Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

1919­–2009

When someone asked Merce Cunningham what his 1953 work Minutiae was about, he pointed to the teeming crowds on the street outside his New York studio and replied, “That.” For Cunningham, one of the pioneering choreographers of the 20th century, dance was not an expression of narrative and character but an exploration of the myriad movements of the human body. A colleague called his dancing “a strange, disturbing mixture of Greek god, panther, and madman.”

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Born in Centralia, Wash., Cunningham took tap- and ballroom-dancing lessons as a teenager, said The New York Times. At 20, he moved to New York City and became “the second man to dance in Martha Graham’s previously all-female company.” He also began a long-term professional and personal relationship with composer John Cage. Together they posited the radical notion “that dance and music should be performed at the same time but prepared separately, both autonomous and co-existent.” Many of their collaborations, beginning with Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951), employed “chance as a compositional tool,” with coin tosses and dice throws determining “which parts of the body would be used, which directions, what parts of the stage, how many dancers.” Cunningham did not advocate chaos. “Rather, he wanted to banish predictable compositional habits.”

The resulting pieces, said The Washington Post, often had no plot or “central focus.” Their drama lay in Cunningham’s unique way of “twisting, folding, and releasing the body,” especially his own; he “had a high, light jump, and once airborne, he seemed to float.” As Cunningham’s fame grew, he employed blinding lights, projected imagery, and other attention-grabbing aids. Such giants of the art world as Jasper Johns, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg provided his scenery; “Andy Warhol created large helium-filled Mylar pillows that drifted around onstage for RainForest (1968).” Not everyone appreciated Cunningham’s avant-garde work; during his namesake dance company’s first European tour in 1964, Paris audiences threw eggs and tomatoes. “During the interval,” recalled one company member, “they went out to get more.”

But for Cunningham, whose many awards ranged from the National Medal of Arts to membership in the French Legion of Honor, the rewards of innovation always outweighed the risks. “Very often you discover something that you think is impossible,” he said in 2005. “You try it out, and it is impossible. But while you’re doing it, you discover something else you didn’t know about.”