ye7 Carolyn Brown, a Shaper of Revolutionary Dance, Dies at 97

Carolyn Brown, a founding and foundational member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company who helped shape its revolutionary aesthetic and who subsequently spent three decades writing an incisive, unsparing memoir about her years with Mr. Cunningham and his partner, the composer John Cage, died on Jan. 7 at her home in Millbrook, N.Y. She was 97.

Her death was confirmed by her niece Robin Rice.

Astonished by Mr. Cunningham’s dancing and electrified by the philosophies of Mr. Cage, Ms. Brown began training with Mr. Cunningham in New York City in 1952. She was with him the next year when his fledgling company gave its first performances, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in its final Summer Institute of the Arts.

She remained by his side until 1972, forging one of the great partnerships in dance history and working alongside such luminaries as Robert Rauschenberg (she starred in his first dance piece), David Tudor and a who’s who of intrepid artists and intellectuals drawn into the Cage-Cunningham orbit.

“We’ve been a part of a great thrust of activity important to our time,” Ms. Brown wrote to her husband, the composer Earle Brown, in 1965. “You have created some of the activity and I have given life to some of it. And that makes me so proud and happy and curiously elated. No matter what miseries were suffered in the doing.”

Suffering there was. The company for many years was marginalized even within modern dance,og777 fighting to gain traction with scandalized audiences, critics and presenters, who rejected its truly modernist aesthetic and were more often than not appalled by the music that Mr. Cage, Mr. Tudor, and others created to coexist with the dance.

And yet, as the company became accepted and even celebrated, Ms. Brown mourned the more freewheeling, holistic approach to life and art that marked its early years.

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Donald J. Trump did not mention Mr. Robinson once at a campaign event in Wilmington, N.C., on Saturday, and several Trump fans who attended said they understood why it was necessary to distance Mr. Trump from Mr. Robinson. The former president endorsed Mr. Robinson in March and held a fund-raiser for him at his home in Palm Beach, Fla., last year.

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