Merce Cunningham, at 90; was transformative force in 20th century dance

Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, over a career of nearly seven decades.

He went on doing so almost to the last. Until 1989, when he reached age 70, he appeared in every single performance given by his company, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; in 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater. And in 2009, even after observing his 90th birthday with the world premiere of the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety,’’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he went on choreographing for his dancers, telling people as they said farewell that he was still creating dances in his head.

In his final years, he was almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest living choreographer.

Mr. Cunningham “made everybody rethink what is dance: Is it just movement to time? Does it have to be synchronized? Can it be improvised? Can it be spontaneous? He played with all these ideas,’’ the legendary ballet dancer Jacques d’Amboise, a native of Dedham, Mass., told the Associated Press.

“Merce: One word that describes a revolution,’’ Ella Baff, executive director of Jacob’s Pillow dance company in the Berkshires, said in a statement.

“He belongs to an unbroken lineage of dance in America. He created something completely new that influenced the world; it was as if dance began again,’’ Baff said. “He always lived in the future, and the rest of us followed him there.’’

Jacob’s Pillow, which featured works by Mr. Cunningham starting in the mid-1950s, had just completed a week of programs honoring his life and works. Mr. Cunningham was also associated with the Concert Dance Company of Boston before it folded in the early 1990s.

He had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn, and Merce Cunningham.

He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, Mr. Cunningham remained a riveting, dramatic performer, capable of many moods.

International fame came to him before national fame. In due course, he was acknowledged in America as one of its foremost artists, but for a time his work was known here only in specialist dance, art, and music circles. Not so in London, Paris, and other cities. There he was widely celebrated as the creator of a new classicism, as Diaghilev’s successor, as one of the most remarkable theater artists of his day.

And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade, with sold-out seasons in Paris at the Theatre de la Ville or the Opera.

Yet he was always a creature of New York. Close to the founding members of the New York Schools of Music, Painting and Poetry, Mr. Cunningham himself, along with Jerome Robbins and the younger Paul Taylor, led the way to founding what can retrospectively be called the New York School of Dance.

These choreographers both combined and rejected the rival influences of modern dance and ballet, notably the senior choreographers Martha Graham and George Balanchine. They absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural world and city life.

With Graham and Balanchine, they made New York the world capital of choreography; and the New York School influenced the world in showing how pure dance could be major theater. Many of the dancers who passed through Mr. Cunningham’s company, notably Taylor and Karole Armitage, went on to be prestigious choreographers themselves. Many other choreographers, notably Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, paid tribute to his influence.

Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated and revolutionary achievement, shared with the composer John Cage, his collaborator and companion, was to have dance and music created independently of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things as well.

“Ambiguity’’ and “poetry’’ were among his favorite words when talking about choreography. Wit and humor abounded in his work; his conversation was full of laughter and wry anecdotes. Partly because dance itself was the main subject of his choreography, and partly because he often made dances of real virtuoso skill, he did more than any other dance-maker to demonstrate that dance can be classical while being in most ways far from ballet.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919 in Centralia, Wash., the third of four children of Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and the former Mayme Joach. (One brother had died before Mercier’s birth.) His two other brothers, Dorwin and Jack, followed their father into the legal profession.

Like many artists, he grew up feeling different, “from about age 2.’’ Later, with this in mind, he made a solo for himself called “Changeling’’ (1957).

But he also took his birthplace with him. Even the names of Mr. Cunningham’s works such as “Borst Park’’ (1972), “Inlets’’ (1977) and “Inlets 2’’ (1983), all made in New York, referred to parts of Washington. It was there that his interest in wildlife began. Even though he did not enjoy country life, his series of “nature studies’’ continued for decades, from “Springweather and People’’ (1955) to “Pond Way’’ (1998). In “Solo’’ (1975), which only he ever danced, he seemed to metamorphose from one animal into another.

In the Northwest, too, his interest in anthropology was kindled. While studying at the Cornish School in Seattle, he gained access through an anthropology student to the Swinomish tribe; he once watched an extraordinary dance ceremony from which white people were barred.

One of his first major solos for himself, from 1944, was called “Totem Ancestor.’’ Anthropology became a lifelong inspiration, most obviously in “RainForest’’ (1968), where he took ideas from Colin M. Turnbull’s account of life among African pygmies.

For many people, Mr. Cunningham was also a superlative dance teacher right up to 2009. Although he often spoke of teaching as if it were a necessary evil, he was passionate about it. No other choreographer has asked dancers to move the torso with such rigor and intensity while keeping the lower body busy. No modern-dance choreographer has ever made more brilliant use of legs and feet.

He often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence.

“You have to love dancing to stick to it,’’ he 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.’’