Merce Cunningham Quotes

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.

The only way to do it is to do it.

Dance is an art in space and time. The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.

Falling is one of the ways of moving.

He seems to be supporting her tenderly. But what holds them together is difficult to pin down. In her memoir, she wrote that he once dropped her on her hip very painfully, and she had the distinct impression he’d done it on purpose. What really goes on between two people is very difficult to say.

This lack of internal body images became clear one day when she said, “Martha, what is jumping? I don’t understand.” Graham responded at once by calling one of her dancers, Merce Cunningham, to the barre and placing Keller’s hands on his waist. As Graham tells the story, “Merce jumped in the air in first position while Helen’s hands stayed on his body. Everyone in the studio was focused on this event, this movement. Her hands rose and fell as Merce did. Her expression changed from curiosity to one of joy. You could see the enthusiasm rise in her face as she threw her arms up in the air and exclaimed, ‘How like thought. How like the mind it is.