Merce Cunningham

American choreographer and dancer

• Born: August 16, 1919
• Birthplace: Centralia, Washington
• Died: July 26, 2009
• Place of death: New York, New York

Active as a professional modern dancer and choreographer since the mid-1940’s, Cunningham introduced new concepts, gestures, and forms to modern dance. He also integrated modernist trends in dance with those in music, the visual arts, and other art forms.

Early Life

Merce Cunningham (murs KUHN-nihng-ham) was born the third son of Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer of Irish descent, and Mayme Joach, a teacher. He grew up in Centralia, Washington, where he was born. At the age of twelve, he enrolled in his first dance class with Maud Barrett, a former vaudeville performer from whom he learned tap dancing, which was very popular when he was a child, as well as ballroom styles. While continuing to study with Barrett, Cunningham also studied piano during his high school years.

Cunningham attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for a year, and then returned to the West Coast to study at the Cornish School, an arts school in Seattle, Washington. Originally, he had planned to study theater as well as dance. Nellie Cornish, the director of the school, required that students study several arts disciplines. Cornish encouraged Cunningham to study with Bonnie Bird, a former member of Martha Graham’s company, who taught him Graham’s modern dance technique. At Cornish, Cunningham’s horizons expanded. He supplemented his academic studies in the arts with performances in vaudeville shows and clubs in the area. In the summer of 1938, between his first and second years at Cornish, he took dance courses at Mills College in Oakland, California, and danced with Lester Horton, a prominent modern choreographer who had founded the nation’s first integrated dance company. After returning for his second year at Cornish, he met John Cage, a composer who had been asked to accompany the dance class on piano. Cunningham also played in Cage’s percussion orchestra at the school. The next summer, Cunningham returned to the summer dance program at Mills College. This time, he danced with Graham, who had brought the Bennington School of Dance (now the American Dance Festival) to Mills College for the summer. She also invited Cunningham to dance with her company in were chosen.

Life’s Work

Accepting Graham’s invitation, Cunningham moved to New York and joined her famous company. He also studied ballet with George Balanchine at the American School of Ballet. Although Cunningham was the youngest member of Graham’s company at the time, he was invited to perform solos in their concerts and also did some choreography for them. Gradually, however, Cunningham lost interest in the narrative, dramatic aspects of Graham’s work, becoming more interested instead in the abstract elements of movement and dance.

Cage, who also moved to New York, became Cunningham’s life and creative partner, sharing Cunningham’s interest in modern aesthetics. They began to collaborate on compositions and presented their first concert together in 1944. Cunningham continued for a while with Graham. He created “Mysterious Adventure,” an innovative solo dance in which he explored the cessation of movement. Then he left Graham’s company in 1945 to focus on his own work and continue collaborations with Cage. Both were interested in loosening the conventional metrical coordination of music and dance gesture, and they worked instead with the concept of juncture points within a longer time line, composing structures that related to each other more independently. In 1947 their four-movement ballet The Seasons , created for the Ballet Society of New York, was highly successful.

In 1948, Cunningham and Cage taught summer classes at Black Mountain College, a progressive interdisciplinary institution near Asheville, North Carolina. One of their first collaborative performances there was of a play by the composer Erik Satie. Cage played piano, Cunningham danced, and futurist-inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, who had come to lecture, was convinced to play one of the central characters. Willem and Elaine de Kooning designed the set.

Cunningham and Cage returned to Black Mountain during the summers of 1952 and 1953. Their efforts led to the founding of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain in 1953. The sets and costumes for the new company’s first performances were designed by artist Robert Rauschenberg, a student at the college. Rauschenberg served as the new company’s artistic adviser from 1954 to 1964. Like the music of Cage, Rauschenberg’s visual objects were highly independent of Cunningham’s choreography, with which they intersected and coexisted. With his assistantJasper Johns, Rauschenberg created objects that the dancers could interact with, often with little or no rehearsal. Critics and audiences did not always enjoy the loosely connected works, especially in the company’s first decade.

In the 1950’s both Cunningham and Cage grew interested in introducing elements of chance into their compositions. They had read a new translation of Yi Jing (I Ching), the Chinese classic on “changes” and divination, and felt that the introduction of chance would add a natural quality to their work. Pieces were designed so that various components of the musical structure and choreography could be selected at random, either during the creation of a piece, just before its performance, or even during a performance. This proved to be a very fruitful area of exploration for the two collaborators, and it led to the creation of many interesting pieces, including Suite by Chance (1953), in which elements of Cunningham’s choreography were determined by tossing pennies, and Suite for Five (1956-1958), in which random imperfections in sheets of paper determined the lengths of time taken for various gestures.

After returning from a European tour in 1964, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company found greater acceptance in the United States. While continuing to create pieces for his company, Cunningham began to expand into new areas of collaboration. In 1966, Cunningham and Cage worked with filmmaker Stan Van Der Beek to create the avant-garde dance film Variations V . Work with other filmmakers and video artists included projects with Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan. Cunningham embraced the use of computers in the arts, and he was involved in the creation of Life Forms (now known as DanceForms), a software program for choreography design. In addition to Rauschenberg and Johns, Cunningham also collaborated with other visual artists, such as Andy Warhol. After Cage died in 1992 (he and Cunningham had been life partners for about fifty years), David Tudor became the new music director for the dance company. Tudor had been associated with both Cage and Cunningham since their Black Mountain days.

Significance

In addition to his work in emphasizing the abstract components in dance, his introduction of chance as a compositional strategy, and other achievements, Cunningham also broke away from the convention of using the center of the stage as a hierarchical reference point in choreography. His dance company, which celebrated its fiftieth year with performances around the world, inspired generations of modern dancers, and its alumni include many prominent dancers, choreographers, and dance company leaders.

Cunningham was at the center of the modern art world for most of his life, encouraging creativity in all the arts by providing venues for the artists, offering them his friendship, and making them think. His willingness to take risks and experiment in performances creates an air of never-ending excitement, and his use of technology, from the electronic textures introduced by his partner Cage to his use of software and video, has further marked Cunningham’s place on the cutting edge of modern culture.

Bibliography

Brown, Carolyn. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. A founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company presents a unique insider’s perspective. This long-awaited memoir includes candid descriptions of the Cunningham-Cage dynamic. Illustrated, with a bibliography and an index.

Copeland, Roger. Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. New York: Routledge, 2004. A comprehensive and very readable examination of Cunningham’s life and sixty-year career, and of the artistic revolution in twentieth century America. Illustrated, with a bibliography and an index.

Cunningham, Merce. Changes: Notes on Choreography. Edited by Frances Starr. New York: Something Else Press, 1968. An early autobiographical work relating Cunningham’s ideas on dance and his reflections on his work. Illustrated.

Harris, Mary Emma. The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. This comprehensive history includes detailed, well-documented accounts of Cunningham’s and Cage’s creative activities, teaching, and concerts at the college, from 1948 to 1953. Beautifully illustrated. Bibliography and index.

Vaughn, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. New York: Aperture, 1997. Beautiful pictorial biography by the archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. Includes photos taken by famous photographers, such as Annie Leibovitz, Imogen Cunningham, Arnold Eagle, Peter Hujar, and Barbara Morgan. Bibliography and index.