Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham

This is a long and interesting book about dancing with the Cunningham company from its inception at Black Mountain College to the early 1970s. Brown is a good writer and uses old journals and correspondence, plus interviews and research to document the burgeoning world of avant-garde music and dance. I learned alot about Cunninghams's style and how the dances were contructed. She creates some great portraits of her fellow performers, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg who was the company's production designers through the 1960s when his own career was blossoming. I wish the book had a little more humor and i wouldn't have minded some gossip either. All in all though, a very absorbing read.

This extremely well-written, erudite, and professional memoir was an especially compelling read for me since I began my professional modern dance training "as an experiment", in a graduate level Cunningham technique class taught by Katherine Kerr, in the mid-70's-just a few short years after the author, Carolyn Brown, retired from her long career as a leading dancer in Merce Cunningham's dance company (and Merce's most frequent and important dance partner).

Katherine Kerr was fast becoming known as "the new Carolyn Brown" during the time I trained with her, and was a major influence on my own decision to switch from ballet to modern dance, so it was interesting to read the whole "back story" leading up to that time. Carolyn Brown's show more account of her life in and out of class, and "on the road"-all over the world- with Merce, (and John Cage, Bob Rauschenburg, and Jasper Johns)-made clear many ideas that had been handed down to me through my teacher that I never really understood before, but had just accepted "on faith". show less