Merce Cunningham

To him, Avant-Garde dance had little to do with symbolism. "You see a chair strapped on my back," Merce Cunningham, the American modernist choreographer who died on July 26 at 90, mused to TIME in 1960. "Can't we just say, 'How strange'?" Nary an envelope went unpushed during his nearly seven decades of creating and performing dance masterpieces.

Though he began his career as a soloist for the famed Martha Graham company in 1939, he struck out on his own in 1944, the beginning of his almost 50-year collaboration--both professional and personal--with composer John Cage. He strayed from Graham's romantic, balletic style and instead emphasized sudden changes of direction and insisted that the dance moves, musical score, set design and costumes all be prepared independently of one another.

He prided himself on creations as fragmented as he believed society to be. His pieces--performed worldwide and with the company he founded in 1953--often divided the stage into autonomous zones of activity. His dedication to abstraction became his trademark; Mikhail Baryshnikov once described the way Cunningham dancers cover space as a "kind of organized chaos."

Cunningham performed long after the last strand of hair on his wily mane had turned gray. His final piece of choreography, Nearly Ninety, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April to mark his 90th birthday. In June the Cunningham Dance Foundation unveiled a "living legacy" plan to maintain his body of work. But to Cunningham, his art was not meant to endure. Dance, he said, "gives you nothing back ... nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."