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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Merce Cunningham

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

— Merce Cunningham

I began to do this thing I do of giving myself a class every day, and trying to experiment and push further.…

— 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…

— Merce Cunningham

Anything can feed you, depending on the way you look at it.

— Merce Cunningham

Dancing is a spiritual exercise in a physical form.

— Merce Cunningham

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

— Merce Cunningham

What really made me think about space and begin to think about ways to use it was Einstein's statement that there are…

— Merce Cunningham

I don't like teaching, because it's so repetitive - especially the beginning of class, which is always more or less the same…

— Merce Cunningham

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source…

— Merce Cunningham

I think the thing that we agreed to so many years ago, actually, was that the music didn't have to support the…

— Merce Cunningham

All these dismal things that are going on in the world - the isolation and the sickness and the governments and the…

— Merce Cunningham

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to…

— Merce Cunningham

I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about…

— Merce Cunningham