Merce Cunningham Quotes

#1. My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day.

Merce Cunningham

#2. Light or luminosity is created by the way elements are juxtaposed. They become reflective and a radiance comes from putting different things together.

Merce Cunningham

#3. There are no fixed points in space,

Merce Cunningham

#4. The only way to do it is to do it.

Merce Cunningham

#5. You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you 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.

Merce Cunningham

#6. Dancing is a spiritual exercise in a physical form.

Merce Cunningham

#7. I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn't particularly interested in doing.

Merce Cunningham

#8. I'm not expressing anything. I'm presenting people moving.

Merce Cunningham

#9. The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too ...

Merce Cunningham

#10. I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself.

Merce Cunningham

#11. Falling is one of the ways of moving.

Merce Cunningham

#12. Anything can feed you, depending on the way you look at it.

Merce Cunningham