US choreographer Merce Cunningham dies aged 90

The American avante-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham, one of the greatest pioneers of contemporary dance, has died in New York aged 90. Cunningham, whose dance career spanned eight decades, was revolutionary in abandoning ballet's conventional storytelling for a free-flowing style which focused on the poetry of dance.

Born in 1919 in Centralia, a small town near Seattle, Mercier began studying tap, folk and ballroom dancing from the age of 12. At college in Seattle he met the young composer John Cage, who was to become his lifelong partner and collaborator. Cunningham moved to New York in 1939, where he spent the next six years working as a solo dancer for Martha Graham, the hugely influential choreographer.
 
Cunningham presented his first solo New York concert in 1944, with music composed by Cage. It was the first of many collaborations with Cage - who eventually died in 1992 – and with other artists and musicians, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and, lately, the English alternative rockers Radiohead. In one of his final collaborations, in April this year, Cunningham celebrated his 90th birthday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the premiere of Nearly Ninety, which he set to new music from Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the New York band Sonic Youth.
 
Cunningham's determination to free his "imagination from its own cliches" and to challenge his audiences saw him choreograph almost 200 innovative and unique works. In Anti Meet Cunningham danced wearing a chair strapped to his back, while in Variations V he entered the stage on a bicycle. He also used video cameras and, in his seventies, a special computer programme, to try out new dance movements.

Asked in 1985 by the Wall Street Journal dance reviewer Robert Greskovic if he was out to shock his public, he replied: "No, no". Instead he chose to note what he once heard Cage say to a similar query: "I'm out to bring poetry into their lives."

It had already been announced that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, formed in 1953, would fold after his death. However, the company (pictured above in 2000) first will undertake a final two-year international tour.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:
 
Debra Craine, the Times: "In person he came across as a gentle man with an impish sense of humour. As a dancer, he was an endearing and gnomic presence. As a choreographer, his intellectual curiosity was legendary."

Robert Greskovic, Wall Street Journal: "For a mild-mannered individual who often referred to himself as a 'practical man', Cunningham remained an iconoclast. His works, with their independent elements of visual, aural and choreographic design, often became flash points, with audience members regularly walking out of his performances before the curtain came down. In the earliest days these walkouts could be vocal and tinged with outrage; in the later years, more sheepish, accompanied by murmurs of bewilderment."

Steve Schifferes, a BBC economics reporter, who once studied with Cunningham: "[He] was mesmerising in person and as a dancer... His technique, involving loosening up the lower back and making movement more free-flowing, was a relief to those who studied the tensed movements of his previous mentor, the great modern dancer Martha Graham, whose story-telling approach to dance he also rejected." ·