Merce Cunningham quotes

Merce Cunningham was an influential American dancer and choreographer, renowned for his innovative contributions to modern dance. His pioneering collaborations with composers and visual artists transformed the possibilities of performance art. He profoundly impacted generations of dancers and continues to inspire creativity in the dance world. Here are 8 of his quotes:

I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn't particularly interested in doing. (Merce Cunningham)
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. View quote
Merce Cunningham
If a dancer dances - which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else's dance - but if the dancer dances, everything is there.... our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom... View quote
Merce Cunningham
My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day. View quote
Merce Cunningham
I was working on a title called, "Untitled Solo,” and I had made-using the chance operations-a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff. View quote
Merce Cunningham
Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64-the number of the hexagrams -to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow-say a particular sound-what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance. View quote
Merce Cunningham
John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams. View quote
Merce Cunningham
I think anything can feed you, depending on the way you look at it or listen to it. View quote
Merce Cunningham