In the Westbeth studio in Greenwich Village, a vast, iron-beamed space with radiant views of New York city streaming in through every window, the Merce Cunningham Company is warming up for the day's rehearsals. Wearing threadbare tights and woolly leg-warmers, the dancers put their limber bodies through the usual paces, slowly stretching in great, arching steps that seem to consume an acre of floor-space, shaking out their joints in splashes of muscle and grace.
It takes a little while to notice, tucked away in one corner behind a raised platform, the old man sitting at his table, "dreaming up steps". Looking up nervously now and then, he scribbles away in a note-pad, twisting tiny stick-figures into odd, off-kilter shapes, right until the moment when the rehearsal is scheduled to begin. Then he puts the paper to one side and raises himself from the chair, a tortuous process that seems to take over a minute.
Only when he takes his first, halting steps is it possible to see the full harrowing extent of his infirmity: one leg delicate, a little bowed, the other collapsed, crumpled like a parody of one of his contorted line drawings. With great effort, he drags himself over to a barre that runs the length of the room and, his buckled feet scraping the floor, uses it to pull himself along. Only when he has neared the end of his agonising journey, do the lithe, young bodies cease their exercises and stand to attention.
"What a beautiful morning," he announces, in a shaking, barely audible voice. "It was this kind of day - bright and sunny and clear - when I landed in New York for the first time and I thought: 'Oh boy, this is it'. Great things could happen here." He then pauses, surveys the dancers for a moment and smiles: "All right then, let's begin..."
Merce Cunningham is, without doubt, the world's greatest living choreographer. His name stands alongside Martha Graham and George Balanchine in the pantheon of mercurial figures that transformed 20th century dance, though his work arguably reaches further and deeper, celebrating sheer movement for its own stark, austere sake. "He's just continued to astound people and stay outside of any fashion or polemic," says fellow choreographer Bill T Jones, "Merce is the champion of the struggle to say that dance is it's own primary language."
At the height of his powers, Cunningham was also a peerless performer. His ability to launch himself into the air was legendary, often drawing gasps from the audience, most famously in the celebrated scene in Martha Graham's Letter To The World in 1940 when, to the cue of Graham's "Dear March, come in," the young Cunningham, in top hat and tails, would bound across the stage. However, it was through his own, eccentric choreography that his feral radiance really shone: "He never moved like anybody else in the company," says Marianne Simon, a Cunningham troupe member, "he looked not like a man, but like a gazelle or a lily blooming in the field."
His genius was like a force of nature, sending unlikely jolting, shuddering ripples through his arms and pelvis and legs. Some say, "he was an animal". And it's easy to see why, in pieces such as the startling 1960 work Crises, with its darting, shifting solo, outstretched one moment, spastic and convulsive the next or in the finale of Place, where Cunningham gave one of his most disturbing performances, thrashing around wildly inside a transparent plastic sack.
Even at the end of his career - he performed later than anyone bar Graham herself - just a flicker of his boney hands could radiate a tremendous energy: "I remember watching a new solo of his, and he is crawling around the floor and doing all kinds of crazy things," says Remy Charlip, who danced with the Cunningham company for its first 11 years, "and it was like looking into his psyche. I thought he was having a fit and I remember saying: "He's not going to do that on stage, is he? He can't do that in public?"
This same naturally iconoclastic spirit also shaped the radical approach of this choreography. With his partner and mentor, the composer John Cage, Cunningham dreamt up some of the most radical and sometimes downright perverse performance notions of the 20th century: flipping coins or throwing dice to decide the structure of pieces; wilfully destroying the time-honoured bond between dance and music.
In the field of modern dance, these ideas would eventually influence Twyla Tharp, Richard Alston and Siobhan Davies. Cunningham would also have an enormous impact on other creative fields, on experimental theatre practitioners such as Robert Wilson and choreographer/director Meredith Monk. It is no surprise that one of theatre's greatest innovators is numbered among his earliest supporters: "Cunningham's group is in the tradition of Martha Graham in many ways, but in one most of all," wrote Peter Brook in 1964. "The very things that are criticised, laughed at and ignored, will only a few months later be imitated everywhere."
By all accounts, Cunningham has mellowed considerably. With his halo of untidy white curls, he now comes across as a delightfully charming, easy-mannered, quaintly old-fashioned elderly gentleman, who repeats his well-worn anecdotes with the confidence of someone who knows his word is now creed. The debilitating arthritis and chronic hip condition that finally forced him off the stage in his early 70s gives his body a brittle, almost translucent quality. However, he transcends his frailty with an open smile and a decidedly unpretentious wit.
But as long-time members and associates of the company will openly testify, this wasn't always the case. Right up until the death in 1992 of his partner John Cage, who had run much of company life, organised tours, even mediated in disputes with dancers, Cunningham was often an aloof, cold, difficult and demanding presence: "He would have these sort of black moods when you couldn't get through to him at all," remembers David Vaughan, original company manager and now company archivist. "When I started to work with him, on some days I would feel it was like walking into this completely impenetrable wall around him. We all felt that." Some have even gone so far as to assert that the same caprice and obsessiveness that made the work great also led him to take dangerous risks, both with himself and with his dancers: "Of course, he crippled himself by doing some of these wild things," says one company member. "He did a dance where people were like twisting and torqueing and spiralling their bodies. The company used to call it 'whiplash'."
Cunningham is also protective of his personal life, and his relationship with Cage still remains one of the great enigmas of the avant-garde. The blank canvas meticulously maintained by both has allowed detractors to paint a picture of the loquacious Cage as "Svengali", feeding ideas and theories to his younger, more taciturn protégé. And while neither denied the fact of his romantic attachment, it had remained until now unfurnished with even the most rudimentary details: "I do the cooking," Cage commented wryly, when pressed once by a gay activist for a few morsels of information, "and Merce does the dishes." Little more than this has ever been divulged before, either in Cage's biography or in the voluminous press coverage of Cunningham.
However, it would appear that there was considerably more to their union, which seems to have been marked by affairs with male dancers in the company. At least once they shared the affections of the same young dancer. It is possibly the fundamentally fraught and complex nature of their 50-year relationship - and not, as is often cited, lingering fear from the beginning of their time together, when homosexuality was still an offence punishable by law -that continues to fuel Cunningham's silence in this relatively open-minded era: "I don't think I was guarded about my personal life," he says gently, "It is quite true I didn't speak about it very much but I didn't see any reason to speak about it. John and I were together. We did our work together. We travelled together. What more is there to say?"
Mercier Philip Cunningham was born in the small lumber town of Centralia, Washington on April 16 1919, the third son of Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer of Irish descent, and Mayme Joach, a teacher. From a young age, Mercier displayed a gregarious streak that marked him out, as he lightheartedly puts it, as the "criminal" among a family of lawyers: "He liked the beach and beach business - the sand and all kind of captured his attention, whirling around in it," says his older brother Dorwin, a retired lawyer who still lives in Washington State. "And if the circus came to town, when they would be going through the streets, I remember Merce would get up and do sort of a dance, just as a youngster would."
At 12 he began studying tap-dancing with a former vaudeville and circus performer named Mrs Barrett, who ran an improvised local academy. After he left high school, Mercier made a half-hearted attempt to study at the George Washington University in Washington DC, taking literature and theatre history courses. Dorwin, who was studying law in DC, kept a journal of this time: "We ate out and Swords [their flatmate] complained about the expenses," he reads falteringly from the entry for October 11 1936. "Then Mercier arrives, bubbling over with enthusiasm after seeing the Jooss ballet in the National Theatre. Such interest as his must be the first outward signs of latent genius."
However, Mercier only lasted one semester at university, enrolling instead at the Cornish School for Performing and Visual Arts in Seattle, an astonishing stroke of good fortune that would transform his life. First he got himself into the 8am dance class of Bonnie Bird, an ex-Martha Graham dancer, who would prove a formative influence. Then, during his second year there, a 27-year-old composer named John Cage was employed as rehearsal pianist, relocating from California with his wife Xenia Kashevaroff. Cage had studied composition under Schoenberg and already had something of a radical, iconoclastic outlook: "He started a percussion programme," says Cunningham, "and once I had mastered the piece, he came and said 'You were playing everything absolutely perfectly. Now just go a little further and make a few mistakes.' I thought 'that is a marvellous idea'."
At the end of his second year at Cornish, in the summer of '39, Cunningham hitch-hiked to Mills College in California where the Bennington School of the Dance was holding its summer school, with tutorials run by famous figures such as Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm and Martha Graham. "I didn't know anything about her [Graham]; I had never seen her dance," Cunningham admits, "I think that she conducted the last two weeks and I remember this woman who was really small, compared to myself. But such a force."
Young Mercier also made an instant impression on Graham, who offered him a place in her company if he came to New York. He immediately travelled back to Centralia to break the news to his parents: "My mother's face fell. But my father, who was a very bright intelligent man, he looked at me and he looked at her and then he said: 'Oh, let him go. He's going to go anyway.' And so I went." After three days on a train, Cunningham arrived in New York on a sunny late-summer day in 1939: "I stepped onto the pavement and I said 'This is home'. It was immediate." He then made his way to the the Martha Graham Studio: "Before classes began, I walked in the door. She was standing there and she said: 'Oh! I didn't think you'd come.' I didn't say it but I thought to myself: 'Lady, you don't know me'."
That season Graham was beginning work on her landmark work Every Soul Is A Circus, and she cast Cunningham in one of the lead male roles: "I thought that was wonderful. I get to be dancing. It wasn't until the performances I suddenly thought: 'Oh, I 'm performing on Broadway in New York.' It was really quite a remarkable feeling."
As Graham company member, Nina Fonaroff - now 86 - recalls: "As a person he was enticing. He was a Puck - irresistible, and very funny too. And as a dancer he was a phenomenon, absolutely extraor dinary. And he had such passion for it. I remember in Circus, when he made his debut, he had on these pink tights and a pink top, and his heart was beating so hard you could practically see it thumping with excitement."
Cunningham, who by now had shortened his first name to Merce, went on to dance lead roles in El Penitente (where he played Christ) and Letter To The World, a piece based on Emily Dickinson's poetry. Graham's relatively narrative-based approach couldn't contain or satisfy Cunningham, who by the end of this time with the company, was already choreographing his own pieces: "I remember one day he came bouncing up saying, 'I have a dance, I have a dance. Come see, come see'." says Fonaroff. "And so I followed him into the studio and he did this thing, almost walking on his knees and jumping up and down. It was called Totem Ancestor. I'd never seen anything like it."
The real catalyst for Cunning ham's break with the Graham company was the arrival of John Cage who had moved to New York with his wife Xenia in the summer of 1942. Cage wrote the music for their first solo programme in 1944, which included Totem Ancestor, a solo called Root Of An Unfocus, and Tossed As It Is Untroubled, inspired by Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "I date my beginning from this concert", Cunningham says.
During rehearsals, Cage and Cunningham also formulated one of their most fundamental tenets: the separation of music and dance. "We could agree on a common structure for a particular dance and John could compose to that structure and I could choreograph. In the beginning, there were points in that structure where the music and dance came together. But later we abandoned that and made them entirely independent." By the early 50s, at the instigation of Cage, Cunningham began to use "chance operations" to formulate the ele ments of his pieces, particularly in the key 1952 piece Suite By Chance: "The individual sequences, and the length of time, and the directions in space were discovered by tossing coins," he says.
Many of these ideas were tested and developed not only through Cunningham's occasional performances but also through the famous summer sessions at the celebrated Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where in 1952 Cunningham and Cage masterminded the world's first "Happening". That summer in Black Mountain also saw the birth of "Merce Cunningham and Dance Company", a startling ensemble of dancers such as Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Jo-Anne Melsher and Remy Charlip which, over the next few years, would give form to some of Cunningham's ground- breaking works: 1953's Septet, where a still, balletic style is positioned next to the music of Eric Satie, and Minutiae in 1954, which marks the beginning of Robert Rauschenberg's 10-year stint as resident designer.
However, it is not just for the quality of the work that the dancers still nostalgically refer to this early period as the Golden Age, but also because of the distinctive company spirit, forged by communal hardships. Reviews were almost universally negative: "His dance language is for the initiated few who are as interested in contemplating Mr Cunningham's navel as he is himself," Dance Magazine said in 1953. "Have a little Mercy, Merce," a later headline would proclaim.
But diatribes did little more than steel a curiously robust sense of mission, as the company toured their pieces in a clapped-out Volkswagen bus, often driving inordinate distances for a single performance and playing to meagre audiences: "It took exactly nine people and a ton of luggage," remembers dancer Carolyn Brown. "We sometimes drove all day and into the wee hours. I remember giving a performance without sleeping at all. But it really was a lot of fun.
"John was a wonderful leader. He and [composer] David Tudor would get into these wonderful conversations. Meanwhile, Merce would be very quiet and study Russian and read or knit. The rest of us would play games. It just was a great time to develop a real company because we were so close together."
By this time, the relationship between Cunningham and Cage was deeply personal as well as inextricably professional. Prior to this involvement, Cunningham appears to have conducted predominantly heterosexual relationships, both during his time with the Martha Graham company - when he was deeply attached to a Bennington theatre student - and earlier at the Cornish school, when he went out with a dance student named Joyce Holder.
"We were very close but it was always ambiguous," Holder recalls. "I was a little wild and was having many flings. I think that one of the attractions for Merce was that my other boyfriends could take him around in their cars if he needed to go someplace." Then, when Holder followed him to New York, she witnessed the formation of the Cage/Cunningham bond in 1942: "Merce would always hint to me that it was very valuable for his work. Music parts drove him crazy and John composing for him solved that problem. His implication to me always was that their relationship was mutually advantageous on that level."
Equally indistinct was the nature of the union itself, which remained clandestine for decades: "I didn't have any inkling," says Marianne Simon, who left the company in 1958, "and I don't think I was alone in that among the female dancers. We were all madly in love with [Merce] in those early days."
From an early stage, however, there were affairs with young male dancers in the company: "It was and it wasn't [an open relationship]," says one of early dancers, who was close to both men, "it was kind of secretive and at the same time they both slept with other people. Later on, Merce took up with a younger dancer in the company who did not want John to come on tour any more, and that was crushing to John because he built that company. John got all the dates and wrote all of the letters anddrove and cooked and made all the arrangements."
At times it seems to have been precisely this dominance that Cunningham was struggling against, both in his affairs and in his general behaviour: "John was the brains and Merce was the body," continues the same troupe member. "Merce couldn't really protect himself, so he would do things like hide in a room for a week and wouldn't come out and wouldn't eat. John would get frantic. That was his way of dealing with John."
Yet, if Cunningham really did worry that his work would never be fully appreciated and would always remain in Cage's shadow, grounds for at least some of his fears would evaporate in the pivotal year of 1964. Tiring of New York's indifference, the company decided to tour Europe and Asia to showcase some of their strongest work: Winterbranch, a relentless piece based on the theme of falling, featuring La Monte Young's stereophonic buzzsaw soundtrack; Story, which involved scrap remade by Rauschenberg from whatever junk was lying around the theatre; and Crises, in which the dancers were bound by giant elastic bands.
At the first major stopover, Paris, they met a familiar reaction: "People threw things at us," Carolyn Brown recalls, "eggs and tomatoes. During the interval they went out to get more." During the Venice dates, things began to pick up; the press reception was respectful and Rauschenberg picked up first prize at the Bienniale art show. However, by the time they reached London, the Merce Cunningham company was being hailed as a sensation: "At a blow, ballet has been brought right up in line with the front-rank experiments in the other arts," raved Alexander Bland in the Observer, "something which has hardly happened since the days of Diaghilev. Here is heart-warming proof that it is an art with a future, opening up ranges of possibilities which stretch out of sight."
After an initial scintillating run at Sadler's Wells, attended by everyone from Frederick Ashton to Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, they transferred for an equally triumphant three-week run at the Phoenix: "Merce was really quite astonished. In New York, the most he'd ever played was two nights," recalls Michael White, who produced the London leg of the tour.
The tour proceeded in a rather chaotic fashion through Scandinavia, onward to Prague (where the posters trumpeted dances "in the style of West Side Story") and Poland, and then further east to Bombay. By the time they reached Japan, the strain was beginning to tell, with tensions particularly clamorous between Cage and Cunningham on the one hand and on the other between them and Rauschenberg, who had made the mistake of becoming far too famous in the wake of his Venice conquest.
After the general critical success of the tour, and particularly the rapture of the London reviewers, subsequently reported in the US press, the entire character of the company changed. While the controversy, the sporadic booing and walkouts, and the financial crises would continue for some decades yet, the critical climate became infinitely more favourable, the company grew in size and professionalism, and Cunningham him self began a steady upward trajectory towards avant garde canonisation.
The latter half of the 60s saw further Cunningham highlights, notably 1968's Walkaround Time, which employed sets based on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, and the stunning piece Rainforest, also in the same year, strewn with Andy Warhol's helium-filled pillows. In the 70s and early 80s, alongside the video artist Charles Atlas, Cunningham coopted video techniques in pieces such as 1975's Blue Studio: Five Segments, and Channel/Inserts in 1981.
By the early 90s Cunningham's physical condition was beginning to severely restrict how much he could perform or even demonstrate to the dancers, and he turned to computer technology, devising ever more ingeniously abstract and random steps using a computer program called LifeForms. Still on the cutting edge at the age of 81, he has taken this a step forward in a work called Biped, which uses state of the art Motion Capture technology to record the movements of his dancers and reproduce them as computer animations within the dance. As audiences at London's Barbican will discover next week, the piece, featuring the music of Gavin Bryars, is mesmerising, the ultimate combination of art and technology.
The main event during this latest period of Cunningham's work and life was, of course, the death of Cage in August 1992. After returning from the New York studio to their Sixth Avenue apartment, Cunningham discovered him collapsed on the kitchen floor, having suffered a stroke. Despite the many difficulties in their relationship, the two men had been, according to Cage's assistant Laura Kuhn, "very affectionate" in their final years together, openly so perhaps for the first time, now that neither had anything left to prove.
The loss of Cage would shatter a dynamic established over half a century: "Because John answered the questions so brilliantly, I kept my mouth shut. But suddenly he was not around to do it. And so I was forced to speak." Most tellingly, however, Cunningham was back in the studio the day after Cage's death: "I decided quite quickly: 'Well, John is dead, there is nothing I can do about that, and I'm just going to go on.' I thought about it. I would find my own solution."
That solution was of course, the work - the force that had sustained and nourished their relationship, made sense of the affairs and the infidelities, smoothed over the petty jealousies. Cunningham's obsession with his work was also the force that drove him, perhaps, to take risks with his body, to continue performing long after it was wise, to demand - and often get - the impossible from his dancers, to push his choreography beyond the bounds of what was thought possible.
"You have to love dancing to stick to it," he has written, "It gives nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls."
Life at a glance: Mercier Philip Cunningham
Born: April 16 1919 Centralia, Washington, USA.
Educated: Centralia High School; Cornish School of the Arts,Seattle, 1937-39.
Early career: Soloist, Martha Graham company, 1939 to 1945; leading roles in Every Soul Is A Circus, 1939, El Penitente, 1940, and Letter To The World, 1940.
Works include: Suite By Chance 1952; Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul 1952; Septet 1953; Minutiae 1954; Antic Meet 1958; Summerspace1958; Crises 1960; Field Dances 1963; Story 1963; Winterbranch 1964; Variations V 1964; Rainforest 1968; Walkaround Time 1968; Canfield 1969; Changing Steps 1973; Blue Studio: Five Segments 1975; Torse 1976; Channel/Inserts 1981; Quartet 1982; Enter 1992; Ocean 1994; Biped 2000.
Some awards: Guggenheim Fellowship for choreography 1954 and 1959; Laurence Olivier award for best new dance production1985; inducted into National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame, Saratoga, 1993; Golden Lion, Venice Biennale 1995; Lilian Gish award 2000.