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 stop in Mexico City. By Silas Riener, Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Hello all, I’m writing from Berlin, where we are currently on tour performing at the Volksbühne, and Academie der Künste, through Tuesday, Sept 27. Which is nothing at all like where we were just a few short weeks ago, in Mexico City, performing at Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Displacement is something I have been thinking about a lot lately, mostly because we are always on tour. The audience is almost always completely different.  Who are they?  What are they expecting?  Why did they come?  Often times in big cities like Berlin or Mexico City, we are in some large and grand opera house because it’s the biggest theatre available, and we are a lot of dancers, and Merce made work that took up a lot of space.  Frequently a theatre subscription audience (people that might buy a block of 4 shows at one theatre) may not know much about what we are about, and I think people’s expectations aren’t quite aligned with the product that we have to offer.  But I have been completely wrong about that before too.  Sometimes I think they are going to hate it, and I find myself surprised by the outpouring of gratitude.  With work like Merce’s, for which the physical narrative (something else I have been thinking a lot about) stretches back into the creation myths of American dance, it can even be a sort of short-coming if the audience comes to expect a certain experience.  Not to say that Merce’s work did not possess themes, and similarities over time, but I think it would be narrow minded to approach a show with really any kind of expectation.

These are charged moments for us all, the last of our moments together as a group, and in some cases the last expressions of a lot of Merce’s work, which may never be seen again.  I think about something he said after the premiere of his final work, Nearly Ninety (at BAM, in New York, in 2009, shortly before his death) which I will paraphrastically describe as thanking the audience for coming, and hoping that what we offered might have been something they hadn’t seen before.  which just about says it all.

So, Mexico City, in no particular order…

• Incredible street food
• Occasional public demonstrations
• Very, very ancient pyramids to the sun and the moon
• Possibly one of the best museum experiences I have ever had (El Museo de Anthropologia)
• Tequila
• A few pretty good junk markets
• Some mild altitude sickness, which may have been tequila sickness
• Very good street art, which was occasionally politically poignant

I would definitely go back, and hope to.  Soon. Coming up, some of the last days in New York at Merce’s Westbeth studio, the stable home of his work since 1970.