LiturgicsPost Cunningham Technique

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 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.

Brenda Daniels studied Cunningham technique with Mel Wong at SUNY Purchase, moved to New York and took company class at the Cunningham studio, founded and ran her own company, danced in the Cunningham orbit (including with Tom Simons), and taught technique at the studio — including company class, which Merce himself took. She is now Dean of the School of Dance at UNCSA. Asked in conversation about Roberts’ repertory-as-qualification claim, she answered from inside the room the claim is about:

“That’s something that Merce neither said nor did in his lifetime. Merce had many teachers at the studio who never danced in his company, who he allowed to teach company class, who he took class with. So I would have to really dispute that statement.”

“Pure Cunningham — I think that’s kind of a myth, because Merce was constantly tinkering and changing what he was doing in the classroom. It was all in the service of his choreography.”

“He let people kind of do what they wanted. He was very non-authoritarian with his faculty. I like to joke every ten years he would have a faculty meeting — but that’s not too far off the truth.”

“It belongs to everybody. So many people have taken that technique through various people who have taught it, who have kind of scattered like seeds all over the world. It’s hard to keep that under a lid — I don’t think the Trust can possibly do that.”

Daniels is the counterexample the repertory criterion cannot absorb: a teacher authorised by Cunningham himself, inside his own studio, who never danced the repertory. Her account also confirms this project’s premise from the orthodox side — the “tradition” was never fixed at the source (her warm-up runs forty-five minutes to his thirty; her combinations are looser; his faculty adapted freely), so the diasporic adaptations this companion tracks are continuations of how the technique always behaved, not deviations from a stable original. Her rule for beginners is worth keeping verbatim: “it always has to be a physical experience — don’t make it an intellectual, mental experience.”

Kimberly Bartosik danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1987 to 1993 and has built a choreographic practice (I hunger for you, and the community movement practice that grew out of it) on what the training made possible. She speaks from exactly the position Roberts says is required — nearly a decade inside the repertory — and rejects the inference drawn from it:

“I don’t believe for a second that just because you danced in the company, you can teach him. Just because you do it doesn’t mean you can teach it at all — that is a complete misconnection.”

“There weren’t really even that many people who danced for Merce. People went and they stayed, and it was a small company. It’s not like a history of thousands of people who are out there who can teach.”

“Mary Lisa Burns — she never danced for Merce Cunningham. I’ve taken her class. Brenda Daniels at North Carolina School of the Arts — she never danced [for the company]. She’s an awesome teacher, much better than me.”

“I’ve had to step away from myself and my experience in Merce’s work to become a good teacher. Yet the experience in Merce’s work is what makes me remember what’s important.”

“It’s all about asking the body to do something that it would never choose to do — and that’s the excitement of teaching it. If you’re training, Cunningham is the best technical basis: get people standing on their legs, get people jumping, get people turning, have your pelvis underneath you, and do it without a barre — you’ve got to be on your own. It’s not about how you feel; it’s about what you do.”

Where Daniels refutes the repertory criterion from outside the company, Bartosik refutes it from inside: nine years dancing the repertory, and she still had to step away from her own experience of the work to learn to teach it. Company membership and teaching authority are simply different things. Her account also names what the technique is for once it is detached from the Trust’s frame — rigorous physical training whose value lies in the possibility it opens in a body, not in the aesthetic it reproduces. And her working practice answers the guide’s emphasis on “accounting for each moment” from another direction: the movement practice she takes on tour strips language away entirely and asks strangers to sweat, tire and fall down together — transmission as communion rather than credential.