41 Quotes by Merce Cunningham

Dancing is a spiritual exercise in a physical form.

Light or luminosity is created by the way elements are juxtaposed. They become reflective and a radiance comes from putting different things together.

I'm not expressing anything. I'm presenting people moving.

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too...

The only way to do it is to do it.

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls .

There's no thinking involved in my choreography... I don't work through images or ideas. I work through the body... If the dancer dances, which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance, everything is there. When I dance, it means: this is what I am doing.

I’m not expressing anything. I’m presenting people moving.

I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn’t particularly interested in doing.