Merce Cunningham, the legendary New York-based choreographer who helped reinvent modern dance, has died at age 90, his foundation said.
“It is with great sorrow that we note the passing of Merce Cunningham, who died peacefully in his home last night of natural causes,” the Cunningham Dance Foundation and the Merce Cunningham Dance Co announced in a statement on Monday.
Although wheelchair-bound by the end of his life, Cunningham was still hard at work choreographing new works until shortly before his death late on Sunday.
He had danced on stage right into his 80s, even joining Mikhail Baryshnikov in a duet at the New York State Theater.
His foundation said he left “an indelible mark on our collective creativity and culture” and opened “new ways of perceiving and experiencing the world.”
Although a revolutionary, he was motivated “not for the sake of iconoclasm, but for the beauty and wonder that lay in exploring new possibilities,” the foundation said.
During the World War II era, Cunningham partnered with Martha Graham before striking out on his own and forming his company. It was then, in long collaboration with John Cage, an influential Minimalist composer who was also his life partner, that Cunningham turned dance on its head.
Most radically, the couple decided to end the traditional marriage of movement and music, saying that both arts should exist independently even when sharing the same space.
Cunningham also abandoned conventional storytelling through ballet to focus entirely on the poetry of dance.
“Dancing, for me, is movement in time and space,” he once said. “Its possibilities are bound only by our imagination and our two legs.”
Last month, he announced a “Living Legacy Plan,” with a trust tasked with preserving and continuing his work. The trust is now set to follow a meticulously prepared program, including a two-year world tour. After the tour, the foundation will formally close and the dance company will disband, but the trust will live on to manage Cunningham’s works.
The New York Times paid tribute, saying Cunningham was “among a handful of 20th-century figures to make dance a major art and a major form of theater.”
He ranked alongside giants such as Serge Diaghilev and George Balanchine “in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography,” the Times said.
In Taipei, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) mourned Cunningham’s death, calling him “the greatest choreographer of the 20th century.”
“His understanding of and concepts about dance influenced every important choreographer after the 1970s because he isolated dance from narrative and emotion,” Lin said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS