ABSTRACT
Allan Ulrich once suggested that all American modern dance choreographers are the children of Martha Graham; and that all postmodern choreographers are the rebellious children of Martha. No former Graham dancer was more rebellious than Merce Cunningham; and therefore, if Ulrich’s formulation is correct, Cunningham should probably be categorized as a postmodern choreographer. But throughout this book I’ve referred to Cunningham as the major “modernizer” of modern dance. Even a brief foray into the realm of classification-by-genre illustrates how quickly such exercises can degenerate into the sort of convoluted word games that Shakespeare parodies in Hamlet when he has the pedantic Polonius speak of “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” and so on. But-for better or for worse-I’ve already begun to play this semantic game, by suggesting that Cunningham, Cage, Johns, and Rauschenberg are the single most important pioneers of one of the great paradigm shifts in the arts of the late 20th century: the transition from modernism to postmodernism. So perhaps the time has come to officially “situate” Merce Cunningham in relation to the problematic landscape of modernism versus postmodernism.
