At the intermission of White Bird’s latest production, Merce Cunningham at 100, tears began falling out of my eyes. And at first, it was hard to pinpoint what was happening or why. Why did “Beach ...

Cunningham was one of the lions of modern dance. He turned his back on the Graham/Balanchine legacy, and—along with Jerome Robbins and Paul Taylor—helped mold dance into a major contemporary art form.

Collaboration, for Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, began with the arrangement of chairs. In the summer of 1952, when Rauschenberg was 26 and Cunningham was 33, both were living at Black ...