Merce Cunningham: Use

Merce Cunningham was American dancer. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Merce Cunningham: 10   quotes 3   likes

“I was working on a title called, “Untitled Solo,” and I had made—using the chance operations—a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff.”

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Music , Chance

“If a dancer dances - which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else's dance - but if the dancer dances, everything is there.... our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom…”

Merce Cunningham

1952
from the front-page of the website of the Merce Cunningham Trust http://www.mercecunningham.org/merce-cunningham/

Freedom , Dance

“Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.”

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Way , Idea , Thinking , Sense

“John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams.”

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Books , Thinking , Change , Chance