Cunningham challenged the conventions of how dances are performed, letting chance lead him to new possibilities. A former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, he formed his own company in 1953.
Merce Cunningham, arguably the greatest, most pioneering and widely influential contemporary choreographer of the past half-century, has died. He was 90. A seminal artist that fellow choreographer Bill T. Jones called “the champion in the struggle to say that dance is its own primary language, with its own agenda and criteria," Cunningham died Sunday at his home in New York of what his dance foundation said were natural causes.
Cunningham challenged nearly every assumption about how dances are made and perceived. “Dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form," he wrote in 1952. “What is seen is what it is." Evolving over the years from a fluid and even balletic modern dance style to a technique emphasizing sudden, virtuosic changes of direction, balance and body-focus, Cunningham refused to interpret music, tell stories, depict characters or even to accept the idea of the choreographer as a kind of all-knowing god.
Instead, he used chance (throwing dice, flipping a coin) to help him discover possibilities beyond his imagination, insisting that the choreography, score, scenic design and costumes for a work should be created independently and come together only at the final rehearsals or first performance.
“Cunningham is happiest when he can create a situation in which no one knows what to expect," Times music critic Mark Swed wrote in 2003, “not his audience, not his dancers or collaborators, not least himself."
Refusing to accept center stage as the sole magnet of attention, Cunningham divided theatrical space into independent zones of action, believing that dance should reflect a world in which people constantly monitor many simultaneous activities. “The society is so fragmented . . . “ he told The Times in 1997, “and I see no reason why it shouldn't affect the way one makes a dance."
