Merce Cunningham

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls."
Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham is widely recognized as the greatest living choreographer. Earlier in his career he was also one of the greatest American dancers. His earliest dance training was in tap and ballroom dance, with a local teacher, Mrs. Barrett, in his hometown of Centralia, Washington: before he was a modern dancer, Merce was a hoofer. What he also learned from Mrs. Barrett was that “dance is most deeply concerned with each single instant as it comes along.”

After five years as a soloist in the company of Martha Graham, he began choreographing independently, first in solo concerts, then in 1953 he formed his own company, whose fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in 2003. In his many works for the company, he has been noted for his collaborations with contemporary visual artists and musicians, especially with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992. In the course of their work together, they proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship of dance and music, both of which are time arts. Therefore, they came to the conclusion that the two should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way.

Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition, such as cause and effect, climax and anticlimax, were also abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself.

His pioneering work in video and film, collaborating with filmmakers Charles Atlas and later Elliot Caplan, enlarged the possibilities of choreography for the camera. Cunningham himself is an imaginative visual artist, whose drawings of animals, birds, and insects have been collected in a book, Other Animals (2002).

Merce Cunningham Dance Company | About Merce Cunningham’s dances have often been described as having much in common with Dada (collage structures) and Zen (multiplicity of centers). This does not mean that the dances are formless, but their structure is organic, like something in nature, not preconceived and imposed on the material. But there is no improvisation: the dancers know precisely what they are going to do before they go on stage.

resourse : http://www.merce.org