Obituary by Alastair Macaulay:
The enchanting, generous, warm, and devout Marianne Preger Simon (1929-2024) has died. She danced for and with Merce Cunningham well before there was any Cunningham Dance Company. In 1949, finding that he was in Paris and having seen him years before with the Martha Graham company, she went to see him dance for his own sake, quite unaware then or much later that his dance colleagues included Tanaquil Le Clercq and Betty Nichols from New York’s Ballet Society. When he returned to New York later that year and began to teach, she was the only dancer waiting for him.
She was the warm and wise student who could take his dark moods, who could persuade others that the early Cunningham enterprise was an important venture. Black Mountain College has often been said to be the making of the Cunningham company – it was where Cage and Cunningham first encountered Robert Rauschenberg in 1952, it was where the Cunningham company gave its first performances in 1953 – but for Marianne it all was merely a continuation of work begun in New York. She danced in the premieres of – among others – “Septet” (Black Mountain, 1953) and “Springweather and People” (1955) and “Suite for Five” (1958)”. After leaving the company to marry, she kept in touch with Cunningham and Cage as a friend: she was moved when Cunningham wrote to her that Cage had recently said “She was the soul of the company.”
Like other Cunningham alumni to follow, she went on to important work. She had been teaching throughout her Cunningham years, – dance, drama, and literature at the New Lincoln School – but now, after having given birth to her daughter, she retrained as a psychotherapist, a career she pursued with enthusiasm for forty years.
She had made films of the early Cunningham repertory, which she donated to the Cunningham Trust. And she remained good friends with Carolyn Brown. In 1998, the two women travelled together to Paris to see the world premiere of Cunningham’s “Pond Way” at the Opéra Garnier; in 1999, they returned to Paris for the Paris premiere of his “BIPED”, new a few months earlier that year. Brown introduced me to Preger: we all ate together most evenings, usually with David Vaughan; once with Cunningham after a performance. The passionate happiness of those conversations stays in the memory.
All this helped Brown to conclude her own important memoir “Chance and Circumstance” (2007), a brilliantly detailed and thoughtful account of Cunningham’s work over the years 1952-1999. Preger and she remained friends – meeting again for the alumni performance of his final work,”Nearly Ninety” in 2009 – but Preger now found herself writing her own memoir, wholly devoid of the passive aggression of “Chance and Circumstance” and far more accepting of Cunningham’s peculiarities. Thanks to David Vaughan, Mindy Aloff and I helped Marianne to bring this short but loving memoir to fruition in 2019, when it was published by University Florida Press.. Marianne had wanted it to be called “In the Orbit of Cage and Cunningham” rather than “Dancjng with Merce Cunningham”, but publishers have their own notions. At all points, Marianne was a delight to work with, just as she had been a delight to meet around Merce in 1999. I’m honoured to have known and loved her.
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