Merce Cunningham

“The legs and arms can be a revelation of the back, the spine's extensions.”

“You do not separate the human being from the actions he does or the actions which surround him, but you see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow passion - and it is passion - to appear for each person in his own way.”

“I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about from looking at other dancing and being involved with the ballet - something about the air and the way she thought about dancing.”

“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.”

“Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.”

“Cage always wanted to know what my structure was, if I had one. I often did have some sense of the time structure. Then he'd make a different one for the music.”

“I think the thing that we agreed to so many years ago, actually, was that the music didn't have to support the dance nor the dance illustrate the music, but they could be two things going on at the same time.”

“I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn't particularly interested in doing.”

“My process has changed over the years. I'd say it has been enhanced.”

“Very often, you did something slow with your arm, for example, and something rapid with your feet - but the arm had to do something large against this - and this set up a kind of opposition.”

“My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day.”

“I think anything can feed you, depending on the way you look at it or listen to it.”

“You can get fixed ideas, and it can get restrictive. So, I try to put myself in a precarious position.”

“I began to do this thing I do of giving myself a class every day, and trying to experiment and push further. I don't mean to say I knew everything, because I didn't, but I would do what I knew and then push beyond that and see what else I could find.”

“It is upon the length and breadth and span of a body sustained in muscular action that dance invokes its image.”

“I don't like teaching, because it's so repetitive - especially the beginning of class, which is always more or less the same and has to be carefully done. It's tedious. But I know it's necessary for dancers to keep working on technique.”

“Our emotions are constantly being propelled by some new face in the sky, some new rocket to the moon, some new sound in the ear, but they are the same emotions.”

“My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.”

“Dancing has a continuity of its own that need not be dependent upon either the rise or fall of sound or the pitch and cry of words. Its force of feeling lies in the physical image, fleeting or static.”

“I have always had this thing about moving around, and that has just remained, regardless of my physical changes. That feeling about it has never changed.”