Boris Charmatz Brings "Flip Book" to MoMA It was an ordinary Christmas and an ordinary gift. A few years ago, the French choreographer Boris Charmatz unwrapped a hardcover book about Merce Cunningham, a present from his father. His heart sank. A book about Cunningham might have excited him when he was 13, but now? "I was a bit like, O.K.," Mr. Charmatz, 40, said in an interview at the Museum of Modern Art. He sighed, his shoulders melting as he remembered. "First, it was on my shelf," he continued. I did not even open it. Then I thought, it was my present. I will look. He imitated the way he opened it, flipping through the pages aimlessly. "From looking at it with a little distance, I could suddenly see, this is a dance," he said. In "Flip Book," Mr. Charmatz has created a work animating the photographs in that 1997 book, David Vaughan's "Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years." It is to be performed Friday through Sunday in the Marron Atrium at MoMA as the final installment of Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures, a three-week series. "Flip Book" is jointly presented with Performa 13, a New York biennial opening on Friday that explores live performance across disciplines. Mr. Charmatz said he initially regarded the images in the book as "a meta-Cunningham "Event," " a reference to performances in which Cunningham took different fragments from different dances to create a new work. "It's randomly organized," he said. There's a dramaturgy of the book, but let's say they are in Venice, and on the next page, Merce is alone, and then there are 10 dancers and then two, and then he is jumping. Because Merce was working with chance so often, I thought this was already a Cunningham piece. I couldn't have had the same impression with a Pina Bausch book. It was really connected to the way Cunningham worked. Since 2008, several iterations of "Flip Book" have been performed by students, amateurs, trained dancers with no Cunningham experience and former Cunningham dancers. Each day at MoMA, the presentation runs from noon to 5 p.m., starting with open rehearsals of the cast, which features Mr. Charmatz and the former Cunningham dancer Ashley Chen, along with Raphaëlle Delaunay, Christophe Ives, Lénio Kaklea and Mani A. Mungai. Valda Setterfield, another Cunningham veteran who performed in a previous version of the piece and has worked with Mr. Charmatz on other projects, will offer a running commentary as a filmed version of "Flip Book" is screened. Performances are at 3 and 4 p.m. on Friday and Sunday, and 3 p.m. on Saturday, each followed by a discussion. Mr. Charmatz may also try teaching museum visitors some of the movements, as he did when the project was presented at the Tate Modern in London. Ms. Setterfield was there. "He did it very well and said sensible things about Americans and modern dance and the strength and the bravery and the force of it," she recalled. It produced a whole other energy in the people that were learning. Ms. Setterfield, who is British-born, is practically modern-dance royalty in New York, where she lives with her husband, the postmodern choreographer David Gordon. She has close ties to Mr. Vaughan, the Cunningham archivist. Mr. Vaughan's book, published by Aperture, is living yet another life as "Merce Cunningham: 65 Years," an interactive application for the iPad. "Boris has allowed something to evolve, which is not uninteresting," she said. I love the process. I thought that particularly in France, when we were doing it in the beginning, Merce would have been pleased. He would have been amused by certain choices that got made, and he would be thrilled that we were making a living. He was always worried about paying his dancers honorably. Sure, it doesn't look like Merce made it, but it is delivered with great respect and affection. Yet the project is also somewhat perverse: instead of studying the Cunningham technique, Mr. Charmatz's proposition - a do-it-yourself enterprise - is about working without a master. "Some people die, and you know nothing about them, because there is no legacy, no disciples and no school," he said. Still, you can relate to them. You can interact. It's superpowerful to play with absence. In 2009, when he was made the director of the national choreographic center in Rennes, France, he renamed it Musée de la Danse, or dance museum. For Mr. Charmatz, operating under the umbrella of a museum is a way to remove the walls between history and experimentation, as a project like "Flip Book" attests. "History is not only something that comes to you," he said. You also need to bring it to yourself. You need to invent it in the sense of making an archive alive. It's not just listening to a lecture. History can be a very active part of what a dance school is. "Flip Book" puts history, or legacy, into action. There is an improvisatory element to the work, where replicating static positions is just as important as getting in and out of them. As Mr. Charmatz explained, a picture is not dance. "If there's a jump, you need to think that they had to prepare," he said. They had to jump and they had to land. So one picture is much more than one picture. When Cunningham died in 2009, Mr. Charmatz contemplated putting "Flip Book" to rest. "It was different to do this kind of work - wild and strange - when he was alive and working," he said. I liked the feeling that if you wanted to see the real Merce Cunningham Dance Company, you could. Then I thought it was stupid that because he died, we would stop this project. Merce was not someone claiming drama - like he died, so we stop! We decided to take care of the fact that it was different, but to still go on. And Mr. Charmatz will make sure it keeps on going. He even has plans to create a children's version. "Cunningham is for everybody," he said. It's not only for the best Cunningham dancers or the best-trained dancers or as ballets for repertory. Of course, nobody will perform as the Cunningham company, and that's not the point. This project was really to make everybody in touch with something from Cunningham. Even if it's one picture.