Interview | Merce Cunningham

At the Harris Theater on November 18 and 19, “The Legacy Tour” brings the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Chicago for the last time. Its founder, choreographer Merce Cunningham, died in 2009; the company has been traveling the world ever since, but will disband after a series of Events—collages of excerpts from longer pieces—December 29–31 at NYC’s Park Avenue Armory.

Here, published in full for the first time, is our interview for TOC Issue 137, given by phone on September 24, 2007. Cunningham was 88.

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There’s a story that some early funding for your company came from John Cage’s obscure knowledge of mushrooms. Is that right?
Oh, yes, he was on one of those contest shows in Milan, and every week they would ask him questions about mushrooms. It came to the last question, a complicated thing about identifying wild mushrooms. He was an amateur, but a very good one. [Laughs] And he had the correct name. And the Italian audience in the studio were in an uproar.

You both kept a lot of plants around the house. Do you still?
Oh, not so many anymore. I have one that looks like a corn plant, only it’s at least ten feet tall, maybe twelve! Like a tree.

I love the plants in your book of drawings, Other Animals. Do you draw every day?
Yes. At the moment, I’m drawing little birds.

But you haven’t shown your drawings in public much, until recently.
Well, I never would have exhibited them, but Margarete [Roeder, a New York gallerist] offered to show them.

You say that as if she coerced you.
Yes, I would say that that’s what it was. [Laughs] I would never have bothered, but she said, “No, no, I would like to show them.” So she did.

You premiered two solo dances here in 1943 with Cage. Was that your first time in Chicago?
No, I came to Chicago when I was about 12, with my mother and brothers. There was a World’s Fair. I remember the area around the lake had all kinds of exhibitions.

Do you remember where that first concert here was held?
It was with… [Pauses] Jean Erdman. That’s right. It was in the Arts Club [of Chicago]. There was a small auditorium. It was wonderful that it was even arranged. And I was very grateful to, I think her name was Rue Shaw, who was the head of the Arts Club then. She helped arrange it. I don’t think it was a very long program.

Just two solos, according to what I was able to find: In the Name of the Holocaust and Shimmera.
Yes, those were early solos.

Early on, you also danced with Martha Graham. Recently, you collaborated with Radiohead and Sigur Rós, and with painters like Terry Winters. What’s it like to have witnessed these huge shifts?
I think the shifts began in the ’50s. They weren’t noticed by many people, but that’s when the composers began to use electronic sound as a compositional medium. The painters—like the Abstract Expressionists and later Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—were beginning to appear and, uh, my own work, which of course was not noticed very much here. But I went on doing it because I kept thinking it was interesting and maybe after a while somebody else might find it interesting.