This Probably Isn’t Possible, But …

He enjoys applause, but he has been used to and seems amused by boos, bad reviews, near-empty theaters and people walking out of performances. His work does not ingratiate; his dancers do not address the audience in a Let me entertain you manner. That his company does far better business and generates far more excitement in Paris and London has never changed his love of living in New York.

He loves paradox, awkwardness, imperfection. In 1992 he gave the premiere of another magnum opus, Enter, at the Paris Opera. Cunningham, still dancing at 73, had two solos, one of which made references to his companion of 50 years and closest artistic associate, the composer John Cage, who had just died. As happens with almost every work of Cunningham dance theater, neither Mr. Cunningham nor his dancers had heard the music in rehearsal. So they did not know in advance that the score by David Tudor (a longtime friend and colleague of Cage and Mr. Cunningham) would include duck quackings and goose honkings that sounded automatically ridiculous.

Another choreographer might well have accused Tudor of sabotaging a major work of poignant personal significance. The Paris audience, during the curtain calls, made it clear whom they blamed, cheering Mr. Cunningham and other dancers but booing Tudor and his fellow musicians. At each performance Tudor adjusted the music so that the quackings, honkings and other noises grew louder and sillier. The more boos the musicians received, the more Mr. Cunningham, twinkling, would gesture affectionately at them.

The independence of music and choreography is just one of the ways — though surely the most profound — in which Mr. Cunningham has, in Mikhail Baryshnikovs words, reinvented the dance. Since the early 1950s the central, only occasionally broken, law of Cunningham dance theater is that the music, designs and choreography are made separately and not assembled until dress rehearsal or the first night.

There are further methods whereby Mr. Cunningham has changed dance and dance making. On March 31 at the Guggenheim Museum (he is a central figure in its current exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1969), he demonstrated two of them. One is his use of chance as a method of composition, which he began experimenting with in the 1950s, in particular after discovering the I Ching. The other was his use of a Life Forms (now DanceForms) system of dance composition on the computer, which, from 1989 on, he has not only used but also helped to develop.

At the Guggenheim, with the dancer-choreographer Jonah Bokaer (who spent most of this decade dancing in Mr. Cunninghams company), Mr. Cunningham demonstrated how to use chance (shaking the dice and letting their even or odd numbers determine his binary choices) while creating a dance on a computer. Mr. Bokaer showed a Cunningham-type dance phrase on the screen; Mr. Cunningham responded by suggesting, Try that part slower, and that part faster. Then, adding a second dancer, he started rolling the dice. Do we change this phrase? (Yes, said the dice.) Do we turn the head? (Yes.) Left or right? (Right.) Is the arm straight or bent? (Bent.) Do we raise the heel? (Yes.)

The questions and the answers came thick and fast. So did the results on screen. About using chance Mr. Cunningham remarked simply: You find out something you didn’t know. It lets your mind open up to something new.

He has been using the dance computer less often of late. Because he no longer travels everywhere with his company, he has taken to working out his choreography with its young apprentice dancers, the Repertory Understudy Group, known as the RUGs. They have become well acquainted with his way of starting a rehearsal with lines like, “This probably isn’t possible, but. …” He welcomes their openness. “If at the end of the day I decide to scrap what we’ve been making, they don’t mind,” he said. They won’t perform onstage the dances Mr. Cunningham has created with them unless they graduate into the company, which not all his apprentices do.

Mr. Cunningham loves the new. It is well known that he works most intensely with dancers during their first six months in the company. After that he tends to leave them alone (or so they feel). For some dancers this change makes it seem, as one put it, “as if I wasn’t there.” This period is usually when his best dancers come into their own, without his close tuition. He seems to like how they bloom along lines decided by themselves.

His interest in his junior dancers has become more pronounced. The great event of “Xover” (pronounced “Crossover,” 2007) was a male-female duet, the longest he had created in decades and one of his most beautiful (which is saying a very great deal). He double cast it, giving it to his company’s least experienced dancers. (Since its premiere he has remarked on the pleasure it has given him to see how each couple has developed this duet along different lines.)

Recently he shocked not only his company but also the dance world by firing his three senior full-time dancers, Holley Farmer, Daniel Squire and Koji Mizuta, officially for “artistic reasons.” It is widely assumed that this is a legal euphemism and that the reasons are economic; every American dance company is suffering, and the three fired dancers, being senior, had been earning the most.

Some have also assumed that the decision was not really or originally made by Mr. Cunningham. He is approaching 90, confined to a wheelchair and increasingly limited in physical energy. And so — this version goes — he has been falling increasingly under the influence of those with whom he runs his operation. (They are: his executive director, Trevor Carlson; his assistant, Robert Swinston; and the head of the John Cage Trust, Laura Kuhn.) When Martha Graham was in her final years, she allowed those who ran her ship to make decisions that, had they truly come from her, would have been increasingly uncharacteristic. Mr. Cunningham danced with Graham from 1939 to 1945; is his history repeating hers?

One day, when Mr. Cunningham dies, it may be dismaying to observe how these people (or their successors) govern his artistic estate. Who could keep his company going posthumously and successfully? I will say here and now that once the Master departs, I would like his company to give a world tour and then disband. Just now, however, Mr. Cunningham is alive.

And nobody who heard him talk at the Guggenheim would think him feebleminded or in danger of abandoning his dearest principles. What was best was to see the fluency, speed and practicality with which he put ideas into practice. Dance evidently remains his instinct and his passion.

I would also guess that “artistic reasons” for the sackings do exist in Mr. Cunningham’s mind. They can hardly be grievous: Ms. Farmer was evidently his favorite female dancer earlier this decade, and all three dancers performed valiantly this year. But they have probably outlived their chief usefulness to him. Having absorbed the freshness and openness of his company’s younger members and RUG apprentices, his appetite has moved on.

Genius does not keep functioning successfully without occasional ruthlessness. Within any great creative temperament there will always be a force that says, “My will be done.” Even in the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Cunningham — otherwise a genial and courteous man — often hurt dancers by not taking their feelings into consideration. Those feelings were not his business.

At merce.org, the first Cunningham quotation you find in “About Merce”: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”

Usually this dictum sounds like enthusiasm. Who does not thrill to the phrase, “that single fleeting moment when you feel alive”? But nobody should miss the toughness in that last line.

His mind is restlessly analytical, working now toward poetic drama, now toward pure-dance intricacy. His main concern is always dance itself. Sometimes he shapes it in ways that are evocative, as in the several classic “nature studies” he made from 1955 to 1998, or dramatically charged, as in the innumerable great male-female duets he has made since the 1940s. Sometimes he twists it in ways that are so focused they refuse to yield meanings: only their own intensity or complexity (only!) makes them riveting. Almost invariably his dances have so many layers that they richly reward multiple viewings.

But most of them put a peculiar emphasis on the role of the individual, on being alone even in company, on being independent even when partnering. And all of them make the point that nothing stays constant. From these facts alone arise meanings. Amid all the change, you frequently see dancers holding one difficult balance after another.

No, this is “not for unsteady souls.”