LiturgicsPost Cunningham Technique
My approach to teaching Cunningham technique emphasizes transmission as a living, embodied process rather than the replication of fixed forms. I invite students to understand that technique is not merely a collection of shapes, positions, or steps, but a system of relationships: between the body and space, intention and action, individual choice and collective practice. Through structured exercises, phrase work, improvisation, reflection, and experimentation, I strive to help students develop the ability to perceive, analyze, and articulate movement choices.
A central part of the pedagogy is teaching students to recognize the logic underneath Cunningham’s movement principles. Rather than asking students only to perform material accurately, I encourage them to understand why movement is organized the way it is—how weight, timing, spatial pathways, sequencing, and attention function together. This approach positions technique as a way of thinking through the body, where embodied understanding becomes a form of knowledge production.
My teaching also situates Cunningham within larger questions of lineage, migration, and cultural transmission. We explore how techniques travel across bodies, communities, and geographic contexts, changing while retaining connections to their histories. In this sense, my pedagogy asks students to consider technique as something alive: something carried, translated, adapted, and reimagined through different practitioners rather than preserved as a static object.
Ultimately, my approach frames Cunningham practice as both technical training and critical inquiry. Students are not only learning how to execute movement but how to engage questions of inheritance, authorship, diaspora, and embodied interpretation.
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Cunningham Movement Values
Eight movement values from the Cunningham learning materials that are applicable to any form of modern dance. They are the frame everything below gets read through, not a separate unit.
Action defines shape
Shapes in dance stem from movement, highlighting the physical drama of action.
Floor position clarity
Precision with leg and foot placement on the floor is crucial for clarity and injury prevention.
Pelvis and leg independence
Understanding movement in the hip joints allows for a wide range of motion and complexity.
Analysing movement changes
Distinguishing what changes and what stays the same is essential for fluid transitions.
Emphasis on weight shifts
Recognising weight changes is fundamental to learning and executing movement.
Rhythmic clarity
Maintaining clear rhythms — even, irregular or idiosyncratic — is key to Cunningham's technique.
Emphasis on contrasts
Big versus small; closed versus open; up versus down; spatial displacement or right on the spot; even versus uneven rhythms — the latter appears more in repertory settings but can be used in the classroom as well.
Action instead of gesture
Shape is the result of action, not an end in itself or a reference to something else. Positions of the torso, arms, or legs derive from movement and are never decorative or merely indicative. Position is the shape that movement took.
Clarity of position on the floor
Whether moving quickly or slowly, the placement of the feet and legs in relation to the floor matters equally when the legs are off the floor. The legs orient to the position of the pelvis rather than the pelvis lurching to catch up with the feet — an extremely important distinction for injury prevention.
Distinction between pelvis and legs
The complexity of torso changes vis-à-vis the legs depends on a clear distinction between the actions of the pelvis and the legs. Their relative independence — or, more specifically, an understanding of movement in the hip joints — creates the range of possibilities seen in a Cunningham class.
What is changing and what is not
When considering movement from one element to another, it is sometimes useful to ask exactly what is changing and what is not.
Change of weight
Merce emphasized change of weight. He saw this as the essential feature to recognize in order to learn movement and as compelling in itself.
Rhythmic clarity
Whether in phrases of a conventional even beat, an irregular time subdivision, or a more idiosyncratic, song-like phrasing. Part of Cunningham’s startling choices are phrases of different meters slammed right up against one another, where the ability to keep these rhythms distinct is key.
Account for each moment
Although the quality of movements can and should vary according to the situation, each moment needs to be clearly understood by the dancer, so that blurring between movements is not due to a loss of information and so that the time the movement takes is included in the understanding of the phrase.
Which of these values is easiest to teach as neutral, and which most needs its historical framing made visible?
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The “Neutral” Body
Fundamentals, the parallel stance, and what “common to all humans” is doing as a claim.
“…the parallel position. It is the one that all humans can see, and understand and more or less assume.”Cunningham, §12.4, “Cunningham on His Technique” (1991)
“The legs and feet are rooted in the ground with the pelvis maintaining an upright, neutral position.”§4.1, Practical Class Foundation
Cunningham’s own account is more contingent than the codified guide lets on: he chose parallel because his early untrained students found turn-out “extreme and ludicrous,” and parallel was simply the stance most bodies already knew. That’s a pedagogical decision made under specific historical conditions — not a discovery of a raceless, cultureless human default. Susan Leigh Foster’s work on technique training as body-discipline is useful here: every technique produces a “docile body” fitted to its own aesthetic commitments; none of them are simply neutral.
Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in Incorporations (1992)This isn’t an argument against teaching the parallel stance — it’s an argument for teaching it as a stance, with a history and a rationale, the same way you’d teach any other. Contextual fidelity asks you to keep that origin story visible rather than let “neutral” do unexamined work in the room.
Where in your own teaching does 'neutral' or 'natural' need to be unpacked out loud?
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Teaching & Authority
Who “everyone” is, and who gets to decide what counts as departure from the tradition.
“Give something that everyone can do and something that no one can do.”Merce Cunningham, §7, General Teaching Advice
“At the conclusion of this workshop, the Merce Cunningham Trust will recognize individuals as authorized teachers of Cunningham Technique®.”§11.4, Additional Thoughts
“Everyone can do” quietly assumes a baseline of trained bodies moving through a shared vocabulary — Ananya Chatterjea’s work on training and resistive choreography asks teachers to notice that “efficient” or “basic” movement is defined relative to a specific training history, and that dancers arrive with different, equally rigorous, histories of efficiency.
Chatterjea, Butting Out (2004)The licensing language — “authorized teacher,” repertory usable “for educational purposes only” — names a real and legitimate institutional structure for preserving a legacy. It’s also worth sitting with, in the same room as diasporic transmission models that run on oral, communal, non-gatekept lines: two entirely different theories of how a tradition survives its founder. Neither is wrong; naming the difference is the pedagogical work.
McMillan’s own teaching practice answers the authority question directly: instruction is grounded in feminist epistemologies and radical inclusion, which in the studio means “de-centring authority in the classroom by inviting students to be co-creators in the development and implementation of their learning.” Codified material still requires a clear instructional hand — the point is not to loosen the form but to make the student’s position inside it legible.
“How do we maintain agency within systems and structures with rules, traditions, and power over our bodies? To put it more simply, how do we find liberation and agency within systems of power?”McMillan, Teaching Statement
Agency, in this account, “requires a working knowledge of the rules, and the ability to perceive opportunities for deviation by choice, not by habit or inability.” That is the hinge between §03’s codified exercises and this module: fluency first, then deviation as an informed act.
- Students first master the eight codified exercises for the back in the Cunningham tradition.
- In small groups they create variations that achieve the same purpose as the original, using the initial movement material and isolating the pelvis from the mid and upper back to achieve dynamic balance.
- Each variation must fulfil the original exercise’s purpose while enacting the philosophical and internal logic of the Cunningham movement tradition.
- Success demonstrates three things at once: mastery of the original, understanding of the tradition’s logic, and choice-making inside a set structure.
The same de-centring runs outside the studio through “40-minute teach-ins,” where student groups lead the class on a main concept; the strongest presentation is taught, with permission, as new material the following year. Student contributions are kept as pedagogical elements in their own right — authority is redistributed, not abandoned.
“The biggest take away I have from this modern class is the word adaptability… He pushed me to become a better dancer and I appreciate his mindset.”Student, Modern Technique, Spring 2019Christopher-Rasheem McMillan, Teaching Statement (University of Iowa; Collegiate Teaching Award, 2019)
Cunningham’s own account of what a technique is for names “devotion” as the most essential thing in dance discipline: not “a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery,” but a discipline that lets the classroom itself be moments of dancing. He is equally clear that the process is invented rather than natural — “an art process is not essentially a natural process; it is an invented one.”
That admission is useful authority-work. If the discipline is invented, it can be taught as an invention with a history and an author, which is exactly the ground the agency-inside- codification assignment stands on: students learn the rules as rules, and deviate by choice rather than by habit or inability. “The rigid limitations he works within, in order to arrive at freedom” and “how do we find liberation and agency within systems of power?” are the same question asked seventy years apart, from two very different positions.
Cunningham, “The Function of a Technique for Dance” (1951)“I think it is important to have danced the repertory in order to teach the technique — though I know others would disagree with me.”Roberts, “Living Inside the Instrument” (2010)
This is the clearest statement of the position this project argues against, and it is worth quoting exactly because it is held in good faith by people who danced the work. Roberts is protecting something real: repertory carries information — phrasing, weight, timing — that the counts alone do not.
But as a criterion for authority it does two things at once. It names an ideal — the teacher who has lived inside the material — and it draws a boundary around who may transmit it, and that boundary is not evenly available. Who got into the company, in which decades, and on what terms, is a matter of historical access rather than of capacity. A qualification that can only be earned by having been in a particular room reproduces the demographics of that room indefinitely.
The alternative this site works from: authority comes from what a teacher can open up in a student — the ability to name the codification as a codification, to teach its logic accurately, and to hand students the means to deviate from it by choice. Roberts’ own admission that others would disagree is the opening; the repertory is a source of knowledge, not a credential.
Daniel Roberts, interviewed by Edith Boxberger, “Living Inside the Instrument,” in Tanztechniken 2010 (IDA — Institute of Dance Arts, Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Linz)Where does your own authority as a teacher come from, and how do you want students to understand that?
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