Contributors
- Contributors
Carolyn Brown is a freelance choreographer, filmmaker, writer, lecturer, and teacher in the United States and Europe. She was a principal dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for twenty years, appearing in forty-two works.
Michael Byrnes is a New York–based theater designer. Recent designs include John Adam’s Death of Klinghoffer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Romola and Nijinski at Primary Stages. He is a graduate of the Motley Theatre Design Course in London, England, and is a member of CiNE, an experimental design collective.
Merce Cunningham is a living legend of the performing arts whose work has been presented all over the world. He has created over two hundred works for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company since founding it in 1953. Among numerous other prizes and honors, Cunningham was presented the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1985.
Gordon Dahlquist is a member of CiNE, an experimental design collective. His plays include Messalina, Delirium Palace, The Secret Machine, Vortex du Plaisir, Island of Dogs, and Severity’s Mistress. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists.
Joe Diebes creates works that converge around the categories of music-theater, sound installation, and conceptual art. He was the musical force behind GAle GAtes from 1996 to 2003. Other collaborators include George Coates, the Living Theatre, and Phil Soltanoff. His first opera, Strange Birds, premiered in 2001, and he is currently working on a new opera, Hypatia, with a libretto by Mac Wellman.
Sasha Dugdale has translated several Russian plays for the Royal Court Theatre, including How I Ate a Dog by Evgeny Grishkovets, U by Olga Mukhina, and Vassily Sigarev’s Black Milk and Ladybird.
Elinor Fuchs is a professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. Her books include The Death of Character, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism; Plays of the Holocaust: An International Anthology; the documentary play Year One of the Empire, which won the Drama-Logue Best Play Award; and the recent Land/Scape/Theater, which won the 2003 Excellence in Editing Award of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Laura Kuhn is an arts administrator, writer, director, and performer. She directs the John Cage Trust, which she cofounded. In 2001 she created and directed James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, a theatrical realization of John Cage’s radio play.
David Levine has directed premieres at Primary Stages, the Atlantic Theater Company, and the Vineyard Theatre in New York. He has developed new work at the Sundance Theater Lab, New York Theatre Workshop, New York Stage and Film, and New Dramatists, where he was director-in-residence. He is a cofounder of CiNE, an experimental design collective.
Joseph V. Melillo is the executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include The Clean House, Melancholy Play, Eurydice, Late: a cowboy song, Orlando, and Passion Play. Her plays have been produced in New York, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Madison, Minneapolis, and Providence. In 2003, she was the recipient of a Helen Merrill Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award. She is originally from Chicago.
Thecla Schiphorst is a media artist, choreographer, dancer, computer systems designer, and associate professor in Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. She is a member of the design team that developed LifeForms, a computer compositional tool for choreography, used by Merce Cunningham and others.
Vassily Sigarev’s plays include Black Milk, The Vampire’s Family, The Lie Detector, The Russian Lottery, and Ladybird. He has received the Anti–Booker Prize and Debut Prize (2000), the Eureka Prize, and the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright. He lives and works in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
David Vaughan is a dancer, singer, actor, and choreographer and is the archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. He is the author of Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years and Frederick Ashton and His Ballets. He has received the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2000) and a “Bessie” for Sustained Achievement (2001).
