Merce and John went off on tour after a few weeks, and never came back to the school. The evening was not perhaps in the same league as the premiere of The Rite of Spring in , but it was more of a scandal than often occurred in New York at the time. The choreographer Anna Sokolow hit the man sitting behind her to make him shut up. The performance was striking for its wit and brilliant inventiveness, and from that time I never missed a Cunningham performance if I could help it. As it happened, I found myself in a uniquely favourable position not to do so: a few years later, I began to study with Cunningham again.
In December Cunningham opened a studio in New York, on the top floor of a building on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue occupied by the Living Theatre, and he invited me to come and work for him. In June the company embarked on a tour that lasted six months and took us round the world. By the end, many things had changed. The artist Robert Rauschenberg was no longer its resident designer and technical director, having won the grand prize at the Venice Biennale and become world famous.
But Cunningham too had gained a kind of recognition that he had not received at home. In Paris and particularly in London, where a week's engagement at Sadler's Wells had been extended by the producer Michael White by a further two-and-a-half weeks at the Phoenix, the work of Cunningham and his collaborators was taken seriously by such critics as Dinah Maggie of the French newspaper Combat and, in London, by Alexander Bland, Richard Buckle, Wilfrid Mellers and John Percival, and by audiences that included artists and, especially, theatre people.
Word of this response found its way back to the United States, and the company returned to find there a new curiosity about its work. Both sponsored touring programmes with residencies and performances, and Cunningham's company was among the first to be included. As the dance writer Nancy Dalva observed, it was not that Cunningham had gone establishment, but that the establishment had gone Cunningham.
Cunningham his original given names were Mercier Philip was born in Centralia, a small town in the state of Washington in the north-west United States. His father, Clifford D Cunningham of Irish descent, was a lawyer and his mother, Mayme, was from a family whose origin was Slavic.
Neither parent had any connection with the theatre, though Cunningham once said that his father had a certain histrionic talent in the courtroom. Cunningham was the second of their three sons; both his brothers followed their father into the legal profession.
Cunningham, being questioned once on jury duty, said: "I'm the criminal in the family. As a teenager, Cunningham studied tap and ballroom dance with a local teacher, Mrs Maude Barrett, who had a great influence on him. He began to perform in her school recitals, and even went with her on what he described as "a short and intoxicating vaudeville tour" as far as California in the year before he graduated from high school, an experience that turned him into a trouper, which he remained throughout his career.
After graduating, he went to George Washington University in Washington DC, but quit after a year and enrolled at the Cornish School in Seattle, originally with the intention of studying acting. But he soon changed his field of studies to dance. Cunningham first met Cage in when Bonnie Bird, the dance instructor at Cornish, engaged him as the accompanist for her dance classes. A year later Cunningham left to join Martha Graham's company in New York, where he remained until taking leading roles as a soloist in El Penitente , Letter to the World , and Appalachian Spring Cage made his way to New York in , and wrote the score for Credo in Us, jointly choreographed by Cunningham and Jean Erdman, and Totem Ancestor, which was a solo in Merce's first independent dance recital.
Thus began a collaboration that was to last until Cage's death in August Neither of them talked openly about the nature of their personal, as opposed to professional, relationship. When a young man who no doubt hoped to "out" them once asked in a public forum about their domestic life, John said, after a pause, "Well, I do the cooking … and Merce does the dishes.
And of course there will always be more It was happiness. It was the moment, right then. Because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are, but in the weather it's impossible to say when something begins or ends.
Summary of Merce Cunningham One of the most innovative artists of the 20 th century, Merce Cunningham employed a range of tactics to create his sometimes difficult dance productions that confounded and delighted viewers. Springweather and People Pictured: Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown.
Read full biography. Read artistic legacy. Artwork Images. Influences on Artist. Marcel Duchamp. Martha Graham. John Cage. Elaine de Kooning. Philip Guston. David Tudor. New Media. Mark Morris. Beth Gill. Robert Wilson. Robert Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns. Robert Morris. Bruce Nauman. Conceptual Art. Performance Art. American Modern Dance. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page.
These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. Merce Cunningham: Creative Elements. Cunningham Fund official website Our Pick. Interscape, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. And one was thanks for the cheese" — Merce Cunningham remembered Our Pick. Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma Our Pick. Overview and Artworks Biography.
In his own words, "My father said, 'If you want to do it, fine. All you have to do is work at it. Cunningham began studying dance at the age of 12, taking tap dance classes from a local teacher, Mrs.
Maude Barrett. Energetic and spiritual, Barrett transmitted to young Cunningham a life changing passion for dance. Merce recalled, "I had a marvelous tap-dancing teacher when I was in high school.
She had an extraordinary sense of rhythm and a brilliant performing energy. Cunningham's original intention was to study acting, but he soon found drama overly restraining.
Dance, however, provided him with a certain flare of ambiguity, an outlet for endless exploration of space and movement. Cunningham was an enthusiastic and relentless pupil, eager to explore the limits of dance. In the summer of , following one of his teachers, Cunningham frequented Mills College in Oakland, California, where he met the most outstanding modern dancers of the century including Charles Wideman, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham.
Later in December of that same year, he met the young composer John Cage, who had been hired at the Cornish School of Fine Art as the accompanist for the dance department and who would eventually become his life-long partner. In spite of the fact that Cunningham's father was initially hesitant to support his son's dancing career, Merce moved to New York City the following September to work in Martha Graham's dance company on Broadway.
He danced as a soloist for six years, and following his stubborn and relentless creative drive, he also started performing his own choreographed pieces. Not only did the two become lovers, but they collaborated on multiple productions and developed and promoted new forms of Performance art. Cunningham and Cage fostered a collaborative, multidisciplinary, and performative art that denied existing traditions and structures and promoted an alternative creative New York arts scene that would be the foundation for the first forays into what would come to be known as postmodernism.
Initially, Cage's music offered to Cunningham a framework in which to work, but after , they both began exploring the notion of chance, which they increasingly incorporated into their work. Not only would they use various chance methods to determine notes and dance moves, but sometimes they would only combine the final choreography and music on the day of the actual performance, forcing the dancers to improvise their movement. Cunningham explained: "Movement has its own life When John and I first thought of separating the dance and the music, it was very difficult, because people had this idea about the music supporting the dance rhythmically.
I can remember so clearly - in one piece I had made some kind of very big movement, and there was no sound at all, but right after it came this incredible sound on the prepared piano, and I understood that these two separate things could make something that could not have happened any other way. Further developing this intense artistic and emotional partnership, both Cunningham and Cage started teaching at the Black Mountain College , an alternative liberal arts school in North Carolina in There, they met painter Robert Rauschenberg , then a student at Black Mountain, who would go on to design the costumes, lights, and sets for the productions of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which he formed in Both Cage and Cunningham developed an interest in the work of Antonin Artaud, the groundbreaking French poet and dramatist, which encouraged them to push their collaboration towards the ideas of theater.
Theater didn't need to be based on the script, as Cage explained, "It needn't determine the other actions, that sounds, that activities, and so forth, could all be free rather than tied together; so that rather than the dance expressing the music or the music expressing the dance, that the two could go together independently, neither one controlling the other.
Cage's and Cunningham's experimental collaborations perplexed most audiences, but soon their reputations began to grow. The poet David Wagoner wrote in , after seing a performance at the Seattle Center Playhouse, "It soon became apparent, in the midst of dizzying light effects and the raucous static of electronic devices, why few people remain neutral in their feeling for this avant-garde group
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