Cunningham Dance History

A 2nd generation Modern Dance dancer and known as one of the greatest and influential choreographers of the 20th century.

Cunningham learnt tap dancing at a young age and was exposed to theatre experience then. He entered Cornish School of Fine Arts in Seattle in 1937 and learnt a range of visual and performing arts without specialisation. He was introduced to Graham technique while taking one of Martha Graham’s workshops during his time at Cornish. Graham’s technique consists of the elemental movements of contraction and release and had sharp, angular, and direct movements which were a dramatic departure from the predominant style of that time.

Cunningham was then being invited to join the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1939. He performed
He developed his own choreographic processes, using unpredictable factors known as the CHANCE method to determine how the dancer should move. He was inspired by this method via The I Ching method from ancient Chinese text as well as being influenced by German philosopher, Nietzsche. An example of this method would be the rolling of dice or tossing of coins to make decisions for sequences of movements in a piece.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company started out with dancers including Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Paul Taylor, and Remy Charlip, musicians John Cage and David Tudor, and often visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. They started their international tour in 1964 including performances in Western and Eastern Europe, India, Thailand, and Japan. These initiated a constant stream of national and international engagements, when the onset of the Vietnam war still happening, and when the U.S. involvement in the war was going at its
They are flexible to alter the mode of perception within different situations. They take collaboration as a new model of social interaction, dealing with a different idea about how people can exist together. At the same time allowing urban contemporary to enter his world, in which one example would be the use of the computer as a choreographic tool during the digital age during the 1970s. Cunningham repudiates the primitivist desire to take dance back to a time “before atrophy of civilisation set in”. His work has no yearning for a return to an imagined state of unity and purity. His strategies for resisting environmental conditioning i.e. dancing ‘wrong side out’ has made his work possess distinctively political dimensions. And his influence is visible almost anywhere one cares to look in the world of contemporary dance and performance. He also impacted artists outside of dance with a progressive approach and through his extensive collaborations that produced an influential body of work in music, dance and visual