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Dance genius was "the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett"
Merce Cunningham
Revolutionary choreographer Merce Cunningham dies
Merce Cunningham, the revolutionary dancer and choreographer died "peacefully in his home of natural causes" on Sunday, a statement from the Cunningham Dance Foundation said. He was 90 and lived in New York. His longtime companion and frequent collaborator, the composer John Cage, died in 1992.
Judith Fishman, chairman of the foundation said: "Merce was an artistic maverick and the gentlest of geniuses. We have lost a great man and a great artist, but we celebrate his extraordinary life, his art and the dancers and the artists with whom he worked."
Cunningham continued to dance well into his 80s and celebrated his 90th birthday in April at the Brooklyn Academy in New York with the premiere of his latest work Nearly Ninety, set to new music by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, rock band Sonic Youth and Japanese composer Takehisa Kosugi. In June, he set up the Living Legacy Plan which is intended to continue his teachings into the future and includes a celebration of his work through a two-year world tour finishing in New York.
In his obituary of Cunningham, Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times (which once dubbed Cunningham "the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett") said: "Mr Cunningham ranks among the foremost figures of artistic modernism and among the few who have transformed the nature and status of dance theater, visionaries like Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine."
