And then there was Merce: Carolyn Brown's awaited memoir.

Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham By Carolyn Brown. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 656 pages, with 24 pages of photographs.

"I had no intention of becoming a dancer," Carolyn Brown writes of herself as a young woman going off to Wheaton College. "Born to a dancing mother, having danced since I was three, I had rejected life as a dancer or dancing teacher. I wanted to write."

And so--after a great career onstage--she has written, and what a wonderful writer she turns out to be! The superlative dancer whom postmodern choreographer David Gordon christened "the prima modernina" has written a marvelous memoir. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham is deeply personal, yet places her performing life in the larger cultural context of the time, which was the 1950s through the 1970s.

But Brown was about more than the modern. She had the adventurousness and philosophical inclination to be in the avant-garde. She had an encompassing appreciation and love for dance in all its forms, and ballet in particular. In her early years in New York, even as she was working with Cunningham, her ballet teachers included Antony Tudor and Margaret Craske, with whom she studied Cecchetti technique at The Metropolitan Opera Ballet School. (Later, she was to teach that technique to a class that included Twyla Tharp!)

About Graske, Brown writes, "Many can give a good class. But a teacher who is dedicated to serving dance, who plays no destructive or cruel power games, nor indulges in self-admiring ego trips, one who has a method and a point of view and can communicate with consistency and caring, always allowing for the students' personal idiosyncrasies in body build and temperament and always demanding growth--that person is rare, and that person I found in Margaret Craske."

Meanwhile, Brown was engaged in the often tumultuous adventures that marked the early years of the Cunningham troupe: barnstorming the United States in a Volkswagen bus with John Cage at the wheel and antic artist Robert Rauschenberg on board, and spending 1964 on a world tour that became so fractious it almost led to the dissolution of the company. Brown created role after role tailored to her exquisite and daring skills and harmonious proportions, frequently performing intense duets with Cunningham. During that world tour, the British dance critic John Percival noted that Brown onstage was "as remotely and passionately beautiful as Artemis."

"Working with John and Merce," she writes, "was not a career. It was a way of life." Her philosophy and her fun came from Gage, who was not only the company's musical director but also its psychic glue. From Merce came the complex, intricate choreography, made apart from music and decor (both sets and costumes would be added only when the dance was made, often right before the first performance), and taught with no explanatory narratives. This was the beginning of the credo of movement for its own sake, and Brown was a supple and adept acolyte, and an accepting one. Even as she writes of Cunningham's extraordinary qualities as a dancer, she also notes his intrinsic dislike of communication and explanation.

Her memoir is written from her letters, journals, notes, and exceptional memory for movement--what she danced, and what she saw. Dancers will love this book for the passion it expresses for dancing, and for the practical understanding it gives of the dancing life. Teachers, in turn, will love this book because it gives class work an ongoing reverence. The rest of us will love it for the writing and for the rich immersion in a life lived fully and joyously, tempered by a clear, unsentimental eye.

As Brown's performing days were winding down, she received the 1969 Dance Magazine Award. "There I was," she writes, "on the dais with 'Papa [Ted] Shawn,' my mother's teacher, whom I had known since I was five, and Sir Frederick Ashton, the ballet choreographer I most revered in all the world! ... A sea of faces filled every available space as far as one could see.... Acknowledging my passion for ballet, most especially the Royal Ballet, I explained that I danced with Merce because I wanted to be a part of a very new experience, of what was happening today, and with Merce, John, and Bob I found that world. 'We look at dancing differently today because of the three of them,' I said, 'and I'm very proud to be part of that involvement.' "

The next day she was at Juilliard for a rehearsal of a piece she had choreographed, then at the studio rehearsing with Cunningham, and at the end of the evening, catching the last two acts of Swan Lake with Nureyev and Fonteyn, a ballerina she saw as often as possible.

Today, Carolyn Brown continues her association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as an artistic consultant, coaching the early works in which she created roles. In the years between her retirement from the stage and the publication of this book (which took her more than 20 years to write!) she has worked as a choreographer, a filmmaker, a lecturer, a teacher, and a journalist. She is still radiant, graceful, beautiful, and passionate about movement--the same person you meet in the pages of this book, which is written just as wonderfully as she danced.

Nancy Dalva is a longtime contributor to Dance Magazine and the senior writer for 2wice magazine.