Merce Cunningham, avant-garde choreographer and pioneer of modern dance died yesterday at age 90. While his own career focused on dance, Cunningham influenced and collaborated with artists as diverse as John Cage, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bruce Nauman. For Here is Cunningham on the use of chance operations to create artistic works:
John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams. Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64–the number of the hexagrams –to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow–say a particular sound–what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.
Merce Cunningham (New York Times)
Merce Cunningham Dance Company
