Monique Jonas

b. UK — dance artist, choreographer, teacher; Artistic Director, JONA DANCE (founded 2019)

Monique Jonas began dancing through the Royal Opera House’s Chance to Dance programme, trained at Arts Educational Schools London in musical theatre and jazz, and completed her training at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. She took an MA at London Contemporary Dance School, passing with distinction in 2017.

She joined Richard Alston Dance Company as an apprentice in 2016 and toured nationally and internationally with the company until its final performance in 2020, and has since danced as a principal with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures — including Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Other credits include Rambert Dance Company (A Linha Curva), Kim Brandstrup, Hubert Essakow, Arielle Smith and Theo Adams Company.

In 2019 she founded JONA DANCE, a project-based London company built in response to the lack of cultural diversity in UK contemporary dance. Her teaching — for English National Ballet School, Rambert School, London Contemporary Dance School, National Youth Ballet and others — is explicitly rooted in Cunningham technique infused with West African movement and release technique, taught to live percussion, with rhythm, groove and sharp shifts of weight as organising principles.

Cunningham line: Cunningham via Rambert School and the Alston company, then deliberately re-grounded — the technique kept, the aesthetic frame changed.

Sir Richard Alston

b. 30 October 1948 — British choreographer; CBE 2001, knighted 2019

Richard Alston trained at the London School of Contemporary Dance at The Place, choreographed his first work in 1968, and in 1972 formed Strider, the UK’s first independent dance group. In 1975–76 he went to New York to study at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio and with Alfredo Corvino, returning in 1977 to work across the UK and Europe as an independent choreographer and teacher.

Appointed Resident Choreographer at Ballet Rambert in 1980 and Artistic Director from 1986 to 1992, he made 25 dances for the company, alongside commissions for the Royal Danish Ballet (1982) and the Royal Ballet (1983) and two solos for Michael Clark — Soda Lake and Dutiful Ducks. In 1994 he became Artistic Director of The Place and founded Richard Alston Dance Company, making more than 50 works before it closed in March 2020.

Key works include Windhover (1972), Soda Lake (1981), Dangerous Liaisons (1985) and Pulcinella (1987). He was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and received the Critics’ Circle De Valois Award in 2008.

Cunningham line: Studied directly at the Cunningham studio; the principal route by which Cunningham technique entered British contemporary dance training.

Michael Clark

b. 29 May 1962, Aberdeen — Scottish dancer and choreographer; CBE

Michael Clark began traditional Scottish dancing aged four, left home in 1975 to train at the Royal Ballet School in London, and on his final day there received the Ursula Moreton Choreographic Award. In 1979 he joined Ballet Rambert, working primarily with Richard Alston, who created roles for him in Bell High (1979), Landscape (1980) and Rainbow Ripples (1981) and made the solos Soda Lake and Dutiful Ducks for him.

A summer school with Merce Cunningham and John Cage led him to work with Karole Armitage, and through her to the filmmaker Charles Atlas. His first concert of his own choreography was at Riverside Studios in 1982, where he became resident choreographer; by 1984 he had made sixteen pieces and launched Michael Clark and Company, which toured internationally to immediate success.

Clark’s practice fused strict classical and Cunningham-derived line with punk, queer club culture and visual art — collaborating with BodyMap and Alexander McQueen, Leigh Bowery and Trojan, Sarah Lucas and Peter Doig, and musicians including The Fall, Wire, Laibach and Jarvis Cocker. Commissions include the Paris Opera, Scottish Ballet, London Festival Ballet, Rambert, Phoenix Dance and Deutsche Oper Berlin; film work includes Hail the New Puritan (1984) and Because We Must (1989) with Charles Atlas.

Cunningham line: Cunningham absorbed through Alston and a Cunningham/Cage summer school, then detonated — technique held intact while its aesthetic neutrality is discarded.

Christopher-Rasheem McMillan

Interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and scholar; Associate Professor of Dance Theory & Praxis and of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, University of Iowa

Christopher-Rasheem McMillan took a BA at Hampshire College, an MFA in experimental choreography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, and a PhD in theology and religious studies at King’s College London — a training route that runs through the same UK conservatoire ecology in which Cunningham technique was institutionalised.

During his time in London he apprenticed with Richard Alston, placing him one step from Cunningham in the same UK line that runs through Alston to Monique Jonas — the technique received in the studio, from a body that had carried it, rather than only through documentation.

He was awarded the Collegiate Teaching Award, the highest teaching honour of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa, in 2019; appointed a fellow of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in Theology and the Arts in 2020; named a Resident Fellow at New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts in 2021; and has held a fellowship at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies.

His research treats choreography in an expanded field, working through video, performance, photography and oral storytelling on race, memory, queer desire, religion, and personal and public mythology. That method underwrites “Unauthorised: Making and Teaching in / through Diasporic Cunningham Technique” — the account of authority, subalternity and the living archive that this companion reads alongside the codified exercises.

Cunningham line: Cunningham received twice over — institutionally, through UK conservatoire training, and directly, through an apprenticeship with Richard Alston — and then re-read: the technique treated as a living archive to be questioned from inside rather than a fixed inheritance to be reproduced.