Introduction

At the start of a new millennium John O’Mahony was able to say: “Merce Cunningham is, without doubt, the world's greatest living choreographer. His name stands alongside Martha Graham and George Balanchine in the pantheon of mercurial figures that transformed twentieth-century dance, though his work arguably reaches further and deeper, celebrating sheer movement for its own stark, austere sake.”

Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington, on April 16, 1919, the second son of Clifford D. and Marion Cunningham. His father was a lawyer of Irish descent, and his mother was a teacher. In his teens he took classes in ballroom and tap dancing, and after graduating from high school in 1936 he went to George Washington University, D.C., before attending the Cornish School in Seattle the following year. As Bonnie Bird explains in her interview (chapter 3), he joined her class in 1937, met Cage in 1938, and in 1939 went to the Bennington Summer School for Dance held at Mills College, where he met Martha Graham. This was a crucial encounter, since she was immediately impressed, and as a result Cunningham left the Cornish School and joined her company in New York. He made his debut with a lead in her Every Soul Is a Circus on Broadway.

Cunningham eventually became impatient with the narrative aspects of Graham's approach to dance and left her company, encouraged by Cage after he arrived in New York in 1942. David Vaughan, archivist at the Cunningham Dance Foundation, has said, “Movement itself is the principal subject matter of his dances: neither narrative nor musical form determines their structure.” Landmarks in the fifty-year Cunningham-Cage collaboration were Credo in US (1942), with choreography by Cunningham and Jean Erdman and music by Cage, given at Bennington College, Vermont, on August 1, 1942; and their first full New York program on April 5, 1944, with Triple-Paced, Root of an Unfocus, Tossed as It Is Untroubled, The Unavailable Memory of, Totem Ancestor, and Spontaneous Earth. In 1948 Cunningham joined the faculty of the School of American Ballet, but he and Cage gave recitals of solo dance and piano music at colleges and other venues in the United States through the 1940s and 50s. In 1949 they both went to Paris.