With Merce Cunningham, she forged one of the great partnerships in dance history. She later recounted those years in an incisive, unsparing memoir.

At the time, there were no brown shoes for our little ballerinas ... variety of hues of tights and shoes in recent years, the ballet aesthetic remains resolutely fixed on the ideal of the white ...

The ballet flat movement shows no sign of losing momentum, and there is one color in particular that I am noticing in every new-in section—a rich chocolate brown hue. Chocolate brown ballet pump ...