About Paige
Paige Cunningham Caldarella joined the Dance faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in August 2022 after fifteen years on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago. She performed internationally with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at venues including the Joyce Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Barbican Centre, and Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. She later danced with The Seldoms, touring to New York and Russia, and has performed with artists including Onye Ozuzu, Timothy Buckley, and Darrell Jones, currently touring with Cynthia Oliver Co. Dance Theatre (COCo). Her choreography blends contemporary ballet and modern dance, emphasizing discomfort, risk-taking, and conflict as catalysts for growth — as seen in her 2012 work Without Consideration for Cincinnati Ballet, described by CityBeat as “by turns satirical, ominous, and oddly compelling.” She holds a B.F.A. from The Juilliard School and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
CBA Project
Summerspace as a Departure Point for Contemporary Reflection
This fellowship supports the research and creation of a new choreographic work that engages Merce Cunningham’s seminal 1958 work Summerspace as both a historical anchor and a contemporary provocation. Having performed Summerspace during her tenure with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and having been coached by Carolyn Brown, a founding member of the company and one of Cunningham’s foremost collaborators, Calderella brings direct embodied knowledge of the work’s original intent and structure to this investigation. Situated at the intersection of ballet and modern dance, Summerspace offers a framework for examining how distinct movement languages can coexist within a single choreographic structure — a question this new work will take up as its central inquiry.
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