Merce Cunningham change the dance field.

For contemporary dance history there’s a ‘before Cunningham and after Cunningham’. His work marks the time for a completely new era of dance and gains it the inscription inside the story of contemporary art with the same status as other arts.
Here is some key ideas from Merce Cunningham:

• Dramaturgical and compositional perspective:

-intention. There’s no need to tell a story or reflect something.

-No figurative or emotional references.

-Away from the need of communicating something, from pre-established formal elements or coming from an interior impulse.

-To compose in space and time without a goal.

-Immobility (as silence) is a sufficient aesthetical experience.

-Chance as a method for making aesthetical choices: throwing coins or dice, using the ‘I Ching’.

-Multiple and simultaneous actions.


• Musical perspective:

-Independence between dance and music.


• Scenic frame perspective:

-Deconstruction of rules of perspective and symmetry defined by court ballet: breaking of scenic space conceptions of front, center and hierarchies: space is equal at any point, Abstraction: Movement is expressive and enough beyond any fragmented and exploded.

-No hierarchy between dancers.

-The audience is free to see in its own manner and with its own looking choices.

-Out of theaters: non conventional spaces.

-Inventor of the ‘EVENT’: sequence of dances whose dramatic structure or content is never stable, with no sense of logical syntax or construction (ancestor of what is later called happening).


• Technical-interpretative perspective:

-Virtuous dancers in a new sense.

-Mastery of tempo and movement length by inner perception.

-Ability to dance with great speed and changing of rhythm and directions in an unpredictable way.

-Capability of adapting and memorizing sequences.

-Rhythmical diversity without equivalent.

-Classical technique for the legs.


• Philosophical perspective:

-Abandonment of the ideas of the ‘inspired artist’, the piece of art as an expression of an individual and an evaluation criterion based on beauty or expressive qualities.

-Order inside disorder.

-Never the two same ‘events’: not about fixing, but about reflecting flexibility of life.

-Reflecting life: no linearity, no classical dramaturgy, things don´t happen only in a successive way but also simultaneously.

-No politics, no narrative, no argument, no theme, no intention.

-Creative freedom.

-ZEN influence: “non obstructive quality” of things, they can coexist in nature without interfering with each other.

-Dance to be danced or to be seen, not to be analyzed.

Here is an example shows that after Cunningham dance should be like what form:

Beach Birds for Camera