MerceDay 2: The student in Seattle

Merce Day 2. In May 1939, the month after Merce Cunningham’s twentieth birthday, his Cornish School dance teacher Bonnie Bird choreographed and presented a production of “The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower”, a surrealist work conceived by Jean Cocteau; Bird commissioned new music by Henry Cowell, John Cage, and George McKay. This photo shows Bird on the left, Cunningham in the centre next to his African American fellow-dance-student Syvilla Fort and another woman student.

A month later, Cunningham was invited by Martha Graham to join her company in New York. “The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower” was thus his final Cornish appearance; he was at the end of his second year there. Bird remained a lifelong friend to Cage and him. In the early 1980s, when she was teaching in London at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, they would stay in her central London flat when they were visiting London.

She always liked to recall that, when Cunningham told her he was off to join the Graham company, she replied with a cheerful twinkle “I haven’t finished your arms yet!” He must have taken her words to heart: when Edwin Denby first reviewed him, his arms were the item that Denby singled out for special praise.

Friday 16 April