"So Light, Like the Mind"

“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, April 16, 1919-July 26, 2009

Innovator Merce Cunningham dedicated a lifetime to the art of dance.

Today, even though time is fleeting, technology gives us a way to watch Merce and his company

of dancers at work in the rehearsal studio.

Mondays with Merce. http://www.merce.org/mondayswithmerce.html

There is a quote from the Tao Te Ching on the www.merce.org homepage.

“...only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is fit to be entrusted with the world. Only he who can do it with love is worthy of being the steward of the world.”

Cunningham was one of the many students who went to school at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a school that was founded in 1933, now remembered as a moment when an artistic and educational experiment led to a burst of artistic innovation that is the stuff of legend. The college brought together artists and great thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller, Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and San Francisco artist Ruth Asawa. The ensuing work and influence of these great artists continues to move forward the ideals set forth at Black Mountain that art and life are not separate.

Learn more about the remarkable minds of historic Black Mountain College:

The PBS "American Master" Series features many Black Mountain College artists

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/black_mountain_college.html

"The College Died, but the Students Really Lived,"

NY Times article about the 1992 Black Mountain College reunion in San Francisco

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/14/arts/the-college-died-but-the-students-really-lived.html

Oral history interview with Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier, 2002 June 21-Jul 3, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/asawa02.htm