Other Animals: Drawings and Journals

Known worldwide for his remarkable and continually groundbreaking choreography, Merce Cunningham has a secret: he also draws. For the first time, he opens a door into his fantastical animal kingdom with Aperture’s publication ofOther Animals.

Cunningham is an obsessive observer with a colossal sense of humor who revels in nature with the same childlike vision--and the same expressiveness--that infuses his dances. Like his dances, his drawings are impressions, inventions, gestures, and interactions. Cunningham introduces us to a bird riding a turtle, a bizarre hybrid creature wearing a fashionable sweater, and an ostrich whose daintily pointed toe rivals the gracefulness of his dancers.

The drawings are collected in a beautifully produced and colorful volume along with selected entries from Cunningham’s personal journals. Juxtaposed with photographs of some of his dances and their notations,Other Animals reveals another side of Cunningham’s creative process. One immediately senses the master’s connection with nature in all her idiosyncratic glory--a place for the unexpected and exotic and peculiar and even silly to roam free. These drawings, playful and evocative in their own right, offer a key to understanding how Cunningham renders his vision of the world through dance--and how his vision is translated into costuming through his close collaboration with designers such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçonnes.