Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham Carolyn Brown Books Review

Correction Appended

Carolyn Brown's rich account of 20 years of dancing with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, "Chance and Circumstance," provides an insider's portrait of two pioneering modernists who ventured into uncharted territory in the realm of dance and music. Brown vividly evokes the thrills and struggles inherent to true liberation, and describes the courage requisite to artistic inventiveness. She is a rare memoirist who focuses on her mentors' physical and spiritual leaps rather than on herself; her guileless revelations illuminate what went right and wrong in Cunningham and Cage's personal dealings, as well as in their fight for survival.

Rhythm in motion: Merce Cunningham, left, and John Cage in 1982.

By Carolyn Brown.

Illustrated. 645 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. .50.

Brown first saw Cunningham dance when she took a master class with him in 1951:

"He was slender and tall, with a long spine, long neck and sloping shoulders; a bit pigeonbreasted. There was a lightness of the upper body which contrasted with the solid legs, so beautifully shaped, and the heavy, massive feet. … I remember Merce most clearly demonstrating a fall that began with him rising onto three-quarter point in parallel position, swiftly arching back like a bow as he raised his left arm overhead and sinking quietly to the floor on his left hand, curving his body over his knees, rising on his knees to fall flat out like a priest at the foot of the cross, rolling over quickly and arriving on his feet again in parallel position - all done with such speed and elegance, suppressed passion and catlike stealth that my imitative dancer's mind was caught short. I could not repeat it. I could only marvel at what I hadn't really seen. His dancing was airborne. … Merce Cunningham had an appetite for dancing that seemed to me then, as it does today, to be his sole reason for living. … He was a strange, disturbing mixture of Greek god, panther and madman."

Only another dancer could capture Cunningham's extraordinary physical prowess, dexterity and deliberate emotional abandon. And only someone with Brown's intrinsic personal modesty and generous spirit could be so trenchant about the man who has enchanted but plagued her from then until now.

The book follows Cunningham's company from its formative years in squalid conditions to glamorous world tours. Unwilling to settle for clichés, Brown questions the notion that Cunningham got his ideas for dance movements by watching people on the street from a high window. She maintains that Cunningham's work has more meaning, and depends less on chance, than he often admitted. Similarly, she does not hesitate to claim that George Balanchine resorted to "daisy-chain contortionist acrobatics" and "girlie-show kitsch" when choreographing to modern composers like Schoenberg and Ives, teetering on "the Mickey Mouse-‘Fantasia' aesthetic" in what the public perceives as undisputed masterworks. Right or wrong, Brown writes with the courage and conviction of a true devotee.

She rounds out the portraits of her characters by depicting them as the children of their parents. John Cage's taste for the unconventional was in his genes. The year Cage was born, 1912, his father invented a submarine run by a gasoline engine (worthless to the government, since enemy ships could detect its location from the bubbles produced); John Milton Cage Sr. also devised an alcohol-based panacea for all woes and patented a wall-size television projection system. However creative Cage Sr. was, though, when his son's "Suite by Chance" was first performed in the 1950s, he and Carolyn Brown's father said "they both made better music in the ‘water closet.'" Cage's and Brown's mothers were offended by electronic blasts that they felt deliberately imitated human wind during a plié; in fact, Brown says, "the flatulent sound … occurred completely by chance and took Merce (and the composer!) by surprise." Brown's parents wept after seeing the large Robert Rauschenberg painting for which her husband had paid , believing their son-in-law might be mentally ill. Cunningham's mother, Mayne, appears when the company spends a Thanksgiving holiday in the choreographer's hometown, Centralia, Wash. Mayne brings out Wilhelmina, a floppy lifesize "girl-doll" whose shoes are still attached to the larger shoes that young Merce wore when doing a ballroom act with her.

Correction: April 22, 2007

A review on April 1 about "Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham," by Carolyn Brown, misstated the composer of the music for "Suite by Chance," a 1953 Merce Cunningham Dance Company piece. It was Christian Wolff, not John Cage.