Merce Cunningham Dance Company

In New York City, her professional apprenticeship began with the Alwin Nikolais Company at the Henry Street Playhouse (1951-1957). This was followed by five years performing in the early Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1958-1963) and touring with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and five other dancers: Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Remy Charlip, Judith Dunn and Steve Paxton.^[3] They toured in a VW bus with John Cage as music director and driver and Robert Rauschenberg as set, lighting, and costume designer. Wood danced in several notable pieces, including "Summerspace," "Rune," "Antic Meet," and "Crises".

The Celebration Group

In 1968, inspired by her exposure to the environmental theatre of Anna Halprin, she stepped off the proscenium forever and formed Marilyn Wood and the Celebration Group.^[4] This group of 8-12 dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, architects, and musicians experimented with site-specific performance in many NYC venues. The genesis of her Celebration vision was a combination of her experience in the avant-garde art world as a dancer, and her history of living in a Latin culture.

Celebrations in City Places: The Seagram Building

In 1972, Marilyn Wood and the Celebration Group became the launch pad for Wood to conceive, choreograph, direct, and produce her "Celebrations in City Places" series. The most ambitious of these was a site-specific performance at the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York City. Her choreography of this event activated the forty-four stories of the façade, the lobby, and the plaza featuring thirty-five dancers inside and outside, original music, film projection, and audience participation in the grand finale.

The outstanding success of the Seagram project garnered her honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and launched her international career, generating commissions for numerous US cities (Charlotte, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Columbus, Ohio, Little Rock, Arkansas, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Denver, Colorado) and international cities (Berlin, Germany, Singapore, Tehran, Iran, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Adelaide, Australia).

Selected events

• 1997 El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mexico: Rio Grande/Bravo Cross-Border Celebration. Performance honoring the shared river, connecting on the International Bridge
• 1992 Charlotte, North Carolina: Nationsbank Corporate Center Grand Opening Celebration. Daylight fireworks, fountain dances, rapeller choreography, atrium aerial ballet, evening roof-edge and scaffold dances, 6 story mega-images of "Faces of Charlotte", and a 300-voice cantata and drumming for nighttime fireworks
• 1974 New York City: "Rain ‘n' Shine Events for Flowertime"; Lincoln Center Plaza
• 1972 New York City: "Celebrations in City Places"; Seagram Building and Plaza

Celebrations choreography

Wood's process often began with use of environmental scores to involve the creativity of the local community of participating artists into initial ideas of the site design. This process was highlighted in "Citysenses," a show that ran for three weeks in 1969 at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City. Her resulting choreography typically encapsulated all aspects of the site with a focus on the physical access of a large audience, often from many directions.^[5] The piece orchestrates local performing groups simultaneously at all entry points as the audience's arrival experience. The choreography includes dance sequences on rooftops, windows, fountains, plazas, parks, and waterfronts. There is also original music, soundscapes, fire and sky sculpture, inflatable forms, site-generated films and video, daytime and nighttime fireworks. The design of the event features deliberate choreographic gestures to move the attention of the audience to one aspect of the site to another. The transition into the finale initiates the audience into dancing and sharing energy in the street.