Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham was an American choreographer and dancer, born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia.
Cunningham attended Centralia High School before continuing his education at Cornish College of the Arts and subsequently at George Washington University. His professional activities extended across several fields: alongside his work as a dancer and ballet dancer, he also practiced as a musician, conductor, and draftsperson. He died on July 26, 2009, in New York City.
Throughout his career, Cunningham received a number of significant honors from both American and international institutions. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, two competitive grants that recognize achievement across the arts and sciences. He also received the Praemium Imperiale, an international prize in the arts, as well as the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honour from France. These distinctions reflect the breadth of his engagement across dance, choreography, and other creative disciplines, which remained central to his identity as an artist.
Quotes by Merce Cunningham
Our emotions are constantly being propelled by some new face in the sky, some new rocket to the moon, some new sound in the ear, but they are the same emotions.
You do not separate the human being from the actions he does or the actions which surround him, but you see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow passion - and it is passion - to appear for each person in his own way.
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.
What really made me think about space and begin to think about ways to use it was Einstein's statement that there are no fixed points in space. Everything in the universe is moving all the time.
It is upon the length and breadth and span of a body sustained in muscular action that dance invokes its image.
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.
Dancing has a continuity of its own that need not be dependent upon either the rise or fall of sound or the pitch and cry of words. Its force of feeling lies in the physical image, fleeting or static.