ABSTRACT

Common sense would seem to suggest that Merce Cunningham’s interest in classical ballet has little or nothing to do with the influence of Marcel Duchamp. (It’s difficult to imagine stranger bedfellows than Duchamp and classical ballet.) But the modified arabesques and attitudes (indeed all the readily recognizable elements of the ballet lexicon that figure so prominently in Cunningham’s work) function in much the same way that “ready-made” objects do in the art of Duchamp: They’re movement forms that preexisted the choreographer, that weren’t invented by him. They come from the realm of “outer” rather than “inner” experience.