MERCE CUNNINGHAM: REMEMBERING JOHN CAGE
Merce Cunningham, with photography from James Klosty He was a man with a mind which was constantly alert to almost everything around him. Very-sharp tongued is wrong-but very bright. He worked constantly”…. Constantly composing or doing art work or answering letters, or writing books. It was simply what he did. And he may have said… Continue reading MERCE CUNNINGHAM: REMEMBERING JOHN CAGE
ON CHANGE
“I look forward to change. If I can make something that I’ve always done one way and then suddenly, for some reason, by accident or whatever it becomes something different, I’m delighted. It gives one a different experience.” Merce Cunningham
OCEAN, a conversation with Merce Cunningham
“Could you make a dance in the round?” John Cage asked Merce Cunningham before the James Joyce/John Cage Festival in Zurich, in June 1991. Cage had in mind a dance performed in the middle of a circular space, surrounded by the audience and then musicians, in concentric circles. There being no suitable venue at the… Continue reading OCEAN, a conversation with Merce Cunningham
A LAST QUESTION
The sky crackled with lightning that night, the air rattled with thunder, and Merce Cunningham joined with the elements so natural to him: the earth, the sky, the water, and the air. Those birds he drew! They could fly as he once could and as, until his last two weeks, he set his dancers to… Continue reading A LAST QUESTION
THE LAST INTERVIEW
Note: Merce Cunningham sat with me for nineteen formal interviews over the last two years of his life. This is the last twenty minutes, unedited, of the last conversation for Mondays with Merce. While I had never intended to include myself in the series, I am off camera here, to allow for the back and… Continue reading THE LAST INTERVIEW
THE I CHING AND ME: Merce Cunningham in conversation
An interview from March 1988, published in Dance Magazine. CLICK FOR PDF OF INTERVIEW