Who will protect the legacies of Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham?

A must read article by Judith Mackrell, at The Guardian:

What happens to dance once the artist who made it is gone?

To put the enormity of this challenge into some context, you only have to imagine a situation where the paintings of Rauschenberg or Bacon were taken down from galleries as soon as those artists died; where the novels of Saul Bellow were removed from the bookshelves, or the music of Stravinsky was silenced.

No other art form would accept for a second that death implied the possible death of an artist's oeuvre. But what makes this a genuine issue for modern dance is the umbilically close connection between most choreographers, their companies and their work.

Modern dance faces urgent decisions about what to do with their legacies.

Pina Bausch (July 27, 1940 – June 30, 2009)
Merce Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009)