Miami artist Daniel Arsham expresses his thoughts in the wake of choreographer Merce Cunninghman’s death last Sunday…

It is with both sadness and a sense of joy that I relay to you the news 

of Merce Cunningham’s passing. It happens to the best of us. I was 

introduced to Merce in his apartment on 18th street in October of 2006. 

My plane was late getting into New York and Jenny and I were both 

fearful that we would be late for my first meeting with him. When we 

arrived an hour late we were relieved to find Merce sitting with his cat 

and Trevor having a glass of red wine, unaware of our tardiness. Merce 

was 86 then, I was 25, and had just been commissioned by him to create 

the Decor for his new work eyeSpace…

We talked about a lot of things 

that evening, none of them had to do with the new piece. He gave me no 

direction other than that the piece needed to be safe for his dancers. A 

few things I remember from that evening are: A story Merce told about 

having tomatoes thrown at him during an early performance in Paris, the 

large stack of drawings of animals on his table  (he made drawings 

everyday, usually of animals, fossils, or plants), the flat files full 

of artworks that Trevor showed me through, the works hanging all around 

the apartment by friends of his including Duchamp, Johns, Cage… We ate 

salmon, spinach and couscous. I drank white wine with Trevor, Jenny and 

Merce drank red. Merce served John Cage’s cookies for desert. (I have to 

admit, I never really liked those cookies : )

When Bonnie Clearwater told me that Merce was looking at my work in 

anticipation of working with me I had to jog my memory of who he was. I 

knew his name from my studies on Duchamp but my knowledge of dance 

didn’t extend much past knowing the names of him, Martha Graham, and a 

vague recollection of what happened at the Judson Church. I became a 

student again. I went to see Merce’s company four times that fall at the 

Joyce Theater, and watched as much video of his company as I could. Had 

I been asked by another choreographer to make a set a would have been in 

trouble as I had no experience whatsoever with the stage, in fact the 

first time I was ever on a “stage” was two days before the premiere of 

“eyeSpace” at the Arsht Center in Miami.  Merce worked with chance and 

thought of an evening of dance as three separate arts coming together 

for the convenience of the audience. The Dance, the Music and the Decor 

were all created independently of each other without the collaborators 

knowing what the other is doing. When these three are brought together 

the outcome can be remarkably congruous. About working this way he told 

me ” I want to open the possibilities to various results and no /one/ is 

particularly better”. What a miraculous vision to believe in me at that 

age and that point in my career. I wouldn’t have trusted me to do it! He 

had a remarkable ability to trust , and I believe had had no fear of 

failure.

What I saw in those performances at the Joyce was an education in the 

immense possibilities of the stage. A six sided box with permeable 

entrances at the sides, and an invisible front. The stage presents a 

unique opportunity to view 3 dimensional objects. With the condition of 

a fixed audience all kinds of tricks can be played and perception is 

easily modified. I observed that his dancers could exit the stage on one 

side and re-emerge from the other side without question from the 

audience. Almost as if the space beyond the wings is a nether space that 

can transport action to any other point on the stage. My set design for 

eyeSpace used this idea in a vertical format, causing a form to appear 

to sink into the stage floor with the portion that would be under the 

surface emerging from the ceiling.

I never really knew what Merce thought of my design, we never spoke 

directly about it. The piece did become part of his company’s repertoire 

which was his way of voicing approval. We did talk about a great many 

other things usually having to do with animals. After I recalled to him 

my experience fly fishing in North Carolina, we talked for an hour or so 

about how chance plays a role in the action of casting the line upstream 

and letting it float downstream. He relayed this to both the 

upstage/downstage parts of the stage as well as the technique in fly 

fishing called “matching the hatch” which is knowing what insects are 

hatching in the river at that particular moment so as to better your 

chances of the fish biting the fly. I asked him if there was a kind of 

“matching the hatch” that could be used in his chance procedure, 

bettering the odds of making something interesting in his dances. He 

kind of chuckled and went back to talking about river rocks and trout.

In the summer of 2008 I was having dinner again with Merce and Trevor 

and they were talking about an upcoming tour in France that Merce was 

very excited about. The company was to perform in small theaters, 200 – 

400 seats, much different that his usual Paris digs like Théâtre de la 

Ville, or The Grand Palais. Merce was happy because these theaters would 

have a much different audience (maybe a tomato crowd!), many of whom 

would likely never have have seen his company perform. Merce said to me 

that these theaters were the types of places that he would have 

performed at in the early 1960’s when Bob Rauschenberg was the artistic 

director of his company. He asked if I would like to go with him on this 

tour and “do what Bob did” for the sets. What Bob “did” was create all 

the sets in situ in the actual theaters. They didn’t travel with any 

materials so when they arrived Bob would gather things he found on the 

street or in the basements of the theaters and create the decor with 

that detritus. I wasn’t interested in replicating what Bob had done but 

I was interested in the idea of using what was there to create a 

situation for the Merce’s company to perform with. For the Val de Marne 

tour this past April in France I decided to use the actual architecture 

of the theater as the set. With the help of Clement Arnaux( the 

assistant that Bénédicte Pesle had generously hired to help me) I built 

a black wall at the very back of the stage. It appeared to the audience 

to be the back wall of the theater.

When the curtain opened the stage was completely Black, no decor. I’m 

sure it shocked people who were expecting a rehashing of Rauschenberg’s 

concepts (as the program indicated)! During the performance I cut large 

holes in this wall allowing light to penetrate into the stage space. 

Pieces of the wall fell onto the stage and I remember thinking that it 

was going to upset the dancers. It was kind of naughty and they actually 

loved it. There was really no way to know if the wall would even stand 

up to holes being cut into it. There was no time to rehearse the cutting 

so the first time I saw it was after the first performance! Trevor gave 

me a lot of ideas about pacing of this and in true Merce form, told me 

about the way Cage used both sound and silence as elements (he was 

suggesting that I needed to pause more while cutting through the wall). 

When I returned to New York following the tour I had dinner again with 

Merce and told him about what I did in France ( as with my set for 

eyeSpace, he was unaware of what I was going to do until it premiered). 

As I recounted to him how I cut through the wall and told him about all 

the erosion forms and pieces falling onto the stage floor he nodded and 

asked questions about timing and materials. I showed him photos of how 

the four different sets looked. His response was “they are all different 

because you cannot break the same hole twice”. That was it. The rest of 

the dinner was spent talking about his favorite couscous restaurant in 

Paris.

My chance meeting with Merce has profoundly shaped both my life and my 

practice. He was a remarkable person and was unlike anyone I have met in 

my life. His courage and penchant for risk and experimentation is an 

inspiration to me. Meeting Merce has led to other collaborations and 

introduced me to an entire new world of people who have become very 

important in my life. It is very possible that I have met YOU because of 

Merce. If there is one thing that I have learned from him it is that 

anything has the “possibility” to work, It may not always be successful 

but the only way to do it, is to do it.

– Daniel Arsham