Carolyn Brown

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Carolyn Brown performing Valse a la Loie with Marion Rice Denishawn. Jacobs Pillow, 1972. Photo John Van Lund. Life and career Brown was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on September 27, 1927, the daughter of James Parker Rice and Marion Burbank Stevens Rice.

After attending a masterclass with Cunningham in Denver in 1951, she pursued dance full-time and moved to New York to continue her studies at the Juilliard School. She also studied with Cunningham and became one of the founding members of his company in the summer of 1953. She was the most important female dancer in Cunningham's company for the next twenty years and danced in 40 of his works, often collaborating with Cunningham and John Cage in the creative process. She created a role in Cage's Theatre Piece (1960) and on pointe in Robert Rauschenberg's first dance work Pelican (1963).

Memoir In 2007, Brown published her memoir Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham, which tells the story of her career, of the formative years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and of the two artists at its center – Merce Cunningham and John Cage.