NEW YORK—Does Merce Cunningham require any introduction? Routinely referred to as “the greatest living choreographer,” this dance icon, now age 87, has led his own company for more than 50 years, during which time he has made a whole catalog of perennially innovative pieces.

Alongside his use of chance procedures in choreography and constant interest in new technologies is Cunningham’s expansive and all-inclusive view of the arts. This openness to the contributions of visual artists has been one of the defining qualities of his work and has led to some of his most memorable collaborations.

It was in 1952, while teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, that he discovered the visual arts. And though his principal collaborator was, throughout most of his career, composer John Cage (until Cage’s death in 1992), Cunningham has worked with contemporary visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

His latest project teams him with Florida-based artist Daniel Arsham for the creation of a multidisciplinary piece called eyeSpace, which debuts Feb. 23 in Miami as part of the of citywide festival “Merce in Miami,” featuring a new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami of images and decors from Cunningham’s dances since 1998.

The choreographer’s longtime commitment to the arts was also celebrated recently in the publication of Photography Portfolios I & II, a collection of photographic works offering tributes by artists as different as Richard Hamilton, Bruce Nauman and Gregory Crewdson.

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Merce, thinking back to the beginnings of your career as a choreographer, you seemed to be an instinctive interdisciplinarian. But weren’t you working in a time when different art forms were considered to be quite separate?

Yes, but at Black Mountain College the situation was one where all of the arts were present, and one was aware of all of them. They weren’t separated. The idea of interdisciplinary activity was present in daily life. At lunch you would be talking with someone from the painting department, or somebody from the music department. In my particular situation I spent a great deal of time with the visual artists. I liked to see their work and I became friends with a number of them.

Do you think that there is a particular affinity between a choreographic sensibility and a visual sensibility?

I think that I probably talk more with visual artists than with dancers. For so many dancers what I did was strange and they couldn’t quite assimilate it, but the visual artists just looked at it and thought that there was something that engaged them.

One of the things about visual artists is that’s what they are—visual. They look. I always asked them if they ever looked at dancing, because if they had, they would always come back with a remark that wasn’t like anything a dancer would say. As time went on with Rauschenberg and Johns, their ideas about what they saw were just fascinating and opened up what I did in a way that I wouldn’t have thought of, and I liked that very much.

I also like the idea that they use technology. There was an extraordinary set for “Canfield” that Robert Morris made for us [in 1969]. It consisted of a metal rod across the top of the front of the stage and a metal beam, at least a foot wide, coming down from that. And the vertical one moved back and forth across the stage, providing light in a way that couldn’t have been done in any other way. That brought something into that particular dance that otherwise wouldn’t have been there.

How does that relate to your use of chance in making dances?

When I first began using chance operations back in the 1950s, one of things that prompted that was the first publication of the I Ching (the Chinese “Book of Changes”). It was such an extraordinary thing, the way that you could use this as a way of asking questions about what you were doing. That brought something into the technique of dance that I didn’t have before: a way of looking at things that were ordinarily outside the realms of my taste. With chance procedures, every time that something came up that looked impossible, I would try it anyway, and sometimes it was impossible, but what it always left you with was something else that you hadn’t thought of. So working that way was a widening of experience.