I think the first word that comes to mind,
is an adventure
It was an adventure to go and see
his company and him
in Fondation Maeght,
in the South of France, when I was about 19,
and I was an immensely innocent dancer,
and we, Richard Alston and I went
every night for about five nights,
we went to everything,
and every single performance we saw was a wonder
It was an experience I had never felt before,
and I had gone to art school, so
to some extent his marriage of thinking
between fine art and dance, was something
that meant something to me,
which I had not felt before
Well I'm thinking, sort of significant
historical figure in dance obviously, but
also with connections through music and art,
but from a dancer's perspective,
what I'm really seeing, is this kind of
very rigorous technique, language,
where there's no hiding place
I think for me, the Merce Cunningham question
occurred when I was at school,
and a few dancers in my class,
started to become interested in Merce,
and actually went to America, worked with him,
I always found it fascinating, it was just
the polar opposite to what
I was doing at the time, you know,
a young dancer at The Royal Ballet
but it always felt very cool, very modern
and I didn't,
I couldn't really,
mentally break into it
I was sort of obsessed with ballet at the time
but as I got older, I had more and more
interest in what Merce was doing
I remember thinking it was the first time
I'd seen a group of dancers performing,
where they weren't showing us what they had already perfected,
they weren't saying 'this is what we're
able to do, and now we're letting you see it'
they were very much saying,
we're engaged in these challenges
and it might go really well,
and it might go surprisingly and we're
actively still in pursuit of
something that we know is not quite attainable
and that fascinated me
It's a choreographer I've been following for
a very long time, since I started dancing
I myself, I'm very interested in lines
very interested in designing the space,
in time, I'm very interested in the
structure of the space, and the structure
of the body, and how those two things
relate to each other, and I really see
so many comparisons, in Merce's work
between everything, so it's
something that's very beautiful to me
I joined Michael Clark Company
and the first class I had, was Cunningham
and I hadn't experienced the technique
at all, during my training
and it slowly became
more of an essential tool
to not only Michael's work, but just
understanding your body, and knowing
how to move, and isolate different things,
for different reasons,
so just in general dance,
I think it's massively important,
it changed a lot
I had the opportunity to take class
with the company in the their home
in New York, probably 2011, or 2010 or 2012
and I would've loved to have had
an opportunity to audition
If I had been ten years older, if I was this
age ten years ago, sort of thing
I think it's fed, it's fed,
his technique has fed dance, in a way
that people don't really realise it
Merce Cunningham is
a huge name in the Ballet world,
it's someone that, I think has been
defying gravity almost, I would say,
and also probably for some dancers,
like working with music specifically
or working alongside the music
Well you know my background is,
I started in Classical Ballet, but I've
also done Horton technique, I've done
Limon, I've done Martha Graham,
a bit of Taylor
so for me, this kind of completes
my background
He's an important, a super important figure
in American modern dance, and so
it's really interesting for me to come,
come to this project, at this point in my career,
I've been in Paris for a long time,
he's obviously really incredibly revered in
France, and so this, this is special
I think this is quite special,
and it's nice for me also to come back to
kind of my roots, in a way,
which is American, you know, the traditional
kind of modern techniques
I had first heard about him
at the beginning of my career,
around the beginning of the 1980s, like 1983-1984
What he represents for me?
Well he's a huge part, really, of contemporary dance in France
in France, he was a big influence
He is a master, one could say
even if I never danced in that way
so for me, this guy
he's a dancer
he's a dancer through and through
The dancers can do this work of transferring,
and of re-appropriating the moves from the different dance pieces
This is something I find incredible
In thinking about
what Merce means to my life,
it's everything,
he's everything, he gave me a reason
to continue to work, he gave me a feeling
of usefulness, that I've been able to carry on
well past my time in the company
He gave me something to offer to the world,
I spent my entire adult life with him,
from eighteen to thirty-six, more time then I even spent
with my own parents,
and you know, the warmth, the generosity,
and the lack of judgement,
that I now try to impart in my own teaching
It has meant the world to me