Merce Cunningham. Beyond the perfect stage - Tapa dura

In Beyond the Perfect Stage, Stephanie Berger captures the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in a series of site-specific "Events" from 2008 to 2011 from a multiplicity of perspectives, creating a photographic choreography that combines the "Events" in a new way. The Cunningham dancers warm up and then perform in various situations--as Cunningham called the galleries and the especially constructed stages for each "Event"--including Richard Serra's steel sculptures, Dan Flavin's neon light installations, Sol LeWitt's Minimalist white boxes and the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. Berger captures Cunningham's evanescent art, constructing a new experience while at the same time preserving the original, thus operating very much within the aesthetic framework Cunningham himself proposed. Vivid, immediate, unmediated yet curated, her photographic "Event" contextualizes the dances in a personal but entirely available form.

Stephanie Berger has been photographing performance and cultural events for over twenty-five years for many major cultural centres and venues such as Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Met Museum, Dia Art Foundation, Baryshnikov Arts Center and The Kitchen. Her photographs have appeared regularly covering the arts, music, dance, opera and social events in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, international journals and book projects. She has been the staff photographer for the Lincoln Center Festival since its inception in 1996.The Festival will celebrate its 20th Anniversary with an upcoming digital exhibit of her photographs. Stephanies photographs of dancers were the scenic décor for the Off-Broadway show, River Deep about Tina Turner at Playwrights Horizon directed by Gabrielle Lansner. She has been commissioned by many top dance companies, choreographers, theatre companies and musicians including: Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Robert Wilson, Bang On A Can and Young Peoples Chorus. She works regularly for PBS photographing many of their hosts and casts for programmes such Ken Burns, Downton Abbey, Vicious, Charlie Rose, History Detectives, and PBS Arts Festival. She has exhibited collections of her photographs in galleries and public art spaces including solo exhibits at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, The New York State Theater Gallery, The Walter Reade Gallery at the Film Society, John Jay College Gallery and numerous group exhibits, most recently at Lower Manhattan Cultural Center and ARTSWestchester. In June 2013, her outdoor photo installation, Dancing in the Streets curated by Apertures Melissa Harris and Designer, Yolanda Cuomo, was a featured exhibition at the LOOK3 Photo Festival in Charlottesville, Virginia. Stephanie graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and studied photography at Hampshire College with Jerome Liebling. She worked as a photographer for the City of New Yorks Department of Transportation in the 1980s climbing to the tops of bridges to document New York Citys infrastructure and public works. Many of these photographs were displayed throughout the New York City subway system. She is also a member of the 52nd Street Project, which matches kids from disadvantaged neighbourhoods with professional theatre artists through unique mentoring programmes.