Word: cunninghams
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...strongly intellectual overtones, however, Cunningham's dance is an art of the body, not of the mind. He once described his choreographic process to Tomkins...
...Cunningham is himself a dancer of extraordinary subtlety and power--"he really does seem to have more in his little finger than most dancers have in their whole bodies," the New Yorker's Arlene Croce has remarked--and the movement of his dances, radiating from a center of balance in the lower spine, demands a firm technique. Despite the disjunction between music and dance, another key component of Cunningham style is rhythm. But as former dancer Brown explains, "Merce requires...that the rhythm come from within: from the nature of the step, from the nature of the phrase, and from...
...decor and stage props accompanying a Cunningham dance are often as inventive as the choreography. "Variations V" uses bicycles and magnetic wands, "Rainforest" fills the stage with silver helium balloons designed by Andy Warhol, and in "Tread" the dancers move behind huge electric fans blowing cool air at the audience. Cunningham's revolution in the conception of dance has been accompanied by a revolution in dance's stage environment...
...Cunningham's primary contribution remains the redefinition of dance itself. It is a vision that has inspired a host of younger choreographers, most nourished in Cunningham's own company: Paul Taylor, Judith Dunn, Deborah Hay, Jack Moore, Dan Wagoner, Yvonne Rainer. In a century when painting has turned inward to explore the grounds of perception, and the "meaning" of poetry has become the relation of word to word and mind to language, Cunningham has created dance centered on nothing more than the activity of movement--and in so doing, in McDonagh's words, he "clearly demonstrated that dance...
...found any art of such absolute reduction too self-restricting, something abstracted beyond either beauty or meaning. Yet unlike painting or poetry or music, dance can never really be "abstract," because the shape of both instrument and perfected form is the familiarity of the human body. The essence of Cunningham's art is in the end not reduction, but the affirmation of the body in the simplicity of its own life. Perhaps most of all, his is an art of celebration