We Lost a Leader Today: Merce Cunningham , Choreographer Dies
Alice Trexler, Associate Professor and Director of Dance, at Tufts University was a very influential leader in my life. I don’t know if she realizes the hugely positive influence she had on me, my thinking about the world in many respects and my outlook on life. In fact, I don’t think I fully realized this myself until I read today in the NY Times about Merce Cunninham, the choreographer, passing away on Sunday.
Merce Cunningham was a leader. Not only in the world of dance and the arts, but in a much larger context as he explored and experimented with ideas beyond the then-accepted boundaries.
Alice introduced me to Merce Cunningham and his work while I was a student at Tufts. I was quickly taken-in by what he pursued and embraced: experimentation,“But” and “What if?” questions about what dance and choreography are or could be, pedestrian movement and its place in dance, independence, ambiguity and humor, dance as the expression of the nature of change itself, “…he showed how people can be intensely involved and isolated at the same time in a relationship, both cooperating and independent.”
All of these concepts and elements are somehow intertwined into my leadership and emotional intelligence work today.
“You have to love dancing to stick to it,” Cunningham once wrote. “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.”
With gratitude and aloha to Alice Trexler and Merce Cunningham, leaders.
Alison Zecha
NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/arts/dance/28cunningham.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp
Tags: emotional intelligence, leaders, leadership
