USA, 1968, 58’
direction Richard Moore
dancers Merce Cunningham and Dance Company
with Carolyn Brown, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, Meg Harper, Susana Hayman-Chaffey, Jeff Slayton, Chase Robinson, Mel Wong
music by John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma
special assistants Jean Rigg, Jim Baird, Rick Nelson
special effects printing W.A. Palmer Films, Inc. San Francisco
producer KQED-TV, Bay Area Educational Television, San Francisco
production KQED Film Unit
with the support of National Endowment for the Arts
In the fall of 1968 Cunningham had the opportunity to create a more extended work for television in collaboration with the filmmaker Richard Moore. Made for the KQED television station in San Francisco, Assemblage was filmed on location in Ghirardelli Square in that city. It represented the amalgamation of two distinct ideas: one, a film about the place itself, and the other, a film about the dance company. Ghirardelli Square was one of the first of those urban environments that now exist in many large cities, where a sometimes run-down market or manufacturing area has been restored, prettified, and made into a mall-like precinct with restaurants, boutiques, galleries, and promenades. The film would show the dancers disporting themselves in this environment, as a kind of fanciful extension of the relationship between it and the people who normally visited it. Cunningham and the company spent three weeks there, rehearsing and shooting. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Ford Foundation.
