Objects in Motion -- Merce Cunningham 1919-2009

The Seattle dance community has always laid a special claim to Merce Cunningham – this is where he took some of his first modern dance classes at the Cornish School, where he started to choreograph, and, most importantly, where he met composer John Cage, with whom he would forge a radical side-by-side collaboration, creating a repertory where movement and music co-exist without one leading the other around. With Cage, Cunningham stripped away most of the expectations that the founding generation of American modern dance had established: dance did not need to ‘express’ anything other than itself, it did not need to live within a hierarchical space with the most important action happening in center stage, it did not need to follow a musical structure. Dance just needed to move. Dance was “movement in time and space,” as far as Cunningham was concerned, and in 70-plus years of exploration, that’s really the only rule he followed.

When an artist lives as long as Cunningham, the cache of stories and anecdotes about them grows big and emotional. We’re all telling our Merce stories right now, in those formal articles where we try to sum up someone’s life, and in the more visceral blog posts and chat room conversations. As much as I love his choreography, some of my favorite memories are from those wonky situations when movement artists try to explain themselves in words to their audiences. Several years ago, at a conference about dance and television, Cunningham was the featured speaker, discussing his video projects with Charles Atlas and Elliot Kaplan. It was summer, and really hot in the lecture hall, and the microphone wasn’t working, making the usually soft-spoken artist even harder to hear. But he kept us all rapt for over an hour, as we leaned further and further forward, like wheat blowing in a field. Years later, here in Seattle at a Q&A session sponsored by Pacific Northwest Ballet, he was unfailingly polite as he explained to a ballet patron that indeed the only connection between the movement and the music in his work is that they happen simultaneously. It was the same answer to the same question he had been giving for all those years, and he certainly would be forgiven if he felt a bit cranky about it, but he took her bewildered concern as seriously as he took his work. He returned to Cornish several times, to tell stories of “Miss Cornish” and his early days to the students there.

Like any truly innovative artist, Cunningham lived in a world of his own making. His aesthetic choices influenced generations of artists who extended and adapted them to their own use, while he continued to follow the paths he found interesting, so that sometimes his work had little relationship to those who claimed him as an inspiration. But Cunningham is the foundation, the root of the post-modern family tree, in all its wild variety. Those of us who dance, and those of us who watch, see him reflected in almost all contemporary dance.

Carolyn Brown, probably the closest thing Cunningham had to a muse, said it well, in a discussion of the company’s early performances in art galleries and other non-theater spaces. “We thought, ‘Let’s not say “no,” let’s say “yes”’” to those unconventional opportunities. Merce Cunningham made a career, made a whole world of dance, out of saying “yes.”