Dancing Quotes by Merce Cunningham

There's no thinking involved in my choreography... I don't work through images or ideas. I work through the body... If the dancer dances, which…

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion.

— Merce Cunningham

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

— 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…

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

Fortunately, dance has been what's interested me all my life. So whether I am faced with incapacities or not, it still absorbs me.

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

You do not separate the human being from the actions he does or the actions which surround him, but you see what it is…

— Merce Cunningham

Very often, you did something slow with your arm, for example, and something rapid with your feet - but the arm had to do…

— Merce Cunningham

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…

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

I have always had this thing about moving around, and that has just remained, regardless of my physical changes. That feeling about it has…

— Merce Cunningham