Merce Cunningham

John Cage was an American composer that experimented with the very nature of sound and developed new ways of notating music. Cage’s ideas on composition influenced many artists such as painters, musicians, and chorographers. Cage questioned the musical preconceptions that was left from the 19th century. Arnold Schoenberg, a teacher of John Cage, called Cage “not a composer, but an inventor of genius” (Hicks, 1990). Many musicians, and to much of the public, thought Cage’s compositions…

inspired generations of fine dancers and choreographers. Merce Cunningham refined the work that his colleague Martha Graham formed, and expanded with this his own improvements, choreographies and avant-garde dance techniques. During his career he was considered as one of the greatest creative minds in American dance, education dozens of worldwide famous dancers and thousands professional dancers who preserved his style until today. Merce Cunningham was undoubtedly the greatest single influence…

to create an X-shape. In contrast to the slow balletic lines, the women also execute parallel jumps with their arms curving over their heads, contractions that soften their upright torsos, and lateral C-curves. The first section demonstrates that Cunningham began his choreography thinking about the shapes of ballet, then going beyond those familiar forms he explored how the torso could move out of them to create new shapes and movements. This section also reflects classical ballet in the way the…

connection that I find interesting is Marcel Duchamp’s influence on the choreographer, Merce Cunningham. Duchamp, as a Dada master of the early 19th century inspired Cunningham’s work, Walkaround Time. The set design and the overall movement quality of the work was inspired by Duchamp's piece, The Bride Stripped Bare of her Bachelors, Even. It is by investigating the set design, and spatial relationships that Cunningham utilizes in his work that one begins to uncover the Dadaist references…

like ballet, tap, jazz, modern and music. When she was just a year and a half old she was already given piano lessons. Her first dance lesson was at the Vera Lynn School of Dance. During her dancing years, she had lessons from Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham and later, she joined Paul Taylor’s dance company. Even so, she formed her own dance company at quite a young age of 23, Twyla Tharp dance company. She has a way of choreographing as she used the crossover…

John Cage an Influential Minimalist John Cage is the epitome of a cutting edge composer due to the fact that he has an elevated appreciation for music, unmatched by any other. Cage enjoys everyday, naturally occurring sounds because of their dynamics and their lengths, rather than the sounds constrained by musical instruments, something other composers usually overlook. This gives him the advantage to compose music in a unique manner. Cage has had an impact not only on musicians, but dancers and…

On Thursday, December 3rd, 2015, I saw a few performances of the Dance Company Fall Dance Concert presented by the Theater, Dance, and Film department of Franklin and Marshall College. The concert incorporated the works of Talia Beck, Merce Cunningham, Elba Hevia Y Vaca, Belinda Mcguire, Janet Peck, and Pamela Vail. The Concert took place at the Schnader Theater in Roschel Performing Arts Center at 7: 30 P.M. Of the performances I had the opportunity to watch, the one that most intrigued me was…

Nicknamed the father of wire, Alexander Calder, was a modernists, a realists, but overall, an artist. During the time, many artists made silhouette line drawings on paper, but Calder was the original artist to use wire to fashion three-D line "sketches" of people, animals, and objects. He then moved from metaphorical linear sculptures in wire to random forms in motion by creating the first mobiles. Composed of whirling sizes of wire offset with thin metallic plates, the presence of the whole…

emotion to be shown through the actual passion of dance (Dance Facts, 2017). This style of dance was very eye catching to others who wanted to express themselves freely and to not follow the rules of ballet. Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan and Merce Cunningham, who are contemporary icons, wanted to show the world freedom in their dances and explore outside of the human body's movement capabilities (Dance Facts, 2017). Contemporary needed to be well known throughout the world, so Martha Graham…

Harvard in 1950 he discovered that sound is innately present in all human beings. This discovery is portrayed in his famous silent piece 4’33”. Also during this period, Cage was involved at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with dancer Merce Cunningham, which…