Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham

"Chance and Circumstance is dancer Carolyn Brown's long-awaited memoir of her life and times working and playing with genius art stars Merce Cunningham and John Cage. It's a remarkable document—both intimate and factual. It's exciting, too: From the 1950s to the 1970s, Brown, a stunningly elegant and precise dancer, breathed in the electrified air exuded by these two men, who permanently took the lid off old-fashioned ways of looking at dance and listening to music. Yet a sense of wistful longing pervades these pages: What has become of the strange muses that Cunningham and Cage unleashed? ... Deeply felt, superbly recollected ... you'll want this book on your shelf for years to come."—Time Out (Chicago)

"The dancing daughter of a dancer, Brown dreamed of becoming a writer. Instead she became a principal dancer in daring and provocative choreographer Merce Cunningham's pioneering dance company. For 20 mad, glorious, and exhausting years, Brown traveled the world, performing before hostile, baffled, and ecstatic audiences. Happily, Brown never lost her literary inclination. Writing with precision and poise, and drawing on her invaluable letters and journals, Brown presents a scintillating chronicle of the John Cage-Merce Cunningham dynamic. Deeply inspired by Cage's warmth, humor, and spirit and by the austere elegance of sphinxlike Cunningham's demanding choreography, Brown gained unique insights into their use of chance as a creative force and their superlative collaboration with artist Robert Rauschenberg."—Booklist (starred review)