Merce Cunningham
Learn about Merce Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009), the pioneering American dancer and choreographer. From his early life to his radical methods (chance, dance-music decoupling), his collaborations, famous quotes, and the lessons his work offers for art, risk, and movement.
Introduction
Merce Cunningham was one of the most influential figures in 20th- and early 21st-century dance. He challenged conventional ideas about choreography, narrative, and the relationship between music and movement. Over a career spanning more than 70 years, he redefined how dance could exist — as an autonomous art form, as experiment, as poetic motion. His works, ethos, and methods continue to resonate among dancers, choreographers, artists, and thinkers across disciplines.
Early Life and Background
Merce was born Mercier Philip “Merce” Cunningham on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Washington, U.S.
His first introduction to dance came through local tap dance lessons. A local teacher, Maude Barrett, who had a background in vaudeville and theater, exposed him to rhythm, timing, and theatrical movement — and kindled his interest in performing movement.
He studied at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle during 1937–1939, initially in acting but soon gravitated fully toward dance. Martha Graham, who invited him to join her company.
Dancing, Choreography & Innovation
Joining Martha Graham & Early Years
In 1939, Cunningham moved to New York and spent approximately six years dancing as a soloist within the Martha Graham Dance Company.
Founding His Own Company & Radical Ideas
In 1953, Cunningham founded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), initially at Black Mountain College. Over time, the company became a laboratory of experimentation. Cunningham’s guiding principles included:
-
Decoupling dance and music: He held that dance and music could be created independently, and then combined — that dance need not illustrate or follow the music, and music need not depend on choreography.
-
Use of chance operations: He often used methods inspired by John Cage (his lifelong collaborator and partner) to introduce randomness in choreographic choices — ordering, sequence, timing — to break habitual patterns and open new possibility.
-
Emphasis on movement itself: For Cunningham, the movement — its spatial, temporal, and formal qualities — was the primary material. Narrative, emotion, or external meaning were secondary (or optional).
-
Collaborative intersections with other arts: He worked with visual artists, composers, architects, technologists, set designers, painters (e.g. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol) to integrate dance with visual and technological systems.
His company toured internationally and gathered recognition.
One notable fact: his last work, Nearly Ninety, premiered in April 2009 to mark his 90th birthday.
Awards, Honors & Legacy Structures
Cunningham received many honors: the National Medal of Arts, the MacArthur Fellowship, Praemium Imperiale (Japan), and international accolades including Laurence Olivier Awards, and he was made an Officier de la Légion d’honneur in France.
In 2009, shortly before his death, he and his company instituted a Legacy Plan (or “Living Legacy Plan”) to preserve his repertoire, teaching, notations, and artistic intent after his passing.
After his death, the company continued for a few years under that plan, then was disbanded in 2012, with the archive and rights maintained through Cunningham’s foundation.
Personality, Influence & Methods
Merce Cunningham was rigorous, curious, and restless. He believed in pushing boundaries and challenging habit. He saw the dancer’s body as a living instrument of possibility, not just a tool to express external themes or narratives.
He trusted in accident, in the unexpected, in juxtaposition and tension. He often placed choreographic fragments side by side, letting them resonate by adjacency rather than by linear cohesion.
His influence is enormous: many choreographers and modern/contemporary dancers cite him as a terrain breaker. Many former company dancers founded their own companies. His work continues to be revived, reinterpreted, projected — and his ideas about dance as independent art remain central in contemporary choreography discourse.
Famous Quotes
Here are some notable quotes of Merce Cunningham, reflecting his views on dance, creativity, movement, and chance:
“You have to love dancing to stick to it.”
“Anything can feed you, depending on the way you look at it.”
“There are no fixed points in space.”
“The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion.”
“Movement is expressive. I’ve never denied that. I don’t think there’s such a thing as abstract dance.”
“The use of chance operations opened out my way of working … The body tends to be habitual. The use of chance … revealed possibilities that were always there except that my mind hadn’t seen them.”
“You can get fixed ideas, and it can get restrictive. So, I try to put myself in a precarious position.”
These lines echo his core aesthetic: openness, surprise, movement as inquiry, resisting fixed structure.
Lessons from Merce Cunningham
-
Embrace uncertainty
Cunningham’s use of chance teaches us to tolerate not-knowing, to let structure loosen, and to see what emerges in the void. -
Respect the material
He treated movement itself as primary. In creative work, sometimes the medium or material demands respect and exploration, independent of message. -
Cross-disciplinary dialogue enriches
His collaborations with composers, painters, technologists suggest that innovation often emerges at the intersection of fields. -
Challenge habitual thinking
Habit — whether of body, mind, or process — is a barrier. Cunningham’s method was to deliberately unsettle habit to find new possibilities. -
Legacy must be planned
His foresight in creating a Legacy Plan shows responsibility toward future generations and the institutional structures needed to sustain an artistic body of work.
Conclusion
Merce Cunningham transformed the way we conceive dance. Not just as movement to music, but as autonomous motion that can question space, time, chance, habit, and collaboration. He was bold, uncompromising in his inquiry, yet generous in his contributions to the community of movement.
Though he passed away on July 26, 2009 in New York City at the age of 90, his influence lives on in the dancers, the choreographers, and the institutions that continue to teach and perform his works.