Customer Reviews

Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (English and English Edition)

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As a former student and long time friend of Ms. Brown and Merce Cunningham, I was moved and delighted to revisit the struggles, perseverance and creativity that went into daily life during the years Ms. Brown spent in the Cunningham Company and to understand, from her viewpoint, the inner workings of Merce's choreographic process. I learned so much and appreciate the knowledge, skill and levels of artistry, friendship and as well as travail that made those years so vital. Thanks, CB

The wonderful thing about this book is that it gives a very close-up view of the Cage/Cunningham world, especially in the early years of the Cunningham Dance Company. It also presents the two major figures, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, in a critical light. We see them both as the towering creative forces that the outer world knows, as well as the difficult, moody, and complicated people they really are, or were.

The book is exhausting in the way it reveals Brown's life as a dancer, and the tensions and struggles of the Company. Perhaps it could be a few pages shorter, but (in the first half of the book) the insights into the world of modern dance in general, and the NY avant-garde in the 1950's and 60's in particular is fascinating and valuable.

It's also a good example of why people should keep detailed journals.

This book is an excellent opportunity to examine Merce Cunningham's work. Carolyn Brown was probably his favorite dancer. She was intimately connected to Merce and John Cage. Many will come away with a more real understanding of what "chance" means to this work. This is very much a dancer's view of things. I only wonder why it took her thirty-five years to write this book. She confesses to the book deal being offered and signed almost as soon as she retired. There are telling comments on State support of the arts and on unions.

Merce Cunningham and John Cage are two of the most significant figures in dance and music in the second half of the 20th century. Cage, who is aruguably the most influential artist of the second half of the century, has been much written about, and was himself a prolific author. Cunningham has also published influential books, and the two have been the subject of numerous documentaries. But not until now has there been an insider's view of what it was like to be an intimate part of the Cage-Cunningham inner circle, a world that included artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, composers Earl Brown, Morton Feldman, and David Tudor, and many others. Brown has written an honest, sincere account of what life was like touring the US in a VW bus with Cage at the wheel, stopping for picnics along the way. Moreover, while Brown clearly adores both Cage and Cunningham, she doesn't hesitate to provide occasionally hair-raising accounts of things said and done by these two artists that seem incongruous with the myths built up around them. In that regard, Brown renders them human in a way I have never previosuly encountered. Reading that Cage, while in his cups one night, held forth on how turned on he was by Merce, should finally set the record straight (pardon the pun) about Cage's sexuality. The book is a treasury of great anecdotes about Brown's life on the road with an astonishing group of artists, and I felt privileged to have been privy to the journey. It is also a savvy analysis of Cunningham's choreography from the perspective of someone who actually danced it. This book should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding the lives and work of Cage and Cunningham.

thankfully this book was published well after John Cage's death and I'm hoping Cunningham was too busy or old to read this thing. Although this is no longer a concern - may Mr Cunningham rest in peace.
Although C&C is horribly written (reads like a high-school essay) the book offers an interesting insight for those curious about the men behind the myths of Cage/Cunningham as well as what it was like to be an artist in NYC during the 50's - 70's.
Good for bathroom reading or reading at the gym but not worth wasting time with unless you are a huge Cage/Cunningham fan.

weighing in at 642 pages, this book is a dancer's story. The key to this is located in the subtitled 'Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham' - the word WITH is the key word. Ms. Brown was a dancer, and perhaps the best dancer of the Cunningham company, but she was not John Cage nor Merc Cunningham. While the book was quite informative early on, dealing with the founding of the Cunningham company for example, there was also more than a good deal of "I did this, and I did that".

I read this book and have no desire to own a copy. It may well be instructional to dancers but I didn't enter into the read as one, and left the book with a case of 'please, not another word'. The book was too long. The book was too long.