Carolyn Brown, a founding and foundational member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company who helped shape its revolutionary aesthetic and who subsequently spent three decades writing an incisive, unsparing memoir about her years with Mr. Cunningham and his partner, the composer John Cage, died on Jan. 7 at her home in Millbrook, N.Y. She was 97.
Her death was confirmed by her niece Robin Rice.
Astonished by Mr. Cunningham’s dancing and electrified by the philosophies of Mr. Cage, Ms. Brown began training with Mr. Cunningham in New York City in 1952. She was with him the next year when his fledgling company gave its first performances, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in its final Summer Institute of the Arts.
She remained by his side until 1972, forging one of the great partnerships in dance history and working alongside such luminaries as Robert Rauschenberg (she starred in his first dance piece), David Tudor and a who’s who of intrepid artists and intellectuals drawn into the Cage-Cunningham orbit.
“We’ve been a part of a great thrust of activity important to our time,” Ms. Brown wrote to her husband, the composer Earle Brown, in 1965. “You have created some of the activity and I have given life to some of it. And that makes me so proud and happy and curiously elated. No matter what miseries were suffered in the doing.”
Suffering there was. The company for many years was marginalized even within modern dance, fighting to gain traction with scandalized audiences, critics and presenters, who rejected its truly modernist aesthetic and were more often than not appalled by the music that Mr. Cage, Mr. Tudor, and others created to coexist with the dance.
And yet, as the company became accepted and even celebrated, Ms. Brown mourned the more freewheeling, holistic approach to life and art that marked its early years.
A perfectionist who prized artistic exploration and did not always relish performing, she believed absolutely in Mr. Cunningham’s assertion that “dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form.” Her ardent fans praised her serenity and stillness as much as they did her purity of movement. Writing in The New York Times in 1970, the critic Clive Barnes described Ms. Brown as “a kind of ballerina assoluta of modern dance.”
“Her style is aristocratic,” he wrote, “her fine‐boned face and sharply defined dancing, with its easy yet exquisite line, all mark her out as one of the best of our dancers.”
Ms. Brown originated parts in more than 40 Cunningham dances, performing in many of the works that have come to define the company aesthetic, including “Summerspace,” “RainForest” and “Winterbranch.”
In addition to Cunningham, her style was partly formed by her youth spent dancing with her mother, Marion Rice, in the proto-modern tradition of the trailblazing choreographers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, whose Denishawn technique pulled from an international array of existing and invented dance forms.
Ms. Brown’s approach to dance was also shaped by the Cecchetti ballet method, which emphasizes pure technique and physical mechanics, as taught by two British ballet paragons, the choreographer Antony Tudor and especially Margaret Craske. Ms. Brown met both while attending Juilliard, and for years she remained a devoted student of theirs, revering them alongside Frederick Ashton and Margot Fonteyn.
“I think it was the intrinsic friction between those two worlds in her spirit that made her the very special dancer she was,” the photographer Jim Klosty, who has been a keen documenter of the Cunningham company and who was Ms. Brown’s longtime companion and collaborator, wrote in an email. He added that when he first saw the company, in 1964 in London, it “was one of the greatest theatrical experiences” of his life, “particularly one dancer, Carolyn Brown, who was like Mahler in the dramatic density of her stage persona.”
So integral was she to the Cunningham experience that after she left the company it didn’t perform any full repertory programs for more than two years; instead, it presented “Events,” unique combinations of preexisting and sometimes new material.
Patricia Lent, co-director of the Merce Cunningham Trust and a company member from 1984 to 1993, could recall only one Cunningham-Brown duet originally danced by Ms. Brown and Mr. Cunningham that Mr. Cunningham revisited with a new partner. As Arlene Croce, the dance critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 1974, Ms. Brown was “irreplaceable.”
Carolyn Rice was born on Sept. 26, 1927, in Fitchburg, Mass., in the north-central part of the state. Her father, James Parker Rice, was an owner of the family business, F.W. Rice Jeweler and Stationer. Her mother, Marion Burbank (Stevens) Rice, choreographed and taught in the tradition of Denishawn, having trained at the Braggiotti-Denishawn School of Dance in Boston. (Ted Shawn referred to himself as Ms. Brown’s “grandpa.”)
Ms. Brown grew up dancing with the Fitchburg-based Marion Rice Denishawn Dancers. In her memoir, “Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham” (2007), she recalls that her first performance was at the age of 3, in a garden recital that also featured her 5-year-old brother, James Parker Rice Jr. Her father carried her onstage in a basket: “I was Maia, the Flower Fairy, and I created the dance myself.”
Wanting to write, not dance, she earned a philosophy degree at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and married her childhood sweetheart, Mr. Brown, in 1950. They settled in Denver, and it was there, at loose ends and drawn to dance despite her writerly ambitions, that she first encountered Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Cage.
“Cage was the big mover in my life, really, in terms of his ideas, his exuberance, his forward-thinkingness,” Ms. Brown said in 2015 in a “Sundays on Broadway” series discussion with the dancer and choreographer Sara Rudner, a former student of hers. Meeting Mr. Cage and attending Mr. Cunningham’s workshop so affected Ms. Brown and her husband, she said, that “we had to move to New York — but I still did not expect myself to be a dancer.”
Her ambivalence toward her vocation runs throughout her memoir, which interrogates and sometimes rebuts the dogmas that inevitably hardened around such famed artists.
“Ms. Brown is romantic, but also skeptical, sometimes in the same breath,” the choreographer Douglas Dunn, who danced in the Cunningham company from 1969 to 1973, wrote in a 2008 review of “Chance and Circumstance” in the German magazine Ballettanz. “If the very fact of the publication of a book on Cunningham/Cage can’t help but loft them yet higher in the firmament, a reading of this one has them often touching earth, where, in their best moments, they would want anyway to be.”
This was ultimately where Ms. Brown wanted to be, too, particularly after numerous separations eroded her marriage. (The couple divorced in 1988 but remained close.) In a 1968 journal entry from Mexico City, Ms. Brown emphasized her longing for “a personal, private, intimate life,” noting that “this rambling around the world — for all its ‘glamour’ and excitement — leaves an enormous part of me empty.”
A voracious reader who loved being in nature, from the 1980s onward she lived a quietly full life in Millbrook, a village in Dutchess County, entertaining friends, gardening, swimming and working on her book. When her niece Ms. Rice asked if seeing bears nearby scared her, she responded, “I love being on the Earth at the same time as bears.”
Ms. Brown’s final Cunningham performance was in Paris in 1972. (“CB, with eyes about to swim,” Mr. Cunningham wrote in his journal. “Mine too.”) For several years after, she choreographed and made films, and from 1980 to 1982 she served as dean of the dance department at Purchase College, part of the State University of New York, in Westchester County. Her works include the evocative site-specific film “Dune Dance,” a collaboration with Mr. Klosty featuring Ms. Rudner.
“Carolyn trusted our improvisational responses to the natural world around us,” Ms. Rudner recalled, speculating that this was what Ms. Brown always wanted for herself. “Total faith and freedom, that’s what she gave us.”
Ms. Brown told a reporter in 1980: “I don’t want to have my own company or studio. I do want to share, and I think one has a responsibility to do that.”
To be sure, she could be caustic and sharply critical. And she set the bar high, particularly when restaging Cunningham works, which she did from 1996 to 2010. The choreographer Silas Riener, who danced with the Cunningham company from 2007 to 2011, recalled Ms. Brown instructing the troupe on a group section involving devilish balances. “If you think you’re going to wobble,” she advised, “don’t wobble.”
The dancer Holley Farmer, who inherited many of Ms. Brown’s roles during her Cunningham tenure, from 1997 to 2009, called her a supreme advocate for dancers whose tutelage had a profound impact. “She was telling us the truth of how things happened, with her body and her recommendations,” said Ms. Farmer, now an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “I felt I was part of a lineage then, and I could rely on her and her knowledge.”
Ms. Brown left no immediate survivors. “Of course I regret not having children and a more normal life,” she relates telling a documentary filmmaker in “Chance and Circumstance.” But “I love my life, am fully aware of how extraordinarily fortunate I’ve been, and do realize that one can’t have everything.”
She did, however, fulfill her ambition to be a writer. Ms. Rice asked her aunt shortly before she died what she was proudest of. Ms. Brown didn’t hesitate: her memoir. “Imagine a dancer writing a book,” she said. “I’m very proud of that.”
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