Word: dancers
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...CREATIVE PROCESS, in Jacob Bronowski's view, is a matter of perceiving profound unity in apparent unlikeness. Perhaps it is a measure of a choreographer's genius that he can sustain with a sense of humor and discovery a suggested equivalence between a dancer and a stuffed sack...
...family of Centralia, Washington lawyers who grew up to shock those who shocked the world with modern dance. But even outrageous art can only outrage within a context of respectability; for Cunningham, the background includes both sporadic ballet study and several years in the early '40s as a leading dancer with Martha Graham's company. Beginning with his first solo recital in 1944, however, Cunningham gradually drifted away from the objective, disciplined symbolism of modern dance's first generation toward his own radical redefinition. New York's early indifference gave Cunningham a reason to work extensively in colleges and universities...
...corollaries to the essential belief. One is that such dance is by no means "meaningless": rather, it simply has no meaning beyond itself and what the individual spectator chooses to perceive. Elsewhere in his book "The Bride and the Bachelors," Tomkins quotes Cunningham as saying that "if the dancer dances, everything is there. The meaning is there if that's what you want." And in a 1970 interview with the Boston Sunday Herald's Joan B. Cass, Cunningham explained...
...dance gesture is equivalent to any other. This dissolution of hierarchy, the refusal to impose any arbitrary order on the intrinsic patterns of movement, is reflected elsewhere in Cunningham's art. Tomkins has likened his use of the stage to "a continuum, an Einsteinian field in which the dancers relate not to fixed points...but to one another," and most Cunningham dances can be viewed to almost equal advantage from any angle. There is no hierarchy of dancers, either: they interact, in critic McDonagh's phrase, with "molecular individuality." As with Cunningham's approach to decor and music, this...
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...