Merce Cunningham on the Path to Zen

Annie Suquet

Historical developments in dance are never merely aesthetic. They are permeated by the political, cultural, and social upheavals of their time. For this issue of CN D Magazine, historian Annie Suquet, author of the recently published Modernités critiques : une histoire culturelle de la danse (1945-1980) (Critical modernities: a cultural history of dance) revisits a chapter that sheds light on the roots of Merce Cunningham’s work. The American choreographer was highly influenced in the 1950s by a then-fashionable movement: Zen.

In the early 1950s, the New York teachings of Buddhist master Daisetz T. Suzuki attracted a host of artists and intellectuals. Among other Eastern spiritualities, Zen aroused great interest, partly due to the anxiety-inducing climate of the Cold War. At a time when the threat of nuclear conflict hung over the future, Zen philosophy taught people to be open to the present moment. The encounter with this movement was to have a decisive influence on the artistic development of Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage.

Through Zen philosophy, they both refined their idea of artistic gestures as acts of listening, welcoming, and paying non-selective attention to the surrounding reality and the texture of the moment. For Cunningham, the entire meaning of dance was, from then on, to be found in the here-and-now of movement. There was to be no narrative or symbolism to decipher, no psychological depth to probe. Dance, he said in 1952, is nothing more than “a visible action of life.” To claim that the dancer offers something to see other than the activity in which they are engaged is to “cut oneself off from life, from the sun that rises and sets, from the clouds that pass in front of the sun, from the rain that comes from the clouds...” By accepting movement for movement’s sake, the dancer places himself in the flow of life and its infinite change. But this flow, Cage and Cunningham contend, can only be revealed by art if the creator’s tastes, fantasies, and torments are set aside to make way for a kind of detached neutrality.

In the 1950s, this Zen-infused conception of the creative gesture was shared by a whole group of artists, many of whom, like Cage and Cunningham, were gay. Perhaps this was a response to a specific feature of the cultural climate of the Cold War: its virulent homophobia. By circumventing all self-expression, this attitude of detachment would have been a way of “concealing” oneself, in the words of painter Jasper Johns, and thus to protect oneself. Deemed a serious deviance at the time, homosexuality was socially stigmatized and, in some American states, punished by prison sentences. What critic Moira Roth describes as the “aesthetics of indifference,” which these artists embraced, can also be read as a discreet but eminently political form of resistance to the prevailing repressive climate.

In any case, it was to “silence their egos” that Cage, Cunningham, and the musicians around them – Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman – began to incorporate various modes of randomness into their compositional protocols. In 1950, Cage discovered the Yi Ching or Book of Changes, an ancient book of divination associated with Taoism (itself a precursor of Zen), which had just been translated into English. This book was to be an important source of inspiration for the random experiments that Cage and Cunningham never ceased to use in their work.

The following year, the choreographer created his first piece based on randomness and chance: Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three. Random draws determined the succession of movement sequences, as well as their duration and direction in space. Two years later, Cunningham radicalized his use of randomness by applying it to his own body. For Untitled Solo, he imagined a range of movements for the arms, legs, head and torso. The sequence was decided by flipping a coin. Over the course of the 1950s, Cunningham gradually experimented with all the variables of random choreographic composition, often resulting in highly complex creative processes.

He was well aware that it might seem “inhuman and mechanical to create a dance by flipping a coin,” as he put it in his 1955 manifesto The Impermanent Art. “By composing in this way, I feel in touch with natural resources far greater than my own creativity,” he wrote. Embracing chance led to a “liberation of perception” that enabled performers to “awaken to the very life we are living.” A resolutely Zen posture that Cunningham never abandoned, and which would run through his entire choreographic work for the next half century.

Annie Suquet is a dance historian and the author of L’Éveil des modernités : une histoire culturelle de la danse (1870-1945) (CN D Editions, 2012) and Modernités critiques : une histoire culturelle de la danse (1945-1980) (CN D Editions, 2025). Her other publications include: Merce Cunningham. Chorégraphier pour la caméra, recueil de conversations avec Cunningham (co-written with Jean Pomarès, L’Oeil d’or, 2013).

L’éveil des modernités - une histoire culturelle de la danse (1870-1945)
Annie Suquet
Editor: Centre national de la danse
Publication: August 2012

Modernités critiques : une histoire culturelle de la danse (1945-1980)
Annie Suquet
Editor: Centre national de la danse
Publication: January 2025

Danse collective et subversion : une plongée rétrospective dans le XX^e siècle
Annie Suquet
April 6 & 13, conference at Palais de Tokyo, Paris
as part of plan D, CN D x Palais de Tokyo

Nature studies
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
March 12 & 14 at Maison de la Danse, Lyon

Merce Cunningham Forever
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
March 19 & 20 at Sadler’s Wells Theater, London
as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels in London