Merce Cunningham, RIP-------->

Merce Cunningham, exit, stage (Flip coin)

So experimental a genre of parody was created in honor of him. So experimental he always seemed a sort of parody of himself.

Anyone who's put underwear or a lampshade on his head and flailed about saying "modern dance" is a fan of Merce Cunningham, though he might not even know the name. Cunningham has inspired a generation of artists. Merce, like his Collaborator John Cage, represents the avant garde that so many young artists find so exciting. His choreography represented dance as dance, and dancers as themselves, no attempt to lull us into the romantic fantasy.

The movements often were inspired by nature and animals, but the dancers were not to be animals, but to move with the spontaneity of animals. Not to pretend to be animals, in a way that romanticizes or anthropomorphises but to simply be human animals.

With Cage, Merce experimented with chance operations and letting in new meanings to the symbology of dance.
In conversation with Cage and...