Merce Cunningham sits very high in my personal pantheon. In 2011 we got tickets to his company’s final performances. These were big, moving nights for us — even as I’ve always found it hard to describe what is so emotionally moving about his work. I wrestled with this and wrote about it for the Paris Review’s “Revisited” series.
…So even prior to (or outside of) the physical dance, there was already a parallel conceptual-art project that was an intense durational-performance work, an almost literal dance with death, a mourning ritual, an explosion of life within death, and an enlightened embracing and letting go of time all at once.
Read the piece here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/22/merce-cunninghams-posthumous-legacy-plan/