In 1940, Martha Graham choreographed El
Penitente and cast Erick Hawkins, her handsome
heartthrob, as The Penitent. The young Merce
Cunningham was a Christ figure. That same year, Graham
choreographed her Emily Dickinson dance, Letter to the
World, and cast Hawkins as The Dark Beloved.
Cunningham was the poet’s elfin wit. In 1944, Graham
choreographed Appalachian Spring and cast Hawkins
as The Bridegroom. Cunningham was a preacher.

Graham may have been concentrating hard on
Hawkins, who was indeed her dark beloved and eventual
(if skittish) bridegroom, but her take on Cunningham is the
more piercing portrait. Christ figure, cool humorist, guru—all
true. Cunningham would leave Graham’s company in 1945,
would head to Black Mountain College with John Cage
where, in a forty-days-forty-nights kind of immersion
(actually about two years), they would create an aesthetic
that was antithetical to Graham theatrics (and far more
lighthearted), and would do nothing less than redefine
purity in the theater, trading impulse for pulse, and feeling
for seeing. Here at the end of the twentieth century, after
more than forty years of dance-making, Cunningham is still
a visionary. While the great Paul Taylor, in his rippling
universe of leaping Manichean extremes, moral solstice
and eclipse, plays God in his repertory, Cunningham plays
Consciousness.

In other words, he plays. What Cunningham and
Cage fixed on so early, finally, and threateningly, was the
notion that the toss of a coin, the roll of the dice, the
reading of tea leaves or the I Ching