Merce Cunningham Research Paper

Merce Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919 and died in 2008. He received his first formal dance and theatre training at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, which he attended at age 20. During this time, Martha Graham saw Cunningham dance and invited him to join her company. In 1939, Cunningham moved to New York and began a soloist career with the company of Martha Graham. He presented his first solo concert in New York in April 1944 with composer John Cage, who became his life partner and regular collaborator until Cage's death in 1992. In 1953 Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Merce Cunningham challenged the way we create and view dance. Some of his main focuses were time, space & weight. He worked
He used chance techniques such as rolling a dice to determine which moves are used and when, and he played with things like order, direction & dynamics. It provides an element of surprise in pieces as dancers can develop unplanned sequences created randomly, but they are still within set boundaries.
As he was greatly inspired and even taught by Martha Graham his dance technique consisted of lots of the same features: high release, curves and arches, tilts, linear lines, spirals, abstract, triplets, arabesques and attitudes, changes in direction and most pieces weren’t narrative. He looked at abandoning conventional elements of dance—such as narrative, cause and effect, and climax and anti-climax. For Cunningham the subject of his dances was always dance itself.
He said he teaches the dancer "how to do something," instead of teaching the dancer how to move like the teacher. Even when he was still dancing, Merce would often explain instead of demonstrate a phrase. "Rather than show the movement, if you explain it, the students have to think it through differently." His clear imagination allows him to describe the movement verbally, so that even recently at and old age sitting on a stool, he makes his intentions