Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham wanted to find new ways of choreographing as he felt our imaginations restricted us creatively. The way he worked focused on movement and not narrative and emotions.He helped to push the movement of chance procedures forward by using them himself, to create works such as Beach Birds.

 He created his own chance method were he dissected the human body into different sections on a computer.Then this would generate what part of the body would be used next, and also the dynamic and direction it would take.


He worked along side John Cage who was a musician who also created art though chance procedures. His process was slightly different however :  Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations.
Merce Cunningham, Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance, 2000