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Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most celebrated modern dancers of the past fifty the story of her own remarkable career, of the formative years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and of the two brilliant, iconoclastic, and forward-thinking artists at its center—Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
From its inception in the l950s until her departure in the l970s, Carolyn Brown was a major dancer in the Cunningham company and part of the vibrant artistic community of downtown New York City out of which it grew. She writes about embarking on her career with Cunningham at a time when he was a celebrated performer but a virtually unknown choreographer. She describes the heady exhilaration—and dire financial straits—of the company’s early days, when composer Cage was musical director and Robert Rauschenberg designed lighting, sets and costumes; and of the struggle for acceptance of their controversial, avant-garde dance. With unique insight, she explores Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and experimentation with compositional procedures influenced by Cage. And she probes the personalities of these two the reticent, moody, often secretive Cunningham, and the effusive, fun-loving, enthusiastic Cage.
Chance and Circumstance is an intimate chronicle of a crucial era in modern dance, and a revelation of the intersection of the worlds of art, music, dance, and theater that is Merce Cunningham’s extraordinary hallmark.
From its inception in the l950s until her departure in the l970s, Carolyn Brown was a major dancer in the Cunningham company and part of the vibrant artistic community of downtown New York City out of which it grew. She writes about embarking on her career with Cunningham at a time when he was a celebrated performer but a virtually unknown choreographer. She describes the heady exhilaration—and dire financial straits—of the company’s early days, when composer Cage was musical director and Robert Rauschenberg designed lighting, sets and costumes; and of the struggle for acceptance of their controversial, avant-garde dance. With unique insight, she explores Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and experimentation with compositional procedures influenced by Cage. And she probes the personalities of these two the reticent, moody, often secretive Cunningham, and the effusive, fun-loving, enthusiastic Cage.
Chance and Circumstance is an intimate chronicle of a crucial era in modern dance, and a revelation of the intersection of the worlds of art, music, dance, and theater that is Merce Cunningham’s extraordinary hallmark.
656 pages, Hardcover
First published March 20, 2007
About the author
Carolyn Brown
46 booksCarolyn Brown was an American dancer, choreographer and writer. She was best known for her work as a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and was Cunningham's leading dancer for twenty years. Brown performed in almost every dance choreographed for the company from 1953 to 1972.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 18, 2007
I found this book deeply moving and inspiring. It's a strange thing to say that someone else's memoir could change my life, but Brown's account of her career in the avant garde dance scene in the 50s and 60s seems so far removed from the jaded irony that categorizes most "radical" artists today, reading it is like discovering art and dance and experimentation all over again.
I rarely read autobiographies, so I have little to compare this to. Some may find it long winded-- and it is-- but I was completely absorbed by every detail. Additionally, her perspective on Cunningham's choreography reveals so much that the dance history books, even by very perceptive authors, have left out. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is remotely curious about Cunningham or Cage's work.
I rarely read autobiographies, so I have little to compare this to. Some may find it long winded-- and it is-- but I was completely absorbed by every detail. Additionally, her perspective on Cunningham's choreography reveals so much that the dance history books, even by very perceptive authors, have left out. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is remotely curious about Cunningham or Cage's work.
January 25, 2021
Never after reading a book have I felt such an upsurge of gratitude to an author as when I finished Carolyn Brown’s Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (Alfred Knopf, 2007). This volume, which chronicles Brown’s twenty-year career as a dancer with Merce Cunningham’s dance company took her thirty years to write. Brown depicts herself as a conscientious, perfectionist type of dancer who struggled over the years to move large. As a writer she displays the same meticulous tendencies. Both as performer and as writer, however, her extraordinary attention to detail helps reveal a passionate devotion to the material.
We are lucky that Brown kept a journal and was a prolific letter writer throughout her performing career. She recounts every major Cunningham performance and tour, from the birth of the company at Black Mountain College in 1953 until her last appearance in 1972 at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. You feel like you were there, hearing about the splintery raked floors, the exhausting travel conditions, the endless rehearsals, the sometimes uproarious sometimes adulatory audience response. But most marvelously told is the experience of what it was like to dance Merce’s works, so many of them, and on so many different stages all over the world.
The narrative begins with Brown and her then-husband composer Earle Brown moving to New York in the early 1950s and being swept up in Cage and Cunningham’s artistic circles. A vivid view of a city’s bygone era emerges, a time of grit, possibility and boundless energy. Brown expresses the most nostalgia for the company’s early touring years when, with Cage at the wheel of a VW microbus, life and art intertwined. Road trips included jaunts for mushroom picking and company cook-outs. Cage leaps off these pages as an uncommonly generous, affable, kind man, not without flaws, but fiercely devoted to Cunningham and a tireless promoter of the company.
Added to our picture of Merce, the emotionally elusive, brilliant and prolific choreographer, is Merce-the-dancer who thrived on performing. He didn’t miss a single one of the seventy performances scheduled on the grueling 1964 world tour despite a serious illness and injuries. Brown shows us how he ate up the stage at every opportunity with dramatic intensity. She also suggests that, contrary to the oft-stated notion that Cunningham’s dances didn’t have meaning aside from the movement itself, some of his dances did have stories, even if he never shared these with the dancers.
The book also traces Robert Rauschenberg’s ascension from poverty to celebrity. For a period, Rauschenberg (who was already becoming famous) toured as the company’s scenic designer and stage manager, sweeping floors, composing the lights and building ingenious custom-designed sets from scratch in each new locale. Perhaps the meatiest part of Brown’s book is her description of how the collaboration between Cage/Cunningham and Rauschenberg was torn apart by his runaway success. Brown sheds light on the inter-personal dynamics of these three extraordinary artists without ever resorting to gossip.
If there’s a flaw in the book it’s in exhaustiveness. At 600 pages (according to Brown’s acknowledgments cut down from 900!) this is more chronology than most lay readers would want. However, as a resource for the scholar or Cunningham fan, this is a treasure trove. Personally, I enjoyed every page and finished it with a lump in my throat. Thank you, Carolyn Brown, thank you!
We are lucky that Brown kept a journal and was a prolific letter writer throughout her performing career. She recounts every major Cunningham performance and tour, from the birth of the company at Black Mountain College in 1953 until her last appearance in 1972 at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. You feel like you were there, hearing about the splintery raked floors, the exhausting travel conditions, the endless rehearsals, the sometimes uproarious sometimes adulatory audience response. But most marvelously told is the experience of what it was like to dance Merce’s works, so many of them, and on so many different stages all over the world.
The narrative begins with Brown and her then-husband composer Earle Brown moving to New York in the early 1950s and being swept up in Cage and Cunningham’s artistic circles. A vivid view of a city’s bygone era emerges, a time of grit, possibility and boundless energy. Brown expresses the most nostalgia for the company’s early touring years when, with Cage at the wheel of a VW microbus, life and art intertwined. Road trips included jaunts for mushroom picking and company cook-outs. Cage leaps off these pages as an uncommonly generous, affable, kind man, not without flaws, but fiercely devoted to Cunningham and a tireless promoter of the company.
Added to our picture of Merce, the emotionally elusive, brilliant and prolific choreographer, is Merce-the-dancer who thrived on performing. He didn’t miss a single one of the seventy performances scheduled on the grueling 1964 world tour despite a serious illness and injuries. Brown shows us how he ate up the stage at every opportunity with dramatic intensity. She also suggests that, contrary to the oft-stated notion that Cunningham’s dances didn’t have meaning aside from the movement itself, some of his dances did have stories, even if he never shared these with the dancers.
The book also traces Robert Rauschenberg’s ascension from poverty to celebrity. For a period, Rauschenberg (who was already becoming famous) toured as the company’s scenic designer and stage manager, sweeping floors, composing the lights and building ingenious custom-designed sets from scratch in each new locale. Perhaps the meatiest part of Brown’s book is her description of how the collaboration between Cage/Cunningham and Rauschenberg was torn apart by his runaway success. Brown sheds light on the inter-personal dynamics of these three extraordinary artists without ever resorting to gossip.
If there’s a flaw in the book it’s in exhaustiveness. At 600 pages (according to Brown’s acknowledgments cut down from 900!) this is more chronology than most lay readers would want. However, as a resource for the scholar or Cunningham fan, this is a treasure trove. Personally, I enjoyed every page and finished it with a lump in my throat. Thank you, Carolyn Brown, thank you!
August 1, 2013
What a treat. After ten years of respecting but not loving Cunningham's work, the last concert at BAM remains one of the most searing theatrical experiences I've encountered. Cunningham, feral? Feral. And so I finally got to Brown's 600 page chronicle of the early years of that work.
Carolyn Brown seems to have met everyone who was anyone during the twenty years she dedicated her life to the developing work of Merce Cunningham. She manages to separate the theory from the reality of Cunningham's extraordinary work. An engaging book on several levels: as one of the best "dance memoirs" I've ever read (Brown's descriptions of the agony and the ecstasy of the dancer's life rank with the best), as a chronicle of an extraordinary period in cultural history, and as a thoughtful discussion of the radical philosophy of John Cage from the inside. Brown's take on Cage's attempts to make his life a work of art are fascinating and worth contemplating again and again. And then the dirt: Marcel Duchamp, Stockhausen, the first Judson Dance Concerts, Claes Oldenberg, Christian Wolff, De Kooning, Margot Fonteyn, Anthony Tudor, Balanchine, Mary Wigman, the Beatles, Pauline Oliveros, Twyla Tharp, Nureyev, and of course detailed account of Bob Rauschenberg and Jaspar Johns, along with so many more I'm not mentioning. A telling anecdote for all.
Carolyn Brown seems to have met everyone who was anyone during the twenty years she dedicated her life to the developing work of Merce Cunningham. She manages to separate the theory from the reality of Cunningham's extraordinary work. An engaging book on several levels: as one of the best "dance memoirs" I've ever read (Brown's descriptions of the agony and the ecstasy of the dancer's life rank with the best), as a chronicle of an extraordinary period in cultural history, and as a thoughtful discussion of the radical philosophy of John Cage from the inside. Brown's take on Cage's attempts to make his life a work of art are fascinating and worth contemplating again and again. And then the dirt: Marcel Duchamp, Stockhausen, the first Judson Dance Concerts, Claes Oldenberg, Christian Wolff, De Kooning, Margot Fonteyn, Anthony Tudor, Balanchine, Mary Wigman, the Beatles, Pauline Oliveros, Twyla Tharp, Nureyev, and of course detailed account of Bob Rauschenberg and Jaspar Johns, along with so many more I'm not mentioning. A telling anecdote for all.
December 30, 2022
review of
Carolyn Brown's Chance and Circumstance
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 8-29, 2022
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticB...
Strange as this admission may seem, I don't think any other bk has moved me to tears as often as this one did. I'm not sure I even know another person who'd be moved to tears by it at all - after all, it doesn't have the young pretty protagonist die of cancer leaving her loved ones devastated, it doesn't have the banker successfully make off w/ the life savings of the sad old man who'd worked his entire life to be able to leave a legacy for those he cared about, it doesn't have the social outcast sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn't commit. You get the idea. Instead, it tells about the struggles & triumphs of people whose work I've followed & respected for many decades, mostly people whose personal lives I knew very little about. Even more strangely, perhaps, is that I don't particularly resent the relative priviledge & good favor these people benefited from b/c I recognize the passion & inspiration that drove them so whole-heartedly. Very few people are as passionate & dedicated as the main characters of this bk. Nonetheless, the very 1st reviewer note-to-self I wrote was "spoiled" in reponse to this 1st paragraph of the "PREFACE":
"One day, a year or two after I'd stopped performing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, I received a phone call from Maxine Groffsky, who had left her position as the Paris editor of the Paris Review and had returned to New York. "I want to be your agent?" she said. Astonished, I asked, "For what?" "Your book." "What book" "The one John Cage says you're going to write." "Well, maybe, someday." "No, now." I resisted, she persisted. So I wrote a sample chapter and Maxine presented it to Bob Gottlieb, then editor in chief at Knopf, and suddenly I found myself committed to the daunting project of writing a book. That was over thirty years ago. The writing and the not writing took that long." - p -ii
Spoiled?! Yes, spoiled: a friend of hers promotes her writing a bk about his boyfriend to a prominent publishing person, sd person approaches her & makes her a good enuf offer to get the project rolling. She was still somewhat young, roughly aged 46. There's no talk of putting her in prison or rendering her homeless for daring to exist, she's treated w/ respect.
As of the writing of this review, I've written & had published or published myself 16 bks. Many of them refer to real-life people but only rarely do I refer to those people by their given names. Sometimes it's to avoid displeasure or repercussions on their part, other times it's to protect them from being fired from their jobs or otherwise persecuted.. - but, OH, how I'd like to just refer to everyone I've known & written about by their given names - whether it's for praise or criticism - & that's what Brown does here. She can probably get away w/ it b/c most of these people are famous, most of them are dead, most of them were friends of hers - &, I think, at least, she's very even-handed about it - she praises John Cage & Merce Cunningham, e.g., & criticizes them - I never got the impression that she was being vindictive or unfair (although her depiction of Yoko Ono struck me as a bit harsh) - in fact, one cd hardly hope for a more honest memoir.
"For the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, this day, with a matinee performance, was the end of the Paris season and the end of the 1972 tour begun in Iran in early September. For me, it was the end of a twenty-year way of life.
"I had deliberately chosen to end that life abruptly, telling no one but those most intimately concerned, and to end it where I loved performing most—in Europe. A romantic gesture, certainly, but one that insured a happy ending to a life I cherished and had been nourished by." - p 3
"It was shortly after graduating from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, marrying Earle Brown, my childhood sweetheart, and moving to Denver, Colorado, that I first saw Merce Cunningham dance—not perform, I hasten to add, but dance, in a master class that he taught and that I took in April 1951." - pp 3-4
"At each of two parties given for Cage and Cunningham that weekend, Earle and I "rather cornered John" (as I wrote home) "and talked the evening away." The first real question Earle asked him was "Do you feel there is an affinity between your music and the music of Anton Webern?" It was still rare in the United States in 1951 for anyone to know Webern's work. Cage looked quickly roward Earle and replied, "What do you know about Webern?" The conversation took off from there. We heard for the first time the names Pierre Boulez, a young French composer whom Cage had met two years earlier in Paris; David Tudor, an extraordinary young pianist; Morton Feldman, a young New York composer writing graph music. All these young men, more than a decade younger than Cage, were born within a year or two of each other and were Earle's immediate contemporaries." - p 5
For someone like myself, the excitement of such a time is probably hard for anyone not obsessed w/ avant-garde music to understand. All of the above composers, except for Webern (I prefer the music of his teacher, Arnold Schönberg), are on my "Top 100 Composers" webpage: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100C... . I have the highest admiration for Tudor, but he wasn't a composer yet & while I like his electronic pieces very much he hasn't quite made it to my Top 100 list either - both Webern & Tudor are potential candidates nonetheless. Even reading about such a conversation 2nd-hand is fascinating for me.
"In April 1951, Earle was already working at three jobs daily. From nine to five he worked at Cabaniss, a contemporary furniture store and interior design shop that sold Eames, Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, Herman Miller, the Knoll line, and Schiffer prints. Earle got the job when we were down to our last dollar—a silver keepsake. He used the dollar for a haircut and got the job the same afternoon. From that job, he went to his own studio in a midtown professional building where he gave private lessons to four young jazz musicians and also taught a class with five students. After that he came home to compose. In the early hours of the morning he wrote a string quartet, a passacaglia (for Jane McLean and me to dance to), and a trio. When he finally did go to bed he had trouble sleeping, music still on his mind." - p 6
I can relate - in fact, this is one of many things that makes the story of this bk something I can relate to deeply. Earle & Carolyn were young, in their early 20s, they weren't being taken care of, they had to work - at the same time they were trying to pursue their passions, to pursue the interests that were at the center of their life. This situation didn't last forever, they were treated better & better. For me, being treated better & better wasn't very likely, I wdn't've been hired at the furniture store in the 1st place, I wd've been too much of a weirdo. The work I created was far more controversial & daring than anything Brown or Cunningham ever did. I didn't want it to be absorbed, I wasn't jockeying for respect, I was assaulting the culture.
SO, to contrast: In early 1985 my apartment was set fire to, I think by an arsonist hired by the assistant to my landlord to get me out of the neighborhood b/c I was helping the local (& very numerous) street drunks &, thusly, endangering the gentrification of the area. My girlfriend of the time took me in for the next 6 mnths until I found a new place to rent. I usually had 2 jobs, but in July & August, for 6 wks, things took an interesting development, I started working 84 hrs a wk, 7 days a wk. I'd get up around 7AM, leave to catch the bus to work around 7:15AM so that I cd get to my 1st job of the day: working in BalTimOre's porn district editing peep shows. It was the 1st (& one of the ONLY) jobs where I had to punch a time clock. If it wasn't punched by 8AM, I'd be docked an hr's pay. Curiously, I don't remember getting an extra hr's pay if I was there early. Funny how that works.
My coworker (& collaborator) & I were responsible for making something like 32 new small gauge (8mm & super-8mm) porns a wk out of available footage organized into themed cubby-holes in the dungeon-like basement where we worked. My coworker, Dick Hertz, & I decided to make a fake porn to sneak into a peep show. I worked 6 days a wk, 8 hrs a day there. This was the Jewish Mafia so it was run somewhat like a sweat shop.
After work, I'd catch a bus to my 2nd job, a used bkstore, where I'd work from 5:30 to 10:30PM (or some such). That was 5 days a wk & then on a 6th I'd work a 6 hr day - making a total of 36 hrs at the bkstore. SO, there were 2 days a wk when I only worked one or the other of the 2 jobs. Wages at both places of employment were close to minimum wage but b/c I was working so many hrs I was treated by the IRS as someone making twice what I was making hrly & I was put in a higher tax bracket & expected to pay even more taxes at the end of the yr than what had already been taken out.
After I got off work around 10:30PM I'd go back to my girlfriend's & start drinking hard liquor & working on the fake peep show movie, wch was called "Balling Tim Ore is Best". I'd get to sleep around 2 or 3AM & get up for work around 7AM & do it all over again. After 6 wks Dick snuck the film into a peep show & I quit that job. Dick got the film back after 2 wks of escaping detection & gave it to me. It's since been screened many places, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, NYC - so, in a sense, I got some respect from the wider cultural world, as did Carolyn & Earle - but I think you can understand just how different our paths were in many ways.
"I was very impressed: "David has been so very generous and helpful—he's gone out of his way to be nice to us. He is such an interesting person—really a genius, I guess. He is the only pianist who can play contemporary music (which is unbelievably difficult), and not only plays this music, but studies the aesthetics of the composers, and their philosophies of life as well, in order to do true justice to what they express in the music. An amazing person. And probably not over twenty-five years old."" - p 8
& if I were to pick one pianist over all it wd be David Tudor. I have a "Top 100 Pianists" webpage too: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100P... . There're only 28 pianist listed on it as of this writing. Tudor wd've been the very 1st I thought of. There're probably more pianists now who can play the extremely difficult work that Tudor pioneered in the 1950s & '60s but he was certainly at the forefront for as long as he was active as a pianist.
"After a quick visit with both our families in Massachusetts, we headed directly to 326 Monroe Street, a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, where John Cage lived on the top floor in two small apartments he'd made into one. The shabby building, almost on the East River, also housed Morton Feldman and the painter-collagist Ray Johnson, who shared his tiny work space with the sculptor Richard Lippold. They called the place "Bozza Mansion," Bozza being their landlord's name." - p 10
Again, I find this exciting. I love Cage's music, I love Feldman's music. I had a brief correspondence w/ Johnson before he committed suicide (it might've been more interesting if it happened after) & he's a major figure in Mail Art history, I don't know Lippold's work much but I remember liking it. The stimulating atmosphere that wd've existed w/ all 4 of these people living in the same bldg must've been phenomenal.
"In March I'd received a phone call from Ray Johnson—the enigmatic, eccentric, lovable Ray Johnson—who wondered if I still had a tiny piece of the very large geometric oil painting he had been working on when first we met him in 1951, which he had subsequently cut into bits and mailed out to his "New York Correspondence School" friends." - p 456
"Our decision meant I must get a job, and at the last minute I did, at the Kent School for Girls, where they indentured me: I was to teach dance to the entire school, first grade through high school; to teach drama; the eighth-grade speech classes; an elective appreciation course in dance and drama to juniors and seniors; to serve as substitute teacher for eighth-grade history (a disaster!); to be bus proctor, study-hall proctor, librarian, and drama coach—all for two thousand dollars a year! Each school day began and ended with me proctoring a busload of giggling girls to and from school; when the school day was over, I was completely wiped out and still had more homework to do than the kids." - p 12
WHEW! That is an insanely heavy workload. I'd imagine that the best way for a teacher to get thru it was to not take what was being taught seriously in the least - something I'm sure Brown wdn't've done. $2,000 in 1952 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $22,491.47 seventy yrs later & that's about what I made in a good yr before I retired (working considerably fewer hrs w/ considerably less responsibility) so, yes, that was pathetic pay. Still, being the proctologist for all those kids was the icing on the butt-cake. I mean, really.
"Less than two months passed; in the mail came a flyer addressed to us in John's own beautiful hand. Inside, elegantly spaced and lettered, was the announcement that the Living Theatre, Inc., would present two recitals by David Tudor at the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, in New York. At the first, Tudor would play Boulez's 2ème Sonate and for the first time anywhere the complete Music of Changes by Cage, as well as a work by Christian Wolff and one by Morton Feldman. The next month, Tudor would play music by Webern, Cage, Wladimir Woronoff, Henry Cowell, Stefan Wolpe, Josef M. Hauer, Low Harrison, Wolff, Feldman, and Earle Brown! The flyer was designed by Cage. In the forties and much of the fifties, Cage and Cunningham (and often Tudor) concerts were usually graced with simple, elegant, handsome flyers, posters, programs, and sometimes tickets that Cage himself designed; when possible he chose the paper as well as the type, layout, colors, etc." - p 13
To say that the above is thrilling to me is an understatement. As an appreciator of imaginative & meticulous design I'm sure that Cage's announcement must've been very special. Just receiving it in the mail wd've been fantastic. Attending the concerts wd've been beyond fantastic. How many opportunities do we have in life for such profound experiences?!
Another composer/performer/writer/designer whose production imagination covered all aspects of presentation was the inimitable Franz Kamin (see my documentary about him entitled "DEPOT: Wherein Resides the UNDEAD of Franz Kamin": on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/qDwGVNIJbgE , on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/depot_201906 ; see my underdeveloped Franz Kamin website here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/FranzKa... ). Franz's designs may've even been more fabulous than Cage's.
I like to think that my own designs are equally fabulous. I also think that the joys to be found in appreciation of such designs are almost to be taken for granted - &, yet, I think about a pyramid (actually folded & taped into a pyramid) I made to advertise a screening of "DEPOT" at Anthology in NYC. The day before the screening I went to a reading by Steve McCaffery, a writer/performer whose work I consider to be of the highest caliber, genius. I gave McCaffery a pyramid ad. He sd he was flying back to Toronto & wdn't be attending my screening. THEN he sd something like: "How am I supposed to carry this on the plane?!" as if the small pyramidal shape was just a nuisance that interfered w/ his practical life. I explained how he cd untape it & flatten it for putting easily into his pocket - but, truthfully, I was flabbergasted: how cd someone as intelligent & talented as McCaffery be so banal?!
"A letter to my parents mentioned the Brandeis Creative Arts Festival, which had commissioned Merce Cunningham to choreograph Stravinsky's Les Noces and Symphonie pour un homme seul, musique concrete composed by Pierre Schaeffer with the collaboration of Pierre Henry." - p 14
Another amazing event I wd've loved to've witnessed. & yet.. John Cage commented:
"The Brandeis business is unfortunately not Boulez but a lousy piece by Schaeffer and Henry." - p 15
A "lousy piece"?! Sometimes, IMO, Cage cd be a bit too myopically restricted by his own philosophical obsessions.
I keep saying how much I wd've liked to've been at these key cultural moments. Imagine Black Mountain College:
"Josef Albers and Charles Olson are probably the two most important to Black Mountain's history, but the list includs Ernst Krenek, Edward Steuerman, Walter Gropius, Lionel Feininger, Ossip Zadkine, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Richard Lippold, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Paul Goodman, Katherine Litz, Bernard Leach, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib, Peter Voulkos, John Chamberlain, David Tudor, Lou Harrison, Ben Shawn, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Stefan Wolpe" - p 17
AMAZING, yes. Definitely. &, yet. despite what I've already written, despite my intense admiration for many of these people's creativity.. I'm actually happy to've led the life I've led, the life that wasn't at Black Mountain College, the life that started in 1953, that represents a very different trajectory - but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate this history. I do appreciate it. Very much.
"In one of his lectures, ostensibly on Satie, Cage said:
"With Beethoven the parts of the composition were defined by means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they are defined by means of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is so important to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music." - p 18
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticB...
Carolyn Brown's Chance and Circumstance
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 8-29, 2022
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticB...
Strange as this admission may seem, I don't think any other bk has moved me to tears as often as this one did. I'm not sure I even know another person who'd be moved to tears by it at all - after all, it doesn't have the young pretty protagonist die of cancer leaving her loved ones devastated, it doesn't have the banker successfully make off w/ the life savings of the sad old man who'd worked his entire life to be able to leave a legacy for those he cared about, it doesn't have the social outcast sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn't commit. You get the idea. Instead, it tells about the struggles & triumphs of people whose work I've followed & respected for many decades, mostly people whose personal lives I knew very little about. Even more strangely, perhaps, is that I don't particularly resent the relative priviledge & good favor these people benefited from b/c I recognize the passion & inspiration that drove them so whole-heartedly. Very few people are as passionate & dedicated as the main characters of this bk. Nonetheless, the very 1st reviewer note-to-self I wrote was "spoiled" in reponse to this 1st paragraph of the "PREFACE":
"One day, a year or two after I'd stopped performing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, I received a phone call from Maxine Groffsky, who had left her position as the Paris editor of the Paris Review and had returned to New York. "I want to be your agent?" she said. Astonished, I asked, "For what?" "Your book." "What book" "The one John Cage says you're going to write." "Well, maybe, someday." "No, now." I resisted, she persisted. So I wrote a sample chapter and Maxine presented it to Bob Gottlieb, then editor in chief at Knopf, and suddenly I found myself committed to the daunting project of writing a book. That was over thirty years ago. The writing and the not writing took that long." - p -ii
Spoiled?! Yes, spoiled: a friend of hers promotes her writing a bk about his boyfriend to a prominent publishing person, sd person approaches her & makes her a good enuf offer to get the project rolling. She was still somewhat young, roughly aged 46. There's no talk of putting her in prison or rendering her homeless for daring to exist, she's treated w/ respect.
As of the writing of this review, I've written & had published or published myself 16 bks. Many of them refer to real-life people but only rarely do I refer to those people by their given names. Sometimes it's to avoid displeasure or repercussions on their part, other times it's to protect them from being fired from their jobs or otherwise persecuted.. - but, OH, how I'd like to just refer to everyone I've known & written about by their given names - whether it's for praise or criticism - & that's what Brown does here. She can probably get away w/ it b/c most of these people are famous, most of them are dead, most of them were friends of hers - &, I think, at least, she's very even-handed about it - she praises John Cage & Merce Cunningham, e.g., & criticizes them - I never got the impression that she was being vindictive or unfair (although her depiction of Yoko Ono struck me as a bit harsh) - in fact, one cd hardly hope for a more honest memoir.
"For the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, this day, with a matinee performance, was the end of the Paris season and the end of the 1972 tour begun in Iran in early September. For me, it was the end of a twenty-year way of life.
"I had deliberately chosen to end that life abruptly, telling no one but those most intimately concerned, and to end it where I loved performing most—in Europe. A romantic gesture, certainly, but one that insured a happy ending to a life I cherished and had been nourished by." - p 3
"It was shortly after graduating from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, marrying Earle Brown, my childhood sweetheart, and moving to Denver, Colorado, that I first saw Merce Cunningham dance—not perform, I hasten to add, but dance, in a master class that he taught and that I took in April 1951." - pp 3-4
"At each of two parties given for Cage and Cunningham that weekend, Earle and I "rather cornered John" (as I wrote home) "and talked the evening away." The first real question Earle asked him was "Do you feel there is an affinity between your music and the music of Anton Webern?" It was still rare in the United States in 1951 for anyone to know Webern's work. Cage looked quickly roward Earle and replied, "What do you know about Webern?" The conversation took off from there. We heard for the first time the names Pierre Boulez, a young French composer whom Cage had met two years earlier in Paris; David Tudor, an extraordinary young pianist; Morton Feldman, a young New York composer writing graph music. All these young men, more than a decade younger than Cage, were born within a year or two of each other and were Earle's immediate contemporaries." - p 5
For someone like myself, the excitement of such a time is probably hard for anyone not obsessed w/ avant-garde music to understand. All of the above composers, except for Webern (I prefer the music of his teacher, Arnold Schönberg), are on my "Top 100 Composers" webpage: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100C... . I have the highest admiration for Tudor, but he wasn't a composer yet & while I like his electronic pieces very much he hasn't quite made it to my Top 100 list either - both Webern & Tudor are potential candidates nonetheless. Even reading about such a conversation 2nd-hand is fascinating for me.
"In April 1951, Earle was already working at three jobs daily. From nine to five he worked at Cabaniss, a contemporary furniture store and interior design shop that sold Eames, Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, Herman Miller, the Knoll line, and Schiffer prints. Earle got the job when we were down to our last dollar—a silver keepsake. He used the dollar for a haircut and got the job the same afternoon. From that job, he went to his own studio in a midtown professional building where he gave private lessons to four young jazz musicians and also taught a class with five students. After that he came home to compose. In the early hours of the morning he wrote a string quartet, a passacaglia (for Jane McLean and me to dance to), and a trio. When he finally did go to bed he had trouble sleeping, music still on his mind." - p 6
I can relate - in fact, this is one of many things that makes the story of this bk something I can relate to deeply. Earle & Carolyn were young, in their early 20s, they weren't being taken care of, they had to work - at the same time they were trying to pursue their passions, to pursue the interests that were at the center of their life. This situation didn't last forever, they were treated better & better. For me, being treated better & better wasn't very likely, I wdn't've been hired at the furniture store in the 1st place, I wd've been too much of a weirdo. The work I created was far more controversial & daring than anything Brown or Cunningham ever did. I didn't want it to be absorbed, I wasn't jockeying for respect, I was assaulting the culture.
SO, to contrast: In early 1985 my apartment was set fire to, I think by an arsonist hired by the assistant to my landlord to get me out of the neighborhood b/c I was helping the local (& very numerous) street drunks &, thusly, endangering the gentrification of the area. My girlfriend of the time took me in for the next 6 mnths until I found a new place to rent. I usually had 2 jobs, but in July & August, for 6 wks, things took an interesting development, I started working 84 hrs a wk, 7 days a wk. I'd get up around 7AM, leave to catch the bus to work around 7:15AM so that I cd get to my 1st job of the day: working in BalTimOre's porn district editing peep shows. It was the 1st (& one of the ONLY) jobs where I had to punch a time clock. If it wasn't punched by 8AM, I'd be docked an hr's pay. Curiously, I don't remember getting an extra hr's pay if I was there early. Funny how that works.
My coworker (& collaborator) & I were responsible for making something like 32 new small gauge (8mm & super-8mm) porns a wk out of available footage organized into themed cubby-holes in the dungeon-like basement where we worked. My coworker, Dick Hertz, & I decided to make a fake porn to sneak into a peep show. I worked 6 days a wk, 8 hrs a day there. This was the Jewish Mafia so it was run somewhat like a sweat shop.
After work, I'd catch a bus to my 2nd job, a used bkstore, where I'd work from 5:30 to 10:30PM (or some such). That was 5 days a wk & then on a 6th I'd work a 6 hr day - making a total of 36 hrs at the bkstore. SO, there were 2 days a wk when I only worked one or the other of the 2 jobs. Wages at both places of employment were close to minimum wage but b/c I was working so many hrs I was treated by the IRS as someone making twice what I was making hrly & I was put in a higher tax bracket & expected to pay even more taxes at the end of the yr than what had already been taken out.
After I got off work around 10:30PM I'd go back to my girlfriend's & start drinking hard liquor & working on the fake peep show movie, wch was called "Balling Tim Ore is Best". I'd get to sleep around 2 or 3AM & get up for work around 7AM & do it all over again. After 6 wks Dick snuck the film into a peep show & I quit that job. Dick got the film back after 2 wks of escaping detection & gave it to me. It's since been screened many places, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, NYC - so, in a sense, I got some respect from the wider cultural world, as did Carolyn & Earle - but I think you can understand just how different our paths were in many ways.
"I was very impressed: "David has been so very generous and helpful—he's gone out of his way to be nice to us. He is such an interesting person—really a genius, I guess. He is the only pianist who can play contemporary music (which is unbelievably difficult), and not only plays this music, but studies the aesthetics of the composers, and their philosophies of life as well, in order to do true justice to what they express in the music. An amazing person. And probably not over twenty-five years old."" - p 8
& if I were to pick one pianist over all it wd be David Tudor. I have a "Top 100 Pianists" webpage too: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100P... . There're only 28 pianist listed on it as of this writing. Tudor wd've been the very 1st I thought of. There're probably more pianists now who can play the extremely difficult work that Tudor pioneered in the 1950s & '60s but he was certainly at the forefront for as long as he was active as a pianist.
"After a quick visit with both our families in Massachusetts, we headed directly to 326 Monroe Street, a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, where John Cage lived on the top floor in two small apartments he'd made into one. The shabby building, almost on the East River, also housed Morton Feldman and the painter-collagist Ray Johnson, who shared his tiny work space with the sculptor Richard Lippold. They called the place "Bozza Mansion," Bozza being their landlord's name." - p 10
Again, I find this exciting. I love Cage's music, I love Feldman's music. I had a brief correspondence w/ Johnson before he committed suicide (it might've been more interesting if it happened after) & he's a major figure in Mail Art history, I don't know Lippold's work much but I remember liking it. The stimulating atmosphere that wd've existed w/ all 4 of these people living in the same bldg must've been phenomenal.
"In March I'd received a phone call from Ray Johnson—the enigmatic, eccentric, lovable Ray Johnson—who wondered if I still had a tiny piece of the very large geometric oil painting he had been working on when first we met him in 1951, which he had subsequently cut into bits and mailed out to his "New York Correspondence School" friends." - p 456
"Our decision meant I must get a job, and at the last minute I did, at the Kent School for Girls, where they indentured me: I was to teach dance to the entire school, first grade through high school; to teach drama; the eighth-grade speech classes; an elective appreciation course in dance and drama to juniors and seniors; to serve as substitute teacher for eighth-grade history (a disaster!); to be bus proctor, study-hall proctor, librarian, and drama coach—all for two thousand dollars a year! Each school day began and ended with me proctoring a busload of giggling girls to and from school; when the school day was over, I was completely wiped out and still had more homework to do than the kids." - p 12
WHEW! That is an insanely heavy workload. I'd imagine that the best way for a teacher to get thru it was to not take what was being taught seriously in the least - something I'm sure Brown wdn't've done. $2,000 in 1952 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $22,491.47 seventy yrs later & that's about what I made in a good yr before I retired (working considerably fewer hrs w/ considerably less responsibility) so, yes, that was pathetic pay. Still, being the proctologist for all those kids was the icing on the butt-cake. I mean, really.
"Less than two months passed; in the mail came a flyer addressed to us in John's own beautiful hand. Inside, elegantly spaced and lettered, was the announcement that the Living Theatre, Inc., would present two recitals by David Tudor at the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, in New York. At the first, Tudor would play Boulez's 2ème Sonate and for the first time anywhere the complete Music of Changes by Cage, as well as a work by Christian Wolff and one by Morton Feldman. The next month, Tudor would play music by Webern, Cage, Wladimir Woronoff, Henry Cowell, Stefan Wolpe, Josef M. Hauer, Low Harrison, Wolff, Feldman, and Earle Brown! The flyer was designed by Cage. In the forties and much of the fifties, Cage and Cunningham (and often Tudor) concerts were usually graced with simple, elegant, handsome flyers, posters, programs, and sometimes tickets that Cage himself designed; when possible he chose the paper as well as the type, layout, colors, etc." - p 13
To say that the above is thrilling to me is an understatement. As an appreciator of imaginative & meticulous design I'm sure that Cage's announcement must've been very special. Just receiving it in the mail wd've been fantastic. Attending the concerts wd've been beyond fantastic. How many opportunities do we have in life for such profound experiences?!
Another composer/performer/writer/designer whose production imagination covered all aspects of presentation was the inimitable Franz Kamin (see my documentary about him entitled "DEPOT: Wherein Resides the UNDEAD of Franz Kamin": on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/qDwGVNIJbgE , on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/depot_201906 ; see my underdeveloped Franz Kamin website here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/FranzKa... ). Franz's designs may've even been more fabulous than Cage's.
I like to think that my own designs are equally fabulous. I also think that the joys to be found in appreciation of such designs are almost to be taken for granted - &, yet, I think about a pyramid (actually folded & taped into a pyramid) I made to advertise a screening of "DEPOT" at Anthology in NYC. The day before the screening I went to a reading by Steve McCaffery, a writer/performer whose work I consider to be of the highest caliber, genius. I gave McCaffery a pyramid ad. He sd he was flying back to Toronto & wdn't be attending my screening. THEN he sd something like: "How am I supposed to carry this on the plane?!" as if the small pyramidal shape was just a nuisance that interfered w/ his practical life. I explained how he cd untape it & flatten it for putting easily into his pocket - but, truthfully, I was flabbergasted: how cd someone as intelligent & talented as McCaffery be so banal?!
"A letter to my parents mentioned the Brandeis Creative Arts Festival, which had commissioned Merce Cunningham to choreograph Stravinsky's Les Noces and Symphonie pour un homme seul, musique concrete composed by Pierre Schaeffer with the collaboration of Pierre Henry." - p 14
Another amazing event I wd've loved to've witnessed. & yet.. John Cage commented:
"The Brandeis business is unfortunately not Boulez but a lousy piece by Schaeffer and Henry." - p 15
A "lousy piece"?! Sometimes, IMO, Cage cd be a bit too myopically restricted by his own philosophical obsessions.
I keep saying how much I wd've liked to've been at these key cultural moments. Imagine Black Mountain College:
"Josef Albers and Charles Olson are probably the two most important to Black Mountain's history, but the list includs Ernst Krenek, Edward Steuerman, Walter Gropius, Lionel Feininger, Ossip Zadkine, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Richard Lippold, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Paul Goodman, Katherine Litz, Bernard Leach, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib, Peter Voulkos, John Chamberlain, David Tudor, Lou Harrison, Ben Shawn, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Stefan Wolpe" - p 17
AMAZING, yes. Definitely. &, yet. despite what I've already written, despite my intense admiration for many of these people's creativity.. I'm actually happy to've led the life I've led, the life that wasn't at Black Mountain College, the life that started in 1953, that represents a very different trajectory - but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate this history. I do appreciate it. Very much.
"In one of his lectures, ostensibly on Satie, Cage said:
"With Beethoven the parts of the composition were defined by means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they are defined by means of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is so important to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music." - p 18
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticB...
January 22, 2025
A complex and absorbing account of modernism's graduation into late modernism and a documentary narrative testament to Cold War meaning-making. By the time I caught the Merce Cunningham company in the mid-Eighties, Carolyn Brown was no longer their co-principal dancer. But if Cunningham were being honest, that's what she'd been for 20 years, between their appearance together at a Black Mountain happening in 1952, through years of support by Universities of the travelling medicine show that was the John Cage-Merce Cunningham troupe through the early Fifties, through the emergence of the coterie around the Cage-Cunningham couple in the Village of the late Fifties, including Robert Rauschenberg, who designed sets for Cunningham and choreographed dances himself, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, and Brown's first husband Earle Brown. Musicians, dancers, painters, poets -- a small community of artists dedicated to being an audience for each other's groundbreaking work, as well as collaborating. It took a vast lineage to create the artist that could see in the Cage-Cunningham formation the nurture of a life in the dance -- that's Carolyn Brown.
Something in that collocation of the two (or four) idioms -- atonal scales and Grahamian reclamation of the floor -- nettled post-War concert hall and theatrical audiences. To that, Cunningham brought his acceptance of the Cagean proverb that dance needn't be subserviant to music, or that it was, if inevitably, so that concert hall music and dance take place as co-events with no necessity that one "serve" another. If such events were to be a visual medium, then a proper set design might distill the lessons of such formal rigor and invent spatial co-inhabitance along with movement and sound; for this, Rauschenberg was enlisted. It got tried out in the 'burbs -- the company used Champaign-Urbana's campus in 1953 and throughout the Fifties and Sixties as just one of several conspiring university departments evangelizing modernism along with Dave Brubeck and Usonian building in that heady post-War moment.
Brown (b. 1927)'s memoir is based on a writing practice -- like her Village neighbor, Patti Smith -- that includes journals, letters home, criticism, and incorporates descriptions [there was no codified notational language of choreography in the pre-digital period until the Seventies] of all the dances Cunningham choreographed during the Brown period. When her first marriage foundered, she married the company photographer, James Klosty (who has his own book on Cunningham-Cage), so documentary she's got no bother with. She turned into Knopf a 900-page ms. that Robert Gottlieb turned into a 600-page book. From this you get some of the grand sweep of history -- while these dedicated professionals are confirmed radicals within the politics of Left Anarchism, frequently you will be puzzled by how German concert-hall hecklers, let's say, of the post-Spring 1968 period play into this touring dance lifer's reflections on '68-69 as years of rage. I'm willing to bet that's the decision of a cliche-averse editor's blue pen. We're 500 pages in before we get to the author's separation from Earle Brown! There's a subtle feminist point in that backgrounding of her romantic life in order to foreground a gay couple. Brown evades sexuality as a topic, which goes straight back to her training in the Denishawn (Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn) dance order. The sublimation applies to the Cage-Cunningham formation, as well; she does not go there. Brown's dance career implies a Cunninghamian rigor around spirit-movement that cut her out to be this movement's scribe. The memoir is that achievement. It's something else again.
Something in that collocation of the two (or four) idioms -- atonal scales and Grahamian reclamation of the floor -- nettled post-War concert hall and theatrical audiences. To that, Cunningham brought his acceptance of the Cagean proverb that dance needn't be subserviant to music, or that it was, if inevitably, so that concert hall music and dance take place as co-events with no necessity that one "serve" another. If such events were to be a visual medium, then a proper set design might distill the lessons of such formal rigor and invent spatial co-inhabitance along with movement and sound; for this, Rauschenberg was enlisted. It got tried out in the 'burbs -- the company used Champaign-Urbana's campus in 1953 and throughout the Fifties and Sixties as just one of several conspiring university departments evangelizing modernism along with Dave Brubeck and Usonian building in that heady post-War moment.
Brown (b. 1927)'s memoir is based on a writing practice -- like her Village neighbor, Patti Smith -- that includes journals, letters home, criticism, and incorporates descriptions [there was no codified notational language of choreography in the pre-digital period until the Seventies] of all the dances Cunningham choreographed during the Brown period. When her first marriage foundered, she married the company photographer, James Klosty (who has his own book on Cunningham-Cage), so documentary she's got no bother with. She turned into Knopf a 900-page ms. that Robert Gottlieb turned into a 600-page book. From this you get some of the grand sweep of history -- while these dedicated professionals are confirmed radicals within the politics of Left Anarchism, frequently you will be puzzled by how German concert-hall hecklers, let's say, of the post-Spring 1968 period play into this touring dance lifer's reflections on '68-69 as years of rage. I'm willing to bet that's the decision of a cliche-averse editor's blue pen. We're 500 pages in before we get to the author's separation from Earle Brown! There's a subtle feminist point in that backgrounding of her romantic life in order to foreground a gay couple. Brown evades sexuality as a topic, which goes straight back to her training in the Denishawn (Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn) dance order. The sublimation applies to the Cage-Cunningham formation, as well; she does not go there. Brown's dance career implies a Cunninghamian rigor around spirit-movement that cut her out to be this movement's scribe. The memoir is that achievement. It's something else again.
March 6, 2010
A brilliant memoir on all counts: A historically important chronicle of the genesis of the work of Merce Cunningham at a seminal time in his life and in the lives of the artists with whom he collaborated. A close-up look at the relationship of Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg. A history of the first twenty years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. A personal history of a great dancer. And last - but in my book definitely not least - a memoir that rings with accuracy, because the author kept correspondence, journals, and other materials from the time during which the book takes place. Brava.
Read
October 7, 2009I really loved this book. She is a meticulous observer of history, people, and herself and it gave me wonderful insights into Merce's choreographic process and her experience of a dancing life. I was constantly comparing myself to her in terms of her devotion and commitment and frequently coming up short. I think that this is a wonderful book even if one is not a dancer or choreographer. I was moved and inspired.
December 14, 2007
took me a hell of a long time to get through but so rewarding! so classy, so beautiful. i wept for a long time at the end. read choice sentences or anecdotes out loud to my boyfriend along the way because they were just too good not to share. highly recommended.
November 9, 2009
My review of this book is here:
http://greeninteger.blogspot.com/2009...
http://greeninteger.blogspot.com/2009...
March 6, 2025
Built on a decades long diary, this book gives a monotonous, intimate look at the life of a struggling modern dancer under the hypnotic spell of Merce Cunningham. Whatever genius Cunningham possessed is overshadowed by his pettiness and insensitivity (bordering on abuse) towards his dancers. Why Carolyn Brown stayed under his control for so very long is a mystery left unexplored.
September 12, 2011
After seeing the legacy tour program in Annandale on Hudson yesterday evening I again felt so inspired (it is the forth time I see the company) by Merce Cunningham's work - and by John Cage's music - that I though I wanted more. They offered this book at the event. After a quick look I couldn't resist. This is going to be my first book purchase in almost two years... I mean a real one that you can actually worry about bending the corners of the nice cover. Since I have my Kindle I have forgotten what it is like to read normal book... It is really heavy and you keep worrying about it...
So far this is very interesting private insight into the lives of three artists I very much respect and form whom I would very much like to be influenced as much as possible. This book seems ideal for getting to know Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Carolyn Brown from the perspective of a dancer.
So far this is very interesting private insight into the lives of three artists I very much respect and form whom I would very much like to be influenced as much as possible. This book seems ideal for getting to know Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Carolyn Brown from the perspective of a dancer.
January 11, 2008
This is a long and interesting book about dancing with the Cunningham company from its inception at Black Mountain College to the early 1970s. Brown is a good writer and uses old journals and correspondence, plus interviews and research to document the burgeoning world of avant-garde music and dance. I learned alot about Cunninghams's style and how the dances were contructed. She creates some great portraits of her fellow performers, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg who was the company's production designers through the 1960s when his own career was blossoming. I wish the book had a little more humor and i wouldn't have minded some gossip either. All in all though, a very absorbing read.
January 2, 2012
"When asked if Suite by Chance was 'an abstract dance,' Merce is quoted as saying that he did not see how humans could be abstract" p. 53.
"Whatever John believed, I'm convinced that there are 'stories' and 'psychological problems' hidden away in a secret subtext in many of Merce's dances. Merce relishes conundrums and riddles, and his skills in deception are Promethean. He's like a fox, agile and sly, unexcelled at putting people off his scent" p.165-6.
"Whatever John believed, I'm convinced that there are 'stories' and 'psychological problems' hidden away in a secret subtext in many of Merce's dances. Merce relishes conundrums and riddles, and his skills in deception are Promethean. He's like a fox, agile and sly, unexcelled at putting people off his scent" p.165-6.
September 25, 2013
This is a book full of gems. I was reading it with one thing in mind: John Cage. Carolyn Brown delivered for me but I had to work to find them. She and Cage were great friends, she relished his quirky genius and it came through in her writing. The behind the scenes look at a dancer's life through the growing pains of an internationally recognized and ground-breaking dance company was a revelation.
February 9, 2010
Very detailed voyage through the seismic shifts in dance, art and music during the kate 40's, fifties and sixties. Intimate and yet discreet, a real treasure for dancers and anyone who cares about what it takes to create something completely original.
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July 21, 2010A most-detailed memoir. Day-to-day recording of what was eaten, who said what and sometimes why.
Admittedly, I dragged through a lot of the details. They're all very welcome-- it's just a large dose all at once.
Admittedly, I dragged through a lot of the details. They're all very welcome-- it's just a large dose all at once.
July 18, 2007
A memoir of years as a dancer with the Cunningham company, this book is charming and informative, though perhaps somewhat slavish in relation to Cage's sainthood. But I haven't got very far yet.
Want to Read
July 22, 2009INTERESTING, Carolyn has a lot of stories to tell. Taking me a while to get through it
Read
January 29, 2014Love this book. Interesting account of the time, Cunningham and Cage.
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