Leave it to Merce Cunningham to make a cavernous drill hall in the Park Avenue Armory feel almost like a cathedral. About 2,500 came to worship, so to speak, and pay homage, on Wednesday as the Cunningham Dance Foundation offered an expansive, absolutely appropriate and comprehensive memorial to this unique and groundbreaking choreographer, who died at the age of 90 on July 26.

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The parties and concerts may have departed the McCarren Park pool, but for a few days this week some jiving hipsters from another era staked a claim to the imposing, artfully rundown setting.

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The dance world will be absorbing the loss of Merce Cunningham, one of the field’s true innovators, for some time. Because he was always moving forward—often with the rest of us lagging behind—by exploring new and adventurous possibilities for dance, we became accustomed to always having the next unexpected project emerge from his endlessly inventive imagination.

This creativity and curiosity never flagged, right to the end. He produced a majestic two-act, full-evening work, Nearly Ninety, in April. Over the past two years, he designed a series of eight events for the gallery spaces at Dia:Beacon that challenged—at times perplexed—audiences, with multiple stages and simultaneous activity, even as he isolated and intermingled sections from his vast repertory.

Last Sunday afternoon, hours before Cunningham passed away, his company gave the last of six performances of an invigorating, beautifully contrasting program at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The three works spanned more than 30 years of his output, yet represented only half of his incredibly fertile choreographic career. They exemplified his ability to capture the unpredictable beauties of nature, the quirky obsessiveness of modern behavior and his full range, from haunting to wickedly witty. As usual, they challenged—and presumably startled—some audience members with their sound scores, which included the distribution of iPods for the 2006 eyeSpace that let viewers have an individually shuffled audio experience. The program concluded with a fierce performance of Sounddance (with a pulsating David Tudor score that feels like a tour of a construction site) that had the audience standing and cheering.

Always au courant with the latest in technological advances, Cunningham, while at home in New York City, could view the troupe’s opening night performance at the Pillow via streaming video to his laptop.

Those who attended performances earlier in the week reported that—true to a now venerable tradition—a handful of the Berkshires crowd (which tends to skew older) headed for the exits during each performance. But on Sunday, the audience skewed especially young, thanks to the presence of children drawn by the family-oriented activities of the Pillow’s morning Community Day that morning. The tykes were attentive and captivated, and it is bittersweet to realize that—with Cunningham’s troupe having announced last month that it would perform for two more years then disband, these youngsters represent the last generation to have seen this exceptional, unique company on stage.

They will perform this weekend in three free events at Rockefeller Park, co-presented by the River to River Festival and the Joyce Theater. Planned months ago, and designed—as all Events are—by combining new material and excerpts from the repertory with the specific site in mind, these performances now become the city’s opportunity to celebrate the life and work of Cunningham, who found his true home in New York.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Sat (6pm) and Sun. (2pm & 6pm), Rockefeller Park (corner of River Terrace and Warren St.) Free. www.RiverToRiverNYC.com

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What will you be doing when you turn 95? Not, most likely, performing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, which is what the ageless Frederic Franklin is doing this week, appearing in the small but dramatically pivotal role of Friar Laurence in American Ballet Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet.

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It’s a happy week for ballet fans. Both of the major companies performing side-by-side at Lincoln Center, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, are offering works in which mythical or fantastical woodland creatures are prominent. They beguile, deceive or play pranks upon the hapless mortals that fall under their spell.

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It’s a longstanding tradition: dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company often become choreographers in their own right. The acutely sophisticated and intellectually challenging nature of the venerable master’s work seems to inspire smart, intriguing choreography from his artistic offspring. Some of his dancers form ongoing troupes; some present work on a more occasional basis. But from Cunningham’s earliest company members such as Viola Farber and Remy Charlip, right through to his present-day dancers, many have assimilated the invigorating experience of dancing for Merce and then sought to cultivate their own distinct choreographic voices.

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Where can you find Harold Prince, Sheldon Harnick, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Frank Rich, Paul Gemignani – plus a host of today’s finest Broadway musical talents—on Saturday? They will all be taking part in Symphony Space’s Wall to Wall Broadway: A Century of Musicals.

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When Harold Pinter died last December 24, the world lost one of the most significant and certainly one of the most influential, playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. His plays were distinguished by their aura of quiet menace, the ominous implications of the unspoken, the edgy power struggles evoked so subtly and masterfully. His political concerns and views were an integral part of his writing and, in his later years, increasingly widely known.

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Monday nights, most Broadway theaters are dark. But this week one could experience a double-header of recollections from the golden age of Broadway musicals. The eternally vigorous and opinionated Arthur Laurents, fresh from directing the well-received (and re-conceived) revival of West Side Story, held forth at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, discussing his experiences with various productions of that show, as well as Gypsy, over the years. Later on, Dancers Over 40 presented an evening of effusive nostalgia as alumni of many Broadway musicals recalled working with the choreographer Michael Kidd.

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The founding of Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969 was a bold step in keeping with the forward-looking nature of that decade and its tumult.  It is hard to imagine the history of American dance during the past four decades without the organization’s contributions. The anniversary is being celebrated in style with “Dance Theatre of Harlem: Forty Years of Firsts,” an exhibition that conveys the sense of purpose and vision behind the company, as well as its achievements and impact around the world.

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