“For more than 50 years the American choreographer Merce Cunningham has clung to the opposite of the notion that inspires all civilisation: holding that decisions made by chance may be just as fine as those driven by logic and feeling… Randomness, one feels, ought to result in ugliness – isn’t that what civilisation implies? Yet what Cunningham edits from this time-consuming procedure is extraordinarily graceful, even classical-looking.” At the age of 85, Cunningham is now physically infirm, and yet his mind appears to be as busy as ever, and he continues to be one of the dance world’s great inspirations to young up-and-comers.