The Cage/Cunningham Process
“In our collaborations Merce Cunningham’s choreographies are not supported by my musical accompaniments. Music and dance are independent but coexistent.” – John Cage
As collaborators, Cage and Cunningham’s method of creation was distinct: they often created their own material separately and independently of each other, with only a chosen time or structural points to guide them. The dancers would often hear the music for the first time during performance. Cunningham and Cage deconstructed hierarchical relationships between sound and dance by treating them as separate entities.
This undated, unattributed photograph shows Merce and John later in life, presumably at Merce’s Westbeth Studio in New York.
Program, Mexico68 International Festival of the Arts, July 1968
With Cage as composer and accompanying instrumentalist, the company performed as part of the International Festival of the Arts for the Cultural Program at the 19th Olympic Games in Mexico City. The group performed three different programs, twice each across 6 days. The high elevation affected the dancers during their performances as well as the athletes later during their competitive portion.
Program, Teatro Olimpico, Rome, 1983
Cunningham’s innovation known as an “Event,” prompted by a lack of performance space while on the 1964 MCDC world tour, allows for unconventional spaces and programming. It is “not so much an evening of dances as the experience of dance,” Cunningham wrote. Over 800 Events were performed between 1964 and 2011, the final events being billed as such and performed at the Park Avenue Armory.
Poster, Six Events, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 1983
The photograph featured on this poster references Cunningham’s work with video, an aspect of his work that began in the 1970s. Cunningham’s interest in time and space informed his interest in creating dance for video, film, or television broadcast. He adapted dance and the experience of viewing dance for the camera while collaborating with filmmakers such as Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan.
Brochure, 1979
This trifold brochure includes a performance calendar and pledge cards. Contrasting this piece and the glossy benefit program shown below with the promotional materials from earlier days shows the growth of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and the changes in the company’s funding and development strategies.
Program, Cunningham Dance Foundation Gala Benefit, approximately 1982
The MCDC company members surround Cunningham, center.
Soho Arts Weekly, 1978
The mesostic, a favorite form of poetry used by Cage, uses a capitalized vertical word or phrase in the middle of the text space, with no repeating letters between two capitalized letters of the vertical word. Soho Arts Weekly printed a series of mesostics by Cage in 1978 as promotional poetry for the company’s upcoming City Center residency.
Letter from Cunningham to Cage, 1976
This letter from Cunningham to Cage describes the company’s residency at the Festival d’Avignon in 1976. Cage did not attend this tour due to his work finishing Renga and Apartment House 1776.
Cage and Cunningham’s personal relationship is not extremely well documented in Cage’s collection. Letters found after Cunningham’s death have been printed in Laura Kuhn’s Selected Letters of John Cage, which provide a glimpse into their romantic or daily life. Cage has called their relationship “organic, I mean to say in the fact that it’s been living and that it’s taken different forms, so that the relation that we have, or that our thoughts or works have, isn’t fixed.” Perhaps every aspect of their relationship lacked a “fixed point in space” (a favorite Einstein quote of Cunningham’s) and it simply existed organically.
This postcard from the John Cage Correspondence Collection features Cunningham’s figure drawings, and is signed “Love.”
Promotional publication, Merce Cunningham and the New Dance Festival, State University of New York, March 5-8, 1987
This brochure promoting a festival and symposia includes reprints of articles by David Vaughan, Roger Copeland, and Sally Banes. An article by Carolyn Brown reprints a heartfelt speech she gave for Cage and Cunningham at the Bessies Awards ceremony in 1986. She refers to them as “the pragmatist” (Cunningham) and “the optimist” (Cage), describing what they were able to accomplish together. Read an excerpt of Sally Banes’ article from this brochure below:
Cunningham’s use of chance techniques dictates that any body part can be used, in combination with any other(s), to make any movement; that the entire spectrum of speeds (including stillness) can be sampled; that no stage space is privileged over any other. His technique combines the best of both worlds of theatrical dancing – the flexible back and changing levels of modern dance, and the upright carriage and brilliant footwork of ballet. There is in Cunningham’s work – in the eccentrically dislocated body that continually resolves itself into classical grace, the decentered stage picture with its flows and eddies, and the sense of endless ongoingness – a kind of embrace of the world’s chaos that nevertheless is shaped by a powerfully organizing imagination. This is the dancing of the age of quantum physics, and it seems aeons away from the neat geometries of ballet or even the sensibly expressive distortions of modern dance.
All of this contributes to an abstract, pure dance field of action that was as explosive in the dance world in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Jackson Pollock was in painting, requiring new modes of perception and understanding. The burden on the spectator to complete the work in the mind’s eye, reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and of John Cage (Cunningham’s long-time collaborator and resident theorist), locates Cunningham firmly in the tradition of high modernism; no wonder intellectuals and artists in all fields have long been attracted to his coolly intelligent, yet heatedly exciting dances.
—Sally Banes, “Cunningham’s Legacy”