Merce Cunningham Legacy

In my research I was interested in the creative collaborations of Merce Cunningham. One could expect for a collaboration to be an intimate process between composers, designers, and choreographers and you could expect for Merce experience to be the same do to his exposure in Martha Graham’s company. In Martha Graham’s company, Cunningham was exposed to dance, sets, narrative and lighting being interdependent, but Cunningham decided to take the opposite approach in his work. He abandoned the theatrical and musical dependency of Graham’s work in favor of an independent collaborative process between the choreography, music and design. He found ways to isolate his choreographic process to create innovative and unexpected work which is I consider …show more content…
Unlike many other choreographers, Cunningham remained focused on dance as an art form in itself without the need for meaning or narrative. Beth Weinstein’s article “The Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham,” highlights Cunningham’s deliberate lack of meaning in his work; “the legitimacy and interest of an artwork sprang from the very medium of the art, rather than from any message or idea being conveyed — underlies the many innovations that mark Cunningham’s work as dancer and choreographer” (2). Cunningham’ was not interested expressive meaning in his work but he wanted the work to stand on its own. Cunningham stated in an article he wrote published in 7 Arts; “when I dance, it means: this is what I am doing. A thing is just that thing” (1). To Cunningham a jump was a jump and a step was just a step. Taking away meaning from his work allowed him to free his preconceived thoughts on how a dance should be sequenced in order to fit the narrative, which “helps break the chains that too often follow dancers feet around” (1). Separating meaning from dance helped Cunningham become an innovative choreographer by creating new and unique movement