Merce Cunningham at 90 on Sunday – WSJ did a nice look at the legendary choreographer.
With the death of Merce Cunningham at 90 on Sunday, one clock stopped and another started ticking. Born Mercier Cunningham in Centralia, Wash., on April 16, 1919, the dancer and choreographer worked tirelessly to challenge the way people saw and thought about dance. He regularly used the clock, sometimes in the form of a hand-held stopwatch, to guide the dances he made over a 65-year period. Cunningham saw dance in time, and with his adoption of “chance procedures” in the 1950s he matter-of-factly created dances that existed independent of their accompanying music and surrounding visual elements. – From WSJ