It's Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”   

– Merce Cunningham

“It’s less like an object and more like the weather because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are, but in the weather it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends. We hope that the weather will continue, and we trust that our way of relating dance and music will also continue.”

-John Cage

Photograph inscribed by Cage: “with Merce Cunningham around 1945.”

John Cage and Merce Cunningham, partners in all senses of the word: life, love, and work, began their partnership in the 1940s. Their creative collaboration was consistent until Cage’s death in 1992. Even then, Cunningham continued to use Cage’s music in his choreography, changing their process by necessity but allowing their works to continually be performed and experienced together in new ways. The first of three parts explores their early work, while the second discusses the creation of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), along with the MCDC’s world tour in 1964. Finally, the third part displays objects from later iterations of their collaborative endeavors and discusses their relationship and their compositional and choreographic processes. 

While we have attempted to represent dance by “showing on walls” (or screens in this case), we hope that the spirit, determination, and importance of Cage’s and Cunningham’s work can come through by viewing these materials through the lens of John Cage’s collection.