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Dateline: 27th July, 2009 Merce Cunningham (1919 - 2009)
Merce Cunningham, America's greatest choreographer and one of the most respected in the world, has died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 90 at his home in New York City. Born in Centralia, Washington, he first asked to train as a dancer at the age of 10 and attended the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle from 1937-39. While at the school he was spotted by Martha Graham who invited him to join her company, where he stayed for six years as a soloist. He gave his first solo concert in 1944 with composer John Cage who became his partner until he died in 1992. He formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1953 and remained its director and choreographer for the rest of his life. The company performed his last work, Nearly Ninety, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this year. In his long career he choreograohed 200 dances and over 800 site-specific "Events". He continued tp perform with the company intpo the early 90s. He was well-known for his collaborations with artists from other disciplines, most notably (apart from with John Cage) with Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. He was very interested in technology and was one of the first choreographers (in the early 70s) to experiment with film and he choreographed works using the computer program LifeForms from 1991. This proved particularly valuable to him as he was crippled by arthritis for the last 25 years of his life. He believed that the subject of dance should be dance and abandoned narrative and other traditional ingredients of the form. Pure movement, he believed, was enough. Famously, when asked what a particular dance was about, he replied, "About forty minutes." His (and Cage's) approach to music was also revolutionary: the music and the dance were developed separately and only came together at the first performance. In some pieces - not all of which were successful - he employed what he called "chance operations" - Unitled Solo was, for example, "a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different." "I think," he said, "the separation of elements, of having dance, music and design created independently, when they do come together they can produce something which no one could predict. They can make something happen that hasn't happened before." He received numerous honours, including both Chevalier and Officer of the French Légion d'Honneur and the American National Medal of Arts.
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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