The long-awaited memoir from one of the most celebrated modern dancers of the past fifty years: the story of her own remarkable career, of the formative years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and of the two brilliant, iconoclastic, and forward-thinking artists at its center—Merce Cunningham and John Cage.

From its inception in the l950s until her departure in the l970s, Carolyn Brown was a major dancer in the Cunningham company and part of the vibrant artistic community of downtown New York City out of which it grew. She writes about embarking on her career with Cunningham at a time when he was a celebrated performer but a virtually unknown choreographer. She describes the heady exhilaration—and dire financial straits—of the company’s early days, when composer Cage was musical director and Robert Rauschenberg designed lighting, sets and costumes; and of the struggle for acceptance of their controversial, avant-garde dance. With unique insight, she explores Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and experimentation with compositional procedures influenced by Cage. And she probes the personalities of these two men: the reticent, moody, often secretive Cunningham, and the effusive, fun-loving, enthusiastic Cage.

Chance and Circumstance is an intimate chronicle of a crucial era in modern dance, and a revelation of the intersection of the worlds of art, music, dance, and theater that is Merce Cunningham’s extraordinary hallmark.

“Memoir, cultural history, biography; choreographic catalogue raisonné, guide to dance technique, performance diary; discourse on chance, aleatory procedures and open form; romance, philosophical meditation and more: Carolyn Brown has written not one book, but books and books, all bound together by her clear and graceful voice, which echoes her clear and graceful self . . . . Chance and Circumstance is a mix of back story and forward motion, of large ideas and small details, in chapters that crisscross the country and then the globe. The New York art world is the center and crucible . . . . If writing is an out-of-body experience, dancing is the opposite, and somehow Carolyn Brown the dancer prevails. You travel out of your body and into hers . . . [and] you feel yourself under a spell, remembering her life the way she does . . . She also seems fueled by a desire to set the record straight, to put aside received wisdom and to tell things as she knew them to be . . . Carolyn Brown writes with a Zen-like even-mindedness . . . This inclusiveness lends to Chance and Circumstance the feel of life as it occurs . . . And what a life!”

Nancy Dalva, New York Observer

“It is the life in dance that Brown [found] through [John Cage and Merce Cunningham] that is the subject of her wonderful new book Chance and Circumstance. Though she modestly never says so, reading her book, one realizes that Carolyn Brown’s body carries within it the whole century of modern American dance. . . . Brown was asked to be part of the group of dancers who went down to Black Mountain College for the crucial 1953 summer formation of Merce Cunningham and Company. Her book gives vivid descriptions of the storied moments of 1950s avant-garde life: the unveiling of [Robert] Rauschenberg’s red paintings, the early Happenings, the Judson Dance Theater. Throughout, Brown achieves the difficult balance of reticence about other people’s private lives and clear-eyed honesty about her own. . . . . One of the great pleasures of Brown’s book is the chance to live, briefly, in imagination, the life of a dancer; in her beautiful descriptions of classes and teaching, we can begin to see how a dancer forms herself in daily practice. . . . There is something terribly engaging in the story of Brown’s fight for mastery–with what sympathy I followed her progress–a young woman, though in the main encouraged and supported by her husband and parents, still very alone in the world. . . . [There] remains throughout [the book] a sense of her continually reaching new heights as a dancer and interpreter. . . . One feels sure that it was the pleasure and sustenance [she took from] this deep and careful artistic work that kept Carolyn Brown in the Cunningham company longer than any other dancer, for twenty years, until her retirement in 1972. With a mind and spirit akin to those of Cunningham and Cage, Brown had been vital to the work. . . . We should be enormously grateful to Carolyn Brown, who kept a thorough diary, wrote and saved and quotes from copious letters to her family and [her ex-husband] Earle Brown, painstakingly combed through the material record, and interviewed other dancers and those associated with the company. Her book is and will remain one of the few and best to read for insight into the workings of this very complex and important artistic creation–Merce Cunningham and Company.”

Rachel Cohen, The Nation

“Brown’s soulful new memoir . . . Chance and Circumstance idiosyncratically and with loving detail, offers as much about John Cage, [Merce] Cunningham, and their collaboration as it does about its writer. Brown’s relationship with these men, the dynamic between the two, and their respective manners of relating to the company members and those around them are the consistent subtexts. Yet in the spirit of other informative zeitgeist books, Chance and Circumstance concentrates on specific artists while providing a larger sense of an effervescent era. Given how categorical and market-driven the art world’s infrastructure has become, the sense of community conveyed in this book, of artists’ vital engagement with one another and with media outside their own, is a powerful tonic. Brown’s understanding and rendering of Cunningham’s choreography and process, as well as those of other dancers and choreographers of the period, feel profoundly intuitive. . . . [She also] deftly handles the experimental music scene of the time, both in the United States and in Western Europe. . . . Through Brown’s chronicling, we see the evolution of the Cage-Cunningham sensibility and its manifestation in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. . . . [Her] voice, full of conviction, is especially insightful when addressing Cunningham’s choreography and his own dancing. . . . Through her radiating way of telling her own story and her tender precision, Brown has given us a distinctive perspective on the work of two of the most exceptional artists of the twentieth century. Although those of us who are loyal fans have always accepted, maybe even held sacred, the tenets put forth by Cage and Cunningham, it is lovely to have a more personal spin, from someone who knows.”

Melissa Harris, BookForum

“Ms. Brown, an original and celebrated [Merce Cunningham Dance Company] member who stayed for 20 years, was there to witness it all. And now, finally, her memoir has arrived. It was only a decade more in the making than her tenure with Mr. Cunningham. Thankfully the book, Chance and Circumstance, doesn’t feel labored. Not even close. Ms. Brown has relied heavily on diary entries and letters written during her time with the company, and these vivid words anchor the book’s rambling vitality. She rockets from the heady excitement of New York’s burgeoning art scene in the 1950s to the fraught relationships between modern ‘Biggies’ (include Martha Graham, José Limón and Doris Humphrey) at the American Dance Festival to tour descriptions that suggest she would make a fine travel writer . . . If Ms. Brown were interested only in offering detail-rich snapshots of the company’s first two decades, her memoir would certainly be an entertaining read, as well as an invaluable resource for scholars. But she is far too feisty to produce an agenda-free historical document. As she writes in the preface, her memoir is just one telling of this story, and ‘surely there are as many other versions as there were people involved–plus that impossible, truly objective one.’ After this charmingly disingenuous disclaimer, she turns to setting the record straight. Nowhere is she more fervent than in her feeling that Mr. Cunningham’s work is often clumsily understood, aided by his own obfuscations. . . . Her physical knowledge of Mr. Cunningham’s work gives her assertions a distinct authority, and her descriptions of the choreography are fascinating. . . . Most pages contain absolute gems. . . . Ms. Brown’s romantic relationships are documented, but the true love story here is an artistic one. She fell early and hard for Mr. Cunningham’s choreography, for the vigor of Mr. Rauschenberg’s riotously creative contributions and for the holistic art-and-life philosophy embodied most fully by Mr. Cage. Like any true love affair between complex, often difficult people, it produced deeply felt, wildly varying emotions . . . [A] book can offer only glimpses of such relationships. But what a glimpse.”

Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

“Carolyn Brown, the elegant and eloquent onstage partner of choreographer and performer Merce Cunningham from 1952 to 1972, penned Chance and Circumstance from an I-was-there perspective. Brown offers a first-hand account of both the beginnings of the Cunningham dance troupe and the degree to which the troupe was shaped by the music and attitudes of the avant-garde composer John Cage. . . . [It] also gives readers a vivid sense of what it was like to live and work during this transformative period of 20th-century American culture. . . . Cunningham, Cage, and Brown all flourished in the heady post-World War II period when the art center shifted from Europe to the United States, with New York as the cultural capital. . . . Chance and Circumstance is centered firmly on the dancing, incorporating some of the most cogent descriptions ever put on paper about Cage’s controversial experiments in music and Cunningham’s revolutionary choreography. Brown also manages to recreate the love of dancing that drove them, not avoiding the conflicts of egos and hurt feelings within the small group. . . . [The] Merce Cunningham Dance Company, still directed by Cunningham, age 87, has influenced the course of contemporary dance around the globe. [Chance and Circumstance is] testament to the all-American character traits of perseverance and belief in dreams, colored by the outsized achievements of Cage, Cunningham, and not incidentally, Brown herself, as performer, biographer, and autobiographer.”

Iris Fanger, The Christian Science Monitor

“This is the real thing. . . . Carolyn Brown’s rich account of 20 years of dancing with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Chance and Circumstance, provides an insider’s portrait of two pioneering modernists who ventured into uncharted territory in the realm of dance and music. Brown vividly evokes the thrills and struggles inherent to true liberation, and describes the courage requisite to artistic inventiveness. She is a rare memoirist who focuses on her mentors’ physical and spiritual leaps rather than on herself; her guileless revelations illuminate what went right and wrong in Cunningham and Cage’s personal dealings, as well as in their fight for survival. . . . Only another dancer could capture Cunningham’s extraordinary physical prowess, dexterity and deliberate emotional abandon. And only someone with Brown’s intrinsic modesty and generous spirit could be so trenchant about the man who has enchanted but plagued her from then until now. The book follows Cunningham’s company from its formative years in squalid conditions to glamorous world tours. Unwilling to settle for clichés. . . . Brown writes with the courage and conviction of a true devotee. . . . [She] provides rare perspective . . . . good-heartedness and [a] plethora of interesting information. And if you want to learn about the era before name-brand recognition ruled the art world, when creativity was burgeoning and money was incidental, Chance and Circumstance is a splendid guide. Existence was precarious, conflicts inevitable, but the pleasure and achievements were sumptuous.”

Nicholas Fox Weber, The New York Times Book Review

Carolyn Brown continues to work with the Cunningham company as an artistic consultant. She is a member of the Cunningham Dance Foundation Board of Directors, and has worked as a freelance choreographer, filmmaker, writer, lecturer, and teacher. She has been awarded the Dance Magazine Award, five National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Dance Perspectives, Ballet Review, and the Dance Research Journal. She lives in Millbrook, New York.