Marilyn Wood papers

1950s-2016

Marilyn Wood (born in 1929 in Columbus, Ohio) was a dancer, choreographer, intermedia artist, artistic director, and producer, who spent her childhood in Puerto Rico. Her exposure to Puerto Rican culture influenced her future artistic career. After high school, Wood attended Oberlin College where she met and married Robert Wood, a musician. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in art history in 1950 and intended to pursue a career in the visual arts. After Oberlin College, Wood attended the Moholy-Nagy Bauhaus Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois to study the visual arts. While at the Institute, she took a student improvisation dance class which inspired her to switch her vocational focus from the visual arts to dance. Wood spent the next two summers in Colorado taking dance classes from Hanya Holm.

Wood moved to New York City and danced with the Alwin Nikolais Company from 1951 to 1957. During this time, Robert Wood got a job as a school teacher and created instructional workshops, sometimes called gatherings, to teach children and adults how to make instruments from scratch. In 1958, Marilyn Wood was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the, then titled, Merce Cunningham and Dance Company. She toured and performed with the company for five years, leaving the company in 1963.

While teaching dance classes at her children's elementary school, Wood met Elaine Summers. Summers's movement approach, kinetic awareness, taught Wood to focus on the intent behind her dance choreography. Summers and Wood formed an improvisation group whose members included Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton. The group met for approximately two years. Around this time, Wood also took a San Francisco-based workshop run by Anna and Lawrence Halprin, a choreographer and architect respectively. During the workshop, participants were given a choreographic score and asked to "go create theater in the city." The workshop inspired Wood to view city spaces as potential theater places and to continue to score choreography.

One of Wood's first commissions was an exhibition called, CitySenses, at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Wood created ten site-specific choreography scores that visitors picked up at the exhibit and then went out into the city to perform. Visitors then returned to the museum to create art (i.e. record a song, write an essay, draw a picture, etc.) about their experience performing the score.

In 1968, Wood created Marilyn Wood and the Celebration Group which consisted of dancers, musicians, visual artists, architects, and filmmakers. Wood collaborated with the Group to create site-specific performances, that Wood's friends called "happenings," which were directed and choreographed by Wood.

Wood's most famous performance took place in 1972 at the Seagram Building in New York City. Unlike her earlier commissions, Wood had complete artistic control of the project and called it a "celebration" (a term that she would use for all of her subsequent projects). The Seagram Building celebration featured thirty-five dancers, film projections, and original music. It utilized the building's thirty-eight-story façade, lobby, and plaza. The finale of the performance involved inviting the audience to dance on the plaza. The success of the Seagram celebration earned Wood an honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects and helped launch her career as an intermedia artistic director and choreographer. She received commissions to create celebration projects in cities around the United States as well as Australia, Europe, Southeast and Western Asia, and South America.

A year after the Seagram Building celebration, Wood was commissioned to create a celebration project in Adelaide, Australia. Due to budget issues with the project, she decided to dissolve the Celebration Group. For the rest of her career, Wood created celebration projects in conjunction with local dancers, artists, musicians, architects, and lighting designers. The performances were always free and accessible to the public and often included audience participation.

In 1987, Wood separated from Robert Wood and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she established the International Center for Celebration, or ICC. The ICC was a worldwide network of different types of artists who worked the environmental and cultural history of each performance site into each celebration project. Wood worked with the Center's artists to plan and perform each celebration project with local artists. Over the following years, the Center received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Wood was honored with the first NEH Creative Artist Fellowship. She used the fellowship's funds to spend a year in Japan studying community festivals.

Wood died in 2016.