Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham danced for Martha Graham for six years and then removed from dance almost everything she had put into it. He came from Centralia, Washington, joined Graham's company in 1939, and left in 1945 to make work on a principle she would have found incomprehensible: that movement need not express anything, that dance and music need not be related beyond sharing a duration, and that the order of events could be decided by chance. With John Cage, his partner for fifty years, he used coin tosses and the I Ching to determine sequence, direction and timing; dancers often heard the score for the first time at the performance. He also abolished the centred stage - there is no front, no hierarchy, and several things happen at once, which audiences found either liberating or infuriating. Collaborators included Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol on design. From the 1990s he used the computer program DanceForms to generate phrases his own body could no longer demonstrate, and he choreographed from a chair with severe arthritis into his eighties. He left instructions that the company should tour for two years after his death and then dissolve, which it did - the first legacy plan of its kind, now widely copied. Summerspace, Rainforest and Beach Birds are among the works most often revived. He and Cage lived and worked together from 1942 until Cage died in 1992, and never discussed the relationship publicly. Rauschenberg was the company s designer for a decade and left after a dispute over billing. The dissolution plan he wrote, now called the Legacy Plan, funded a final world tour, an archive and a licensing trust, and has since been used as a model by several other choreographers.

• Lived: 1919 CE – 2009 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist