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A dancer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performs alongside Charles Long’s sculpture “Way Station.”

Merce Cunningham not only creates respected work, he collaborates with people whose work he respects.

Sculptor Charles Long was asked by the modern dance choreographer to create sets for “Way Station,” a piece that will be performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Friday night at Royce Hall.

The work represents one of many joint projects for Cunningham, whose collaborations have included artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol over the last 50 years.

But for Long, the combination of dance and sculpture in live performance was an unprecedented experience.

Currently living in Los Angeles and teaching at CalArts, Long has displayed his sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among other established museums and galleries around the world.

He’d previously collaborated with the French band Stereolab, but had no experience working with dancers.

When he was originally contacted by Trevor Carlson, Cunningham’s general manager, he had no intention of doing so.

“At the time, I was so out of touch with my own body,” Long said. “I thought, dance – I don’t get it. I didn’t understand why people would want to flop their bodies around.”

But when Carlson contacted Long again four years later, he’d had time to reconsider. He realized, as he said, “that I had to yield.”

Long credits his study of Taoism and the “I Ching,” the ancient Chinese book of divination, as helping him to understand Cunningham’s work. Cunningham, he said, uses an element of chance in creating his dances, often rolling dice to determine the structure of a piece.

“It’s an acknowledgment of a dimension of our lives which is in change,” Long said. “The idea of using chance purposefully is a way of reminding yourself that everything is in flux. You really don’t know what’s going to happen in the next moment. It’s really great when you’re working around issues of movement, weight, shape, mass. Issues that aren’t right or wrong.”

The sculptures he created for “Way Station” were inspired in part by the work of artist Alberto Giacometti – long-legged, abstract forms that gather together at the top to form a kind of body. Composed of steel armature covered with aluminum-foil-backed paper, the large-scale, colorful “creatures” stand up on their own, much like the dancers do – autonomous and strong.

Much of Long’s work deals with the paradox that he believes exists between individuals and their environment – the idea that humans can be independent when really, he said, we’re all basically just living off the energy of our last meal.

But whatever interpretations might accompany the forms he’s placed on the stage, Long said that his collaboration with Cunningham has taught him to keep his mind open, if at all possible.

“Just experience the work, if you can,” he said. “Don’t try to find a narrative or a story, but just take it in without referring to anything else. Just open your eyes and see what’s happening right then and there.”