The Merce Cunningham Dance Company is scheduled to present shows April 25 and 26 at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, and the center is offering a special discount for faculty and staff for the April 26 performance.

The special offer is for faculty and staff who are members of the center's UC Davis VIP e-mail list.

"The Merce Cunningham Dance Company's upcoming performances at the Mondavi Center are among our most anticipated events of the year, and we want to do everything we can to make sure the campus community has every opportunity to experience them," the center declared in an April 16 e-mail to the VIP list.

So, for the April 26 show, the center announced that staff can buy a limited number of the best seats in the house for $20 each (regularly $43).

"If you don't know Merce Cunningham, rest assured that this is wildly creative, innovative dance unlike anything you've ever seen," the e-mail stated.

The April 26 program features BIPED, an exploration of the choreographic possibilities of the "motion capture" technology used in computer animation, with music by Gavin Bryars. Also: eyeSpace, with music by Mikel Rouse. His suite International Cloud Atlas will play on iPods, loaned to audience members by the company; as the tracks shuffle at random in the iPods, each person will experience a unique match of music to dance.

The April 25 program: MinEvent, a 2008 work featuring John Cage's Thirty Pieces for String Quartet performed live by the Kronos Quartet. Also: Split Sides, a 2003 work featuring recorded music by Radiohead and Sigur Rós.

Both performances are scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. in Jackson Hall. Shelly Gilbride, a doctoral candidate in performance studies in the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance, is scheduled to present a preperformance lecture at 7 p.m. April 25 in the Studio Theatre.

Tickets: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or www.mondaviarts.org. For the special discount for faculty and staff on April 26, use this Web site: www.mondaviarts.org/mercediscount (and follow the link to the "promo page"). You can join the Mondavi Center's VIP e-mail list at www.mondaviarts.org (click on "Tickets," then "Faculty and Staff Discount").