Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years.

The first entry in the chronology of staged performances listed in David Vaughan's smashing new book on Merce Cunningham is something called Unbalanced March, which premiered at the Seattle Elks' Club in 1938. Six decades and more than 180 projects later, Cunningham is still astonishing, delighting, and annoying dance aficionados with defiant regularity. Of course, life has not left Cunningham untouched by its vicissitudes: His partner of a half century, composer John Cage, died in 1992, and at 78 the arthritis-ridden choreographer no longer makes his traditional onstage appearances. And a few years ago he embraced the Life Forms system, software developed at British Columbia's Simon Fraser University for the purpose of devising choreography.

What has not changed is his stature as one of the seminal artists of the 20th century. From dance he has demolished all traces of narrative, psychology (the preoccupation of Martha Graham, in whose company he danced the premiere of Appalachian Spring), and conventional relationships between movement and character, movement and meaning, movement and music, and movement and decor.

And he has not choreographed in the wilderness. His collaborators have included some of the most outrageous avant-garde composers and some of the era's most visionary artists, many of them gay. The roster of Cunningham company members over the years reads like an honors list of the most distinguished dancers ever produced in America. md judging from his 1996 season in New York City, Cunningham gives no indication of abandoning the art--and the craft--of choreography.

How does one account for such a rich life? In Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, Vaughan, the Cunningham Dance Foundation's archivist for more than two decades, has attempted--with staggering success--to document the career of a living legend. The title of this ravishingly illustrated book is slightly misleading. Vaughan traces his subject from his beginnings, following him through his meeting with Cage at Seattle's Cornish School and continuing to the years with Graham and the founding of the Cunningham company in 1952.

What you get here is basically a catalogue raisonne. Vaughan outlines the signal events of every year throUgh 1996, includes a complete listing of collaborating personnel, and appends words uttered by Cunningham himself over the decades. He traces his subject's absorption in chance procedures, the codification of the Cunningham Event (a dance happening in which excerpts from sundry works are performed, often in unusual settings that can range from a New York City armory to a Berkeley, Calif., gymnasium to an Italian town square), and his discovery of film as a legitimate medium for choreographic inspiration.

What you will not find here is any attempt at interpretation. VaUghan, who has also penned the definitive study of English choreographer Frederick Ashton, has observed Cunningham since the 1950s, having danced in his troupe for a spell. He sensed decades ago that his subject's greatest gift to the arts is his willed effort to abandon "meaning." As Cunningham has said, "A dance means what you want it to mean." His job is to shape movement sequences of heart-stopping invention, many of them occurring simultaneously and all following the logic of the moment. Freeing art from the rigidity of a single perspective has generated far-reaching consequences and a host of mediocre imitators. Returning to the source and his colleagues (who have included Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Marcel Duchamp) is like a journey through the imagination at its most fertile. Cunningham finally has the book he deserves.