Contribution to Dance

Merce Cunningham is truly a one-of-a-kind choreographer. Putting technique aside he created a way of moving which allowed the audience to see pure movement and not movement with emotion, or so were his intentions. Dance was the only idea being presented in Merce’s dances. His dances could range in movement from big and virtuosic to pedestrian based. He liked to push the boundaries of movement: using the computer program DanceForms allowed him to come up with movements that might have seemed (or have actually been) impossible but he was able to get another view on the movement by watching his dancers attempt to do the movement. I can’t think of any other choreographer that used this method to choreograph movements.



Probably his most well-known contribution to the dance world is his use of chance operations in which he would literally leave movement choices up to chance. He also had a very unique way of putting together his works in terms of the relationship between the dance the music and the lighting/stage set-up in that he wouldn’t allow these things to come together until performance time (he adopted this idea from his partner, John Cage).