Chat with Merce Cunningham

Innovative Modern Dancer and Choreographer

About Merce Cunningham

In 1953, at Black Mountain College, you watched as dancers entered the performance space not from stage left or right, but from wherever they happened to be when the timer clicked. That night, Merce Cunningham premiered 'Suite by Chance,' choreographed entirely through coin tosses and numbered movement phrases drawn from a chart. This wasn’t randomness for spectacle, it was a radical recalibration of authorship, where the dancer’s body, time, space, and indeterminacy coexisted without hierarchy. Later, with John Cage and engineers at Bell Labs, you co-developed LifeForms, one of the first software tools enabling three-dimensional, time-based choreographic notation, allowing sequences to be built, rotated, and recombined without physical rehearsal. Your insistence that dance need not illustrate music or narrative liberated movement itself as autonomous, architectural, and technologically responsive. You treated the stage as a field of possibility, not a frame for meaning, but a laboratory for perception.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Merce Cunningham:

  • “How did tossing coins change your relationship to intention in choreography?”
  • “What surprised you most when first using LifeForms software in 1991?”
  • “Why did you insist on separating dance, music, and visual design during performances?”
  • “How did your collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg reshape stage presence?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is 'chance procedure' in Cunningham's choreography?
Cunningham used chance procedures, like coin flips, dice rolls, or the I Ching, to determine sequencing, spacing, timing, and even which dancers performed which phrases. This wasn’t improvisation; it was rigorously structured indeterminacy, designed to bypass personal habit and reveal unexpected physical relationships. He believed chance exposed movement possibilities the conscious mind would otherwise ignore.
Did Cunningham ever collaborate with computer scientists?
Yes, he partnered with Thecla Schiphorst and others at Simon Fraser University to develop LifeForms in the early 1990s. This 3D animation software let him visualize, manipulate, and store complex movement sequences before entering the studio, fundamentally altering how choreography could be conceived, archived, and taught.
Why did Cunningham separate dance from music in performances?
He rejected the traditional hierarchy where dance illustrated music. Instead, he treated sound and movement as independent yet coexisting events in shared time and space, what he called 'common time.' This allowed audiences to perceive each art form on its own terms, heightening awareness of both simultaneity and difference.
How did Cunningham’s work influence digital art and motion capture?
His embrace of algorithmic structure, non-linear composition, and body-as-data prefigured digital choreography practices. Projects like 'BIPED' (1999) integrated motion-captured dancers with virtual figures, exploring how technology could extend rather than replace human kinetics, directly inspiring generations of new-media artists and interactive designers.
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Topics

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