What is modern? Modern classical music is the music of Beethoven. Modern physics is the physics of Schrodinger and Einstein. Modern dance is the dance of Martha Graham. Modern art is 70 years old. We need the term contemporary to describe the art and dance of our time as if the time period were a genre. Modern isn’t what it used to be. Merce Cunningham was modern, always. If the point of dance is not to illustrate music or to tell a story then what is the point? Merce asked this question when modern still meant modern and proceeded to answer it for the rest of his career. A tall, thin, muscular guy with a strange face, like one of Arthur Rackham’s fauns or fairy kings, Merce just had to stand there to impress. He moved like an animal, with animal intent, natural, but with precision. When Contemporary dancers want to know what being “in the moment” looks like as they struggle to free themselves from thinking about the execution of a movement, they need look no further than any footage of Merce dancing. He could leap too, and not like a ballet Grande Jete’.  It was like a leopard, or a frog, or a bug, the kind of leap that you have to marvel at when you see it in the wild. You can’t take your eyes off him when he dances because when he is in the moment so are you.

His choreography was as compelling as his own movement. It was definitely choreography but with a seemingly unlimited vocabulary.  The music was employed the way the set was. It provided a space to perform. It was not about the dance and the dance was not about it. The dance was usually not even related to it in any more direct way than it was to, say, the color of the lights. Together with John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, some really remarkable work was produced. A three body collision of talent and strangeness like that doesn’t happen often. It’s more likely that such collaborations are just collisions of strangeness.

Too much dance, post Merce Cunningham appears as a parody of itself. Movement styles have become standard and predictable. Contemporary dance means that you move like_____. Some of the dancers on So You Think You can Dance identify themselves as Contemporary. How do you know? Well they’re the ones rolling on the floor a lot and jerking their torsos during their solos. I like those dancers too but dance after Merce is like physics after Einstein. What the hell is there left to do? What’s the point? A question that never gets old. Even at ninety, Merce was still as creative and fresh as he ever was as a choreographer. Always new, always modern.

Merce Cunningham 1919-2009