Merce Cunningham, 90: His dance dared

Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer revered for his continual reinvention of dancing, died Sunday in his Manhattan apartment, according to Leah Sandals of the Merce Cunningham Foundation. He was 90.

A compelling dancer himself, Mr. Cunningham created a body of work that questioned the traditional premises of dancing, providing unique answers that were both baffling and beautiful.

"What interests me is movement," he said in a 2005 interview. "Not movement that necessarily refers to something else, but is just what it is. Like when you see somebody or an animal move - you don't have to know what it's doing."

Some aficionados found his work inscrutable, while for others it was absorbing and wholly original. But he never made things easy for his audience. His dances, shunning narrative and character, were simply about dynamic human bodies moving in space. Occasionally the work assaulted the spectator. The 1964 Winterbranch, with its Sisyphean movement, its darkened stage from which lights shone full blast into the viewers' eyes, and its abrasive La Monte Young score, had people exiting the theater in droves.

Steadfastly, Mr. Cunningham kept dance, music, and decor separate entities, coexisting in time and place. He would inform the composer of the required duration, and that was that. The dancers in a new work usually first heard the score that would accompany them at the dress rehearsal of the piece.

In creating a dance, he sometimes turned to the I Ching, the Chinese system based on rolling dice. Injecting an element of chance into his work, he said, expanded his choreographic choices, which might otherwise be limited by habit. Zen philosophy, with its emphasis on the present moment and a keen sensitivity to nature, also informed his work.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Wash., the middle son of three born to Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and his wife, Mayme. While his two brothers followed their father into legal careers, Merce found his path through a neighbor, Maude Barrett, a retired vaudeville performer. He took classes at Barrett's dance school, starting with tap. With her daughter as his partner, he performed at auditoriums and fairgrounds.

After high school he attended George Washington University but left after his first year. In 1937 he enrolled at Seattle's Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts). He planned to be an actor but kept studying dance, including a class on Martha Graham, taught by a former member of her company. During his second stint of summer classes at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., he met Graham, who invited him to join her company in New York.

A marvelous dancer, agile and fluent yet with a commanding intensity, Mr. Cunningham danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1939 to 1945. His roles ranged from March in the Emily Dickinson piece Letter to the World, with its feather-light jumps, to the damnation-and-hellfire Revivalist in Appalachian Spring.

He began choreographing in the 1940s and formed his own company in 1953, at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Unlike Graham, who invented her own rooted-to-the-earth vocabulary, he borrowed mostly from its opposite - classical ballet, which emphasizes balanced, harmonious proportions, elegant verticality and the illusion of ease. He gave the style wry new twists.

He set his early works to familiar music, particularly that of Erik Satie, but the choreographer's most significant musical collaborator was the avant-gardist John Cage, also his life partner for half a century. Cage died in 1992.

With David Tudor, another early participant in Mr. Cunningham's enterprise, Cage came to favor music created in performance, on electronic instruments. Mr. Cunningham also worked with visual artists whose forward-looking sensibilities overlapped his own, among them Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Lancaster, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.

"I don't try to tell them what to do," he said. "I much prefer that they use their way of thinking and imagine, so that something would be added to this joint working that no one of the three of us - the dance, the music, and the decor - could predict."

High points of Mr. Cunningham's seven decades of dance-making include Summerspace (1958), with its dancers streaming past Rauschenberg's pointillist backdrop in leotards that match it; the exuberant How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965); RainForest (1968), in which the dancers move like jungle creatures among Warhol's silvery helium-lofted pillows; Sounddance (1975), which seems to launch its performers into a violent intergalactic world; Points in Space (1986-1987), which takes its title from Einstein's declaration that there are no fixed points in space; and Ocean (1994), a magisterial piece that has its dancers framed by concentric rings - the spectators and, behind them, the musicians.

He described Ocean this way: "It's like being in a bath of sound, because it comes from every source around you. In doing it, you find out something else about dance, something that you never thought of before. I always look forward to seeing what that will be."

He also created one-time-only 90-minute "events," collages of old work, repertory excerpts and new material in which unrelated passages often occurred in the performance space at once, accompanied by a sound score devised for the occasion.

The productions - which underlined his faith in chance and change - had a practical purpose, too, allowing his work to be seen in sites other than theaters. Events, untitled except for number (#1 was in 1964), occurred in venues ranging from the ruins of Persepolis in Iran to his studio in Greenwich Village, where a wall of windows, revealing the cityscape became the dancers' backdrop.

Today, Mr. Cunningham's work is considered the great link between the so-called Mid-Century Moderns (from Graham and her contemporaries to Paul Taylor) and the postmodern choreographers who emerged in the 1970s, such as Twyla Tharp, rebelling against traditional conventions.

Though his company had perpetual financial strains, Mr. Cunningham was showered with awards during his long career. Among the most prestigious were New York City's Handel Medallion, the Kennedy Center Honors, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, and the rank of Officier of the French Legion d'Honneur.

Even in his waning years, while crippled by arthritis, Mr. Cunningham riveted an audience's attention. In his 1999 one-time-only duet Occasion Piece, he managed to upstage Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In middle age Mr. Cunningham already looked older than he was; he eventually came to resemble a cross between magician and guru. He was deeply intelligent, witty, perceptive, and forever devoted to "making it new."

This year it was announced that after his death his company would embark on a two-year world tour and then fold.