr, and Valda Setterfield, who have been instrumental in not only reviving work for the company, but in attempting to provide context and sensorial information for the works they reconstruct. Much information goes into a reconstruction.  There are Merce’s notes, Robert’s notes, videos of rehearsals and performances, all of them different from each other.  It’s difficult to try and recapture whatever spirit the piece might have originally possessed, or to imagine what Merce might have been going for initially.  It’s a separate set of challenges from the work itself.

It’s worth thinking about these things, because in the New Year and the years to follow, all of Merce’s work, whatever is seen, will be revival.  There will be nothing other than revival, because there will no longer be a resident company with a creative master making new work.  What role should the revivalist play?  Is the work still valid, or authentic?  I think it is, although I admit I have complicated feelings about it.

Tomorrow is our final performance of Merce’s final piece, Nearly Ninety ^2.