Merce Cunningham, Modern Dance Innovator, Dead At 90

Merce Cunningham, who as a choreographer was one of modern dance's most important innovators, died Sunday at age 90.

Cunningham was known for pushing dance's boundaries by introducing novel abstract movements into his work.

As a choreographer, he exploded the notion of dance pieces following a narrative form with a beginning, middle and end based on traditional ideas of storytelling, and with succeeding sections building on what preceded.

Instead, he exploited the element of chance in his work. As an article in Britannica.com explains:

Because of his interest in pure movement as devoid as possible of emotional implications, Cunningham developed "choreography by chance," a technique in which selected isolated movements are assigned sequence by such random methods as tossing a coin. The sequential arrangement of the component dances in Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951) was thus determined, and in Suite by Chance (1952) the movement patterns themselves were so constructed. Suite by Chance was also the first modern dance performed to an electronic score, which was commissioned from Christian Wolff.

He found a like-minded collaborator in composer John Cage, the abstract composer who was his long-time partner. Cage died in 1992.

David Dorfman, chair of Connecticut College's dance department and founder of the David Dorfman Dance company, studied at Cunningham's studio. Dorfman said:

"He was a giant. After getting my MFA from Connecticut College, I was a scholarship student at the Cunningham studio my first year in New York City. I had opportunities to speak with Merce on several occasions and, along with the rest of the world, consider him one of the most brilliant, ever-changing and growing, dance makers that ever lived."

NPR's Renee Montagne interviewed Cunningham slightly less than three years ago. Here's an excerpt from the website story that accompanied the radio interview.

"Things come up that one could say were physically impossible," Cunningham says, "but I always try them and in the act of doing, I find out something I didn't know."

For instance, Cunningham says, take three movements: a run, a jump and a fall. Tossing a coin would tell you what movement to do first. Such random choreography breaks down a dancer's muscle memory of what steps normally follow other steps.

Cunningham demands a lot of audiences, too. Often when he collaborated with John Cage, Cunningham would create a dance and Cage would compose the music -- separately. Cunningham made no attempt to fit the dancers' movements to the music. Sometimes the performance was the first time they heard the music.

"Given a certain length of time, let's say 10 minutes, I could make a dance which would take up 10 minutes and John Cage could make a piece of music that occupied the same amount of time, and we could put them together," Cage recalls.

(Revised at 3 pm)