Introducing Choreographer Merce Cunningham: Embracing Chance in Modern Dance
Merce Cunningham. Wikimedia Commons
Many dancers have experienced the fear of forgetting their dance on stage, of messing up the sequence of steps they were supposed to do or performing differently than they had in rehearsal. What if, though, we approached dance with an openness to those “mistakes,” to those moments of rarity and wonder that occur when things don’t go quite as planned? Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), a renowned American modern dancer and choreographer, sought to do just that.
Cunningham grew up dancing in his hometown of Centralia, Washington, and moved to New York City at the age of twenty to join the Martha Graham Dance Company. After six years of intensive dance training, Cunningham left the company and began premiering his own choreographic works. He sought to challenge the expectations of a traditional modern dance piece, namely that the piece should have a plot, should convey emotion, and should be strictly set to music. To achieve that, Cunningham focused only on creating movement, leaving the rest of the dance—such as its sequencing, music, costuming, and set—entirely up to chance.
Can you imagine having your choreographer roll a die fifteen minutes before the curtain opens to tell you what the order of the sections in the piece will be that night? Can you imagine pulling costumes out of a pile in the wings and changing into them as you please throughout the show? How about dancing amid a set which has just been assembled upon your arrival at the theater? That was precisely what occurred during the 1963 premiere of Cunningham’s Story. The dancers, guided by Merce Cunningham’s daring creativity, relinquished their fears and embraced spontaneity.
Merce Cunningham, “Ocean,” Carnival Center, March 2007. Wikimedia Commons
Cunningham also incorporated chance into his works through collaboration with other artists. John Cage (1912-1992), an esteemed avant-garde composer, was Cunningham’s lifelong partner and frequent artistic collaborator. Like Cunningham, Cage used coins, dice, and the ancient Chinese I Ching—a book meant to aid in decision-making—to construct his works. When the two collaborated together on a performance, they would prepare the movement and the music separately and would put them together for the first time during dress rehearsal, adding a whole new layer of chance for everyone involved.
In 1968, Cunningham collaborated with artist Andy Warhol on his piece RainForest. Warhol’s installation “Silver Clouds,” an accumulation of helium-filled silver balloons, was the set for the piece. As the dancers moved, the balloons would float freely throughout the space, even being kicked around in unexpected ways during the performance.
By handing over complete trust to other artists, Cunningham reimagined what collaboration could look like across mediums. Furthermore, his incorporation of chance across all elements of performance allowed his dancers to experience the movement anew each time they executed it, to be bold and brave in changing the movement through their choices. For Cunningham, dance was never static—it was always transforming and innovating, in the same way he was as an artist. After an astounding seven decade career, Cunningham’s work remains vital, reminding all artists to go ahead: take that risk.