Portrait
Merce Cunningham
Born
16 April 1919Centralia, Washington, USA
Died
26 July 2009New York City, USA · aged 90
Dancer and choreographerUnited States

Merce Cunningham

He freed dance from music and story – and shared his life and work for fifty years with the composer John Cage.

Merce Cunningham grew up in a small town in Washington State and took tap dance lessons as a boy. He studied in Seattle, where he met the composer John Cage, and in 1939 joined the dance company of Martha Graham in New York as a soloist.

In the 1940s he began choreographing his own works, and in 1953 founded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Together with Cage he developed a radical new approach: dance and music were created independently of each other and only met at the performance. Cunningham used chance – dice, coins, the I Ching – to determine sequences of movement. He collaborated with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol on sets and costumes, and later experimented with computers and film.

Cunningham and Cage were partners in life from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992. They lived and worked together, but spoke little in public about their private relationship.

Cunningham choreographed into his nineties. He died in New York in 2009, aged 90. As he had planned, his company gave a final world tour and then disbanded.

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