Merce Cunningham

Roger Copeland is Professor of Theater and Dance at Oberlin College. He is coeditor of the widely used anthology What is Dance? His essays about dance, theater, and film have appeared in The New York Times, The NewRepublic, The Village Voice, and many other publications including The Encyclopedia of Dance and Ballet.

• Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 From Graham to Cunningham: An Unsentimental Education 2 Portrait of the Artist as a Jung Man 3 Beyond the Ethos of Abstract Expressionism 4 The Limitations of Instinct 5 Contemporary Classicism: Re-Discovering Ballet 6 Primitive Mysteries 7 The Sound of Perceptual Freedom 8 Cunningham, Cage, and Collage 9 Dancing for the Digital Age 10 Re-Thinking the Thinking Body: The Gaze of Upright Posture 11 Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Cunningham 12 Fatal Abstraction: Merce Cunningham and The Politics of Perception 13 Dancing in the Aftermath of 9/11 Index

"Copeland's book about the sixty-year career of Merce Cunningham is also a brilliant sixty-year history of theater, dance, art, music and intellectual movements in America. . . ." -- Sally Sommer, Professor of American Dance Studies at Florida State University."Examines the trajectory of Merce The Choreographer and places him just where I think he belongs--as a global artist of the twentieth century moving in all directions into the twenty-first." -- Valda Setterfield, Member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 1964-1974"Copeland's book will bring joy to Cunningham partisans." -- Allan Ulrich, Dance Magazine