American - Dancer | April 16, 1919 - July 26, 2009
The use of chance operations opened out my way of working. The body tends to be habitual. The use of chance allowed us to find new ways to move and to put movements together that would not otherwise have been available to us. It revealed possibilities that were always there except that my mind hadn't seen them.
Merce Cunningham
TogetherMindChancePossibilities
Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.
DanceThinkNeverMovementAbstract
My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.
WorkBirdsSmallSeeingMovement
All these dismal things that are going on in the world - the isolation and the sickness and the governments and the pollution - it's so frightful, over the whole world.
WorldSicknessIsolationPollution
I use the computer as a tool. Like chance or the camera or the other tools I've used, it can open my eye to other ways of seeing or of making dances. It's not simply to do a trick.
EyeChanceToolsCameraSeeingOpen
Cage always wanted to know what my structure was, if I had one. I often did have some sense of the time structure. Then he'd make a different one for the music.
MusicTimeKnowStructureCageHe
You can get fixed ideas, and it can get restrictive. So, I try to put myself in a precarious position.
MyselfIdeasYouTryPositionGet
It is upon the length and breadth and span of a body sustained in muscular action that dance invokes its image.
DanceActionBodyImageLengthSpan
In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.
MindChanceOperationsUsing
I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn't particularly interested in doing.
DoingGradesStudentsGiveWhich
My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day.
DayDanceEvery DayClassOpenCome
Fortunately, dance has been what's interested me all my life. So whether I am faced with incapacities or not, it still absorbs me.
LifeDanceI AmMeMy LifeBeen
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