The sky crackled with lightning
that night, the air rattled with thunder, and Merce Cunningham joined with the
elements so natural to him: the earth, the sky, the water, and the air.
Those birds he drew! They could
fly as he once could and as, until his last two weeks, he set his dancers to
doing. He told me near the end of his life that choreography had become, for
him, "a habit of mind." Even as movement was taken from him, his
dancers gave it back. So direct, their process with Merce: thought into
movement, with nothing intermediary.
In his last months, he was tired;
but he was game. He never stopped laughing, at himself as much as anyone or
anything. To the end he was gallant and courteous with visitors, and
clear. Always clear, like those green eyes that could look as blue as the sky
on a cloudless day. I asked him this:
"Merce, how is it that
without music, without narrative, and with your using chance procedures to
remove yourself, to keep from imposing your personality on the movement, that
your dances are so passionate?"
"Because, he said, I love dancing!"
Quotations from an interview by Nancy Dalva ©copyright Nancy Dalva 2010, 2013. 2014
