41 Quotes by Merce Cunningham

Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.

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.

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.

I don't like teaching, because it's so repetitive - especially the beginning of class, which is always more or less the same and has to be carefully done. It's tedious. But I know it's necessary for dancers to keep working on technique.

I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about from looking at other dancing and being involved with the ballet - something about the air and the way she thought about dancing.

You can get fixed ideas, and it can get restrictive. So, I try to put myself in a precarious position.

Fortunately, dance has been what's interested me all my life. So whether I am faced with incapacities or not, it still absorbs me.

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.

Very often, you did something slow with your arm, for example, and something rapid with your feet - but the arm had to do something large against this - and this set up a kind of opposition.