The Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded in 1953 by the choreographer and his partner, the composer John Cage, at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Sixteen years later, the director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Lichtenstein — who had fallen in love with Cunningham's work when he studied with Cunningham at Black Mountain as an undergraduate — was in a position to offer several worthy and financially struggling dance companies a home in New York at BAM, including an annual two-week performance season and offices for the companies' administration. Cunningham's company was the first on his list.

This happy example of seemingly chance operations in everyday life was deceptive, however. Higher education has been an important patron of modern dance since the end of World War II, particularly in the case of the Cunningham company — where intellect and ideas, including chance operations, were engines driving the choreography, the music, the designs, and the lighting. Higher education provided some of the money and many of the thoughtful audiences that gave Cunningham and his colleagues a hospitable forum for their generally abstract, visually complex, and athletically demanding work, and also supplied the company with many of its dancers.

For much of the 1950s and 60s, the economic survival of Cunningham and his company was dependent to a remarkable degree on the performances, teaching gigs, and residencies they were able to arrange at American colleges. At the Connecticut College School of Dance, in 1958, Cun-ningham had the time and breathing room to choreograph one of his landmark dances, "Summerspace." At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cun-ningham was the first dancer appointed to its artist-in-residence program. At the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the University of Florida, and many other institutions, enlightened faculty members and administrators were able to recognize what federal appointees, prominent critics, and backbiting colleagues could or would not: that the dances of Merce Cunningham were both pristinely avant-garde in their compositional procedures and aesthetic premises, and truly beautiful and exciting to contemplate in live performance by him and his outstanding dancers.

Although today the work of Cunningham and Cage is revered, for the most part their native country was the last to acknowledge their value as artists. For all of the 1950s and nearly all of the 1960s, the company's applications for support from the U.S. State Department to make international tours were soundly rebuffed, even though other modern-dance companies, like Martha Graham's and Alvin Ailey's, were generously supported. For nearly three decades of Cunningham's career, professional presenters for his work in America were rare indeed. Critics outside New York frequently appreciated, even enjoyed, Cunningham's magnificent dancers and disciplined, imaginative, and deeply personal choreography — separating their evaluations of him from those of the inveterately (and sometimes aggressively) destabilizing sound scores by John Cage, David Tudor, and their associates. However, within New York, Cunningham and Cage, partners in art and life, were consistently and humiliatingly ignored by John Martin, the dance critic at The New York Times, and were also subject to jealous interference by fans and protectors of prominent modern-dance choreographers from the previous generation, most notably the former Martha Graham dancer Martha Hill, the visionary pedagogue at Bennington and Connecticut Colleges and at the Juilliard School. And so it was especially touching to hear Cunningham say in June that of all the places he has toured, New York is his favorite. He added, "The first step I put here years ago, I thought, 'This is home.'" The occasion was the opening of an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center. "Invention: Merce Cun-ningham & Collaborators" chronicled his company's history through manuscripts, films, costumes, sets, photographs, and scores.

These days, Cunningham enjoys so much documentation in a variety of media that it is possible for a university to teach a graduate course on him. Since its founding, the Cunningham company has frequently been filmed and televised in rehearsal and performance. Eventually, Cun-ningham also worked with the filmmakers Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan to make his own films of dances arranged for the camera. Excellent documentaries, beginning with Caplan's monumental Cage/Cunningham (1991), are also commercially available. And, over the years, a little library has accrued of writings by and about Cunningham, Cage, and such collaborators as the painter Robert Rauschenberg — who toured with the company in the early 1960s in order to redesign its settings, costumes, and lighting at each performance and who once (to the umbrage of choreographer and composer) described the Cunningham company as the biggest canvas he ever worked upon.

B ooks about Cunningham have been published in several Romance and Nordic languages, reflecting his company's dazzling success with audiences in Europe. Still, the majority of his commentators have come from Britain and America, and English speakers who would like to read about the world of this complex, peerlessly determined, and profoundly focused choreographer and virtuoso dancer have a wealth of material from which to choose. They might begin with the superb and extensive entry on him by the dance critic, historian, and longtime Cunningham company archivist David Vaughan in the International Encyclopedia of Dance (Oxford University Press, 1998) — ideal for undergraduates and new fans, regardless of whether they have dance backgrounds.

Also excellent for undergrads is the section on Cunningham in Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick's magnificent history No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2003), which puts Cunningham's career in a wider theatrical context. For grad students and serious dancers already interested in Cunningham — who apparently never, in half a century, missed a performance, even when he was so injured or ill that he could barely limp onto the stage — the book of choice is Vaughan's irreplaceable Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (Aperture, 1997), a trustworthy, illuminating, and exquisitely written artistic biography. In addition to an engaging history of the choreographer's unfolding creations, it includes the texts of key essays and lectures by him, as well as a meticulously researched and detailed chronology of his dances, from the 1938 solo "Unbalanced March," with music by Paul Hindemith (made when Cunningham was 20), to the 1996 "Rondo," with music by John Cage. Calvin Tomkins's profile of Cunningham in The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (Viking Press, 1965), his collection of New Yorker profiles on American avant-gardists of the 1960s and 70s, is also quite readable and sensible.

Richard Kostelanetz's edited anthology of essays by and about Cunningham and Cage, Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time (Chicago Review Press, 1992), is a very good survey of artists and critics. It includes some of the best early reviews of Cunningham in America, by Edwin Denby and others; transcripts of panels with Cunningham's dancers and composers; and some of the keenest writing on the Cage-Cunningham enterprise from the 1970s to the early 90s. It would be good for graduate or very knowledgeable undergraduate students.

James Klosty's well-known anthology, Merce Cunningham (Saturday Review Press, 1975), contains excellent photographs by Klosty but oddly resentful or partial comments by many of Cunningham's colleagues. Without a wider context, the book isn't helpful to students, in my view. Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (Routledge, 2004), a book-length essay by Roger Copeland, a professor of theater and dance at Oberlin College, is a voluble and devotedly subjective attempt to grapple with Cage and Cunningham's achievements through the prism of politics and intellectual tradition. As admirable as the author's impulses might be, the book is filled with iconoclastic, even polemical, generalizations. The author insists, for example, that Cunningham and Cage were consciously expressing a political point of view, influenced partly by opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and subsequent blacklistings of the 1950s, in their decision to maintain varying degrees of independence among the choreographer, composers, and designers during the preparation of new dances. Copeland also writes that the best articulation of "the way noise and randomness function in Cage and Cunningham's work" comes from the novelist William Burroughs — who, to my knowledge, had no connection whatsoever with either Cunningham or Cage. Such points might make this book most useful for doctoral students in dance studies. They would have the background and research experience to test the author's speculations.

Cunningham has published his own writing and conversation. Among his most admired personal writings is "Story: Tale of a Dance and a Tour," excerpts from his journal concerning the company's landmark, yearlong world tour in 1964, published in Dance Ink in 1995 and reprinted in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Its revelations include the fact that he was suffering at the time from an unspecified illness so debilitating that it required, in his words, "formidable injections" — a condition that he, characteristically private, did not share with some of his closest colleagues on the tour, who simply registered that he was very changeable in mood. Yet, to feel the weight of those details, one needs some background knowledge. The most interesting of his publications, for a student, would probably be The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation With Jacqueline Lesschaeve (M. Boyars, 1985). Lesschaeve proved to be a congenial interviewer, and Cunningham addressed at length her questions concerning his early dance experiences; his views on art, nature, and the spiritual; his composition of dances, including his use of the I Ching; and his way of working with Cage and other collaborators. The book is filled with anecdotes and records Cunningham's understated irony and sense of fun.

His Changes: Notes on Choreography (Something Else Press, 1968), which includes his charts and notes concerning his choreographic process, would be impenetrable to a newcomer but useful to a grad student. My personal favorite of his books is Other Animals: Drawings and Journals (Aperture, 2002), a collection of his animal drawings from a 20-year period. I find it delightful because, for me, it relates closely to some of his nature dances — "RainForest," "Inlets" (whose world premiere, in 1977, I happened to witness), "Beach Birds," and "Ocean." For someone who wasn't familiar with that repertory, the sophisticated observation commingled with a childlike charm in the pictures may not have the same magical resonance.

However, with this year's publication of Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), by the dancer Carolyn Brown, the Cage-Cunningham enterprise has the vivid, exacting, opinionated, wide-angled, and independent narrative it has needed to connect with a readership beyond scholars and current fans. Between 1952 and 1972, Brown devoted her body and mind (and ultimately sacrificed her loving marriage to the composer Earle Brown) to serve Cunningham and Cage as their de facto principal female dancer and as Cunningham's principal onstage partner. They provided her with gorgeous dancing roles, worldwide visibility, travel on tours as far as India and Japan, an oxygenated milieu of camaraderie among artists, and the opportunity to realize herself as a contributor to a pathbreaking artistic enterprise. She provided them with a crackerjack intelligence; a background in classical ballet that endowed her dancing with serenity and moral devotion, which Cunningham admired and was able to count on; an amazing memory and willingness to do the kind of solitary work that marks a star in dance; and a delight in choreographic innovation.

In her youth, Brown was a philosophy major and an aspiring writer, and her marriage helped to sharpen her understanding of the heady, crisscrossing points of view about cutting-edge innovation in music and art that marked European and American postwar intellectual circles. From that understanding, she can forthrightly state her opinions about whether the works of art she discusses are any good, which is tremendously refreshing in the literature about Cunningham and Cage. (Her affection for Cage as a person is rivaled by the intelligence of her disenchanted arguments with the sonic results of his anarchic and often rigid theorizing.)

This memoir, 20 years in the writing, also opens a window onto Cunningham's intrinsically hermetic public personality. (In one priceless passage, she describes a party in which Cunningham, a little tipsy, spoke to Brown "about how no one at the party really understood what he did, people didn't understand about how difficult the music [that accompanied his dances] had made his life, but that he was stubborn.") She maps critical responses to Cunningham and Cage, and her honesty is to be applauded in reporting the uncomfortable yet brilliant questions, focused on the use of chance procedures, which the dramatist Bharati Sarabhai posed following a luncheon for some members of the company that she held at her home in Ahmedabad, India. "If, in the music, any sound is music, any sound can follow any other — be it ugly or beautiful to the human ear — why is it that all the dancers in his company are tall and beautiful? Why not choose the dancers by chance too?," Brown records Sarabhai as asking. "Merce laughed, and said he'd always wanted to have a company of midgets. This of course, begged the question. Choice, not chance, was involved in the selection of dancers, as well as the composers and designers invited to collaborate with Merce."

Brown lyrically and helpfully describes dances from the inside. She also speculates with authority, wondering, for example, whether her "Night Wandering" duet with Cunningham, which he made quickly in Sweden, was a tribute to Sweden's premier filmmaker and theater director, Ingmar Bergman. Such musings are part of Brown's larger thesis that most of the dances Cunningham made while she performed with him, despite what she deems to be the party line that the company pursued movement for its own sake, in fact either had stories that the choreographer wouldn't share, reflected his feelings in particular ways, were guided by his reading, or were made to pre-existing tonal music. In one startling admission, Cun-ningham told her he had choreographed something to Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, which was then performed to a different score devised by chance procedure. Again, characteristically private, he refused to tell even Brown which dance it was. Brown also corrects the record on the matter of the famous independence of choreography, music, and design in the Cunningham repertory. In fact, Cage did sometimes present Cunningham with pre-existing music to choreograph to; and some of the composers and designers acquired a fair amount of information about the choreography before embarking on the scores or designs.

Recently, as part of a historic seminar series on Cunningham's choreographic development that Robert Swinston, former company dancer and now assistant to Cunningham, has organized at the Westbeth studio in Greenwich Village, Cun-ningham and Brown appeared with Vaughan on a panel to discuss a few of his dances through the 1950s, as embodied in performances of excerpts by members of his current company and apprentice group. The physical strength, stamina, and aerodynamic beauty of Cunningham's dancers in these older works are simply breathtaking, and more than once the audience could see the performers attempting to go beyond the physical facts of the choreography toward, well, the look that a dance can have when its performers are carrying stories about it in their heads. In Cunningham's words, "dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form." Brown's memoir reminds dancers, as well as audiences, exactly how the spiritual gets into the exercise.

Another extraordinary book on Cun-ningham is in progress. Alastair Macaulay, chief dance critic for The New York Times, has been working for the better part of a decade on a critical biography of the choreographer, a portion of which he shared with an audience in mid-October in a lecture at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It's very different from Brown's memoir or any of Vaughan's histories, as it contains new, richly evidentiary interpretations of Cun-ningham's art, based on the critic's 28 years of intense observation, as well as new information about the choreographer's life, based on many interviews and independent research.

When will it be completed?

"Tell The New York Times not to work me too hard," Macaulay joked.

Look for it.

Mindy Aloff teaches dance history and criticism at Barnard College and has written about dance for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other publications.

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 14, Page B14