29 Facts About Merce Cunningham

1.

Mercier Philip "Merce" Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years.

2.

Merce Cunningham frequently collaborated with artists of other disciplines, including musicians John Cage, David Tudor, Brian Eno, and graphic artists Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jasper Johns; and fashion designer Rei Kawakubo.

3.

Many dancers who trained with Cunningham formed their own companies.

4.

Merce Cunningham earned some of the highest honours bestowed in the arts, including the National Medal of Arts and the MacArthur Fellowship.

5.

Merce Cunningham received Japan's Praemium Imperiale and a British Laurence Olivier Award, and was named Officier of the Legion d'honneur in France.

6.

Merce Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919, the second of three sons.

7.

Merce Cunningham took tap dance class from a local teacher, Mrs Maude Barrett, whose energy and spirit taught him to love dance.

8.

Merce Cunningham attended the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, headed by Nellie Cornish, from 1937 to 1939 to study acting, but found drama's reliance on text and miming too limiting and concrete.

9.

Merce Cunningham preferred the ambiguous nature of dance, which gave him an outlet for exploration of movement.

10.

In 1939, Merce Cunningham moved to New York City and danced as a soloist in the Martha Graham Dance Company for six years.

11.

Merce Cunningham presented his first solo concert in New York in April 1944 with composer John Cage, who became his lifelong romantic partner and frequent collaborator until Cage's death in 1992.

12.

In 1968 Merce Cunningham published his book Changes: Notes on Choreography, edited by Francis Starr, containing various sketches of his choreography.

13.

Merce Cunningham continued to live in New York City and lead his dance company as Artistic Director until his death.

14.

Merce Cunningham presented his last work, a new work, Nearly Ninety, in April 2009, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, to mark his 90th birthday.

15.

From 1971 until its dissolution in 2012, the company was based in the Westbeth Artists Community in the West Village; for a time Merce Cunningham himself lived a block away at 107 Bank Street, with John Cage.

16.

Merce Cunningham concluded its farewell tour on December 31,2011, with a performance at the Park Avenue Armory.

17.

Merce Cunningham collaborated with an array of visual artists and designers.

18.

Merce Cunningham valued the process of a work over the product.

19.

Merce Cunningham used "non-representational" choreography which simply emphasizes movement, and does not necessarily represent any historical narrative, emotional situation, or idea.

20.

Merce Cunningham did not believe that dance needs a beginning, middle or end.

21.

In Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three, Merce Cunningham used Indeterminacy for the first time in this piece; the changing element for each show was the sequence of the sections.

22.

In Field Dances, Merce Cunningham experimented with giving the dancer more freedom.

23.

In Story, Merce Cunningham experimented with the variables of costumes and sets.

24.

Merce Cunningham began investigating dance on film in the 1970s, and after 1991 choreographed using the computer program LifeForms, a software made by Zella Wolofsky, Tom Calvert, and Thecla Schiphorst.

25.

Merce Cunningham explored motion capture technology with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to create Hand-drawn Spaces, a three-screen animation that was commissioned by and premiered at SIGGRAPH in 1998.

26.

In 2008, Merce Cunningham released his Loops choreography for the hands as motion-capture data under a Creative Commons license; this was the basis for the open-source collaboration of the same name with The OpenEnded Group.

27.

Merce Cunningham was one of the first choreographers to begin experimenting with film.

28.

Merce Cunningham created an original work for the video Westbeth in collaboration with filmmaker Charles Atlas The computer program later became DanceForms and uses avatars of dancers with color-coded limbs as a platform for choreography.

29.

Merce Cunningham saw randomness and arbitrariness as positive qualities because they exist in real life.