Merce Cunningham

What a terrific addition to the library! Noland is . . . taking the received understanding of Cunningham, and working against its fetish terms of chance, indeterminacy, nonnarrative, and so forth, to probe instead for Cunningham's interest in human connections and particularities. The effect of moving through Noland's text is of an unfolding of multiple issues and optics, many of them fundamentally biographical, all in turn shaping the kinesthetics of Cunningham's expertise as dancer and as choreographer. Rather than presenting the evanescent medium of dance as a linear compositional project, Noland shows it as constellational-recursive, dialogic, felt, meant, and, most importantly, thought. --Judith Rodenbeck, author of Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary is a rigorously argued, extremely persuasive, and highly topical book. While Cunningham's work is famous for being almost tortuously difficult, Noland successfully reads it through the arbitrary and the human, the abstract and the motivated, the structural and the personal. She has done so, moreover, with a fluid voice that moves easily between the register of observation and the metacritical. It is at once historical, theoretical, and formalist, making it a model of scholarship in any humanist field. Noland moves deliberately, examining not only a sequence of Cunningham's dances but their interlocking relationships with other choreographies, both contemporaneous and otherwise. --Rachel Haidu, author of The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers 1964-1976