Moments of Dancing Too: A Study on Cunningham Technique and Devotion by Benny Olk

These texts are an invitation to offer insight into this poetic and personal practice developed during the course of my study. Through a regular and ongoing studio practice I draw on my personal dance history as material in an attempt to understand the affective and performative aspects of devotion in dancing, the very devotion which both obscures and reveals something intimate, but beyond the subjective. Recalling and amplifying the ghostly present and presences in a film recording of a single Cunningham technique class, I have been exploring the spectral remains in the transmission of a dance technique, from recording of living bodies to a digital, publicly-available video and then to my corporeal reinterpretation of that video. By continuously repeating the same material over the course of nearly two years I have developed a multilayered understanding of the material, which allows me to depart from and return to the class through associative portals. I bilocate between the physical site of practice and the space of recall, between an action from the class and the memory of that action. I enjoy the strange spectral things that arise from this practice: ghosts, portals, other bodies. With my eyes closed, my attention is displaced from image to sensation. It’s about work. “Not to show off, but to show,” as Cunningham said. It’s about toil. It’s about devotion. These slippery materials propose to invert the traditional choreographic relationship to presence, and instead call upon memory, absence, and dislocation to provide an understanding of movement through time and space. This collection is comprised of texts written at various points throughout my two years in the MA program New Performative Practices (NPP) at Stockholm University of the Arts. My focus on devotion in Cunningham technique originated as a self-organized Advanced Independent Study. This course was built on readings, a solo studio practice, teaching others, and interviews with former Merce Cunningham Dance Company members. I created exposition on the Research Catalogue as part of my exam, a precursor to this one. In creating the exposition, my notebook became a central tool, a material I carried and used everywhere, from the studio to the classroom to interviews to the library, all places where I carried out the study. I wrote texts on top of photographs of my notes, and the presence of two texts situated together suggests dynamic reading possibilities. This MA is research-preparatory and strictly speaking this is not artistic research. I’ve taken advantage of the liberty being independent of formal academic research offers. The traditional citation models, academic formatting, and impartial address have been left behind at times to favor for a looser, more experimental formatting, multiple styles of essays, and a piece-meal approach to continuity. Thanks to: Anna Giertz for design and layout of the print version, which inspired this version; Chrysa Parkinson, Litó Walkey, Jeanine Durning for supervision; Frank Bock for portals; Martin Hargreaves for unpacking performativity; Rebecca Hilton for the initial push; my NPP colleagues for their feedback, curiosity, and support; Ken Tabachnick for insight from the Merce Cunningham Trust; Patricia Lent, Andrea Weber, Joseph Lennon, and Michael Cole for interviews; Sarah Michelson for devotion; Moriah Evans for searching for forms; Kris Berggren for the ordinary devotion which got me here, and copy editing; Pat Richter for her music; Robert Swinston for class, again and again.

The origin of this study came from an absence, an absence grown so large I saw what wasn’t there as the thing itself, the thing itself made mythological by its absence, made up a by constellation of absences so I see ghosts, holograms, and myths in the same dim light

If Devotion deals with myths, it has spun its own because it can’t be seen anymore. In my own experience with her, Michelson maintains that fundamental to dance is it’s how it is situated in time and place. Documentation of a dance creates a relic — an object that is removed and preserved, and simulates the experience of the thing while simultaneously denying direct access to it.

The most direct connection between Michelson and Cunningham is her 2011 piece Devotion. David Velasco writes that Devotion in many respects is “an homage to [Cunningham], or to his legacy; to her time as one of his students in the early 1990s; and, perhaps, to the model of dance making and dance preservation that he both epitomized and modified. It is a dance that conjures and twists creation myths.”

Cunningham class became one of the through-lines during my nomadic years as a freelance dancer based in New York City. Between various projects, class was both a social space and a work space. Other times it was a warm-up class before rehearsal, or just a thing I did between 12:15pm-1:45pm and went about my day. Then as now, every time I come back to New York going to a Cunningham class gives me the same feeling as I have going home to my parent’s house: excitement at seeing what’s changed, but also ease in knowing my way around. It’s familial and familiar, both family-like and comfortable.

During these seven weeks I took daily Cunningham technique classes, in addition to several hours of learning material. I remembered Robert Swinston offering his advice that learning the lower back curve was best achieved by approximation then refinement. He said something like, “Do what you think it is, and we’ll work on getting it right later.” Through daily repetition of Cunningham class I began to understand the form of the class and what the technique might offer me. The first several exercises are repeated almost identically from day-to-day, and the class follows a format that

allows for a sense of continuity. I began to see the forms the technique taking shape within, on, and from me, informing me while also forming me. I was attracted to the rigor, the rhythm, the shapes that were somehow balletic and at the same time transcending ballet’s representational tendencies and understanding the possibility in concrete actions.

I first entered the realm of Cunningham as it was slowly emptying itself of what it had been and moving on while moving uptown. For seven weeks in the summer of 2012 I took part in free Cunningham repertory workshops to learn three early Cunningham dances: How to Pass, Kick, Run, and Fall from 1965, Place from 1966, and Scramble from 1967.

These workshops happened just as the Merce Cunningham Foundation was reconfiguring itself to become the Merce Cunningham Trust, leaving its home of over 40 years at the top floor studio of Westbeth Artist Housing in the West Village of New York City, and relocating as a renter of the 5th-floor studio at New York City Center.

One of the first freelance projects I did was with the choreographer Sarah Michelson. Her working is rigorous and physically technical, and relies on the intelligence and devotion of her dancers. Dancing with Michelson could be transcendent, but it also took place in what she called the void. the new, formed as it was discovered, mercurial, dynamic, and gravitational.

The commitment required in her dancers was something I observed and felt in studying Cunningham technique. The link between Cunningham and Michelson is not coincidental. She was a student at the Cunningham Studio in the early 1990s, and cast then-company members in her early work.

Meanwhile, I continued other freelance work, including other Cunningham workshops, eventually getting paid to do them. In 2015 I performed in a reconstruction of Cunningham’s Crises (1960) at the new building of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Then Sarah Michelson came to see the performance, and at the talk-back afterwards she asked the reconstructors Jennifer Goggans and Patricia Lent, “Was the piece we just saw really Crises? Was it the dance or was it something else?” She was airing her concerns about documentation and preservation.

Michelson’s question led me to begin to think about the artistic implications of reconstructing these pieces. I’d always felt my dancing of Cunningham’s Crises more in dialogue with the original Cunningham dance than, for example, Ballett am Rhein performing Pond Way into their repertoire. The cast of Crises had been taking classes at the Trust for years with former company members and had learned other choreographies as well. Ballett am Rhein had no such Cunningham classes other exposure to his work. My motivation came from the work itself, a devotion to the work to get it “right”, to “keep it alive” and to make it relevant (and maybe do those things for myself). My artistic identity was tied up in my association with Cunningham. I defined my dancing by rhythmic precision, a rigorous attempt at physically difficult forms, an uprightness and springiness, unadorned actions that were anti-representational, and the poetic abstraction found in his principles of chance and circumstance.

The mythology of Devotion and it’s subsequent siblings (Devotion Study #1 — The American Dancer and Devotion Study #3) haunted and permeated what became 4, whose creation I was initially part of but left after many months of economic hardship and artistic confusion. Participating in both the Cunningham Trust’s and Michelson’s work demanded I make a choice about my time. Use my non-paid hours to take class or go to rehearsal? Devote myself to the known and newly familiar, or to the unknown and uncomfortably new?

But Cunningham is dead. His company is disbanded, and his work is scattered in memories, archives, and particularly in an institution that seeks to preserve his legacy. While his choreographies excite me, I’m not content with preservation as the only strategy to pass on his work. The scholar Rebecca Schneider helped to sharpen my thinking around this. “To pass on the past as past, not as (only) present,” as she writes in Performing Remains. “If the event is presented not as an ‘authentic’ reperformance but as a reenactment of a prior event, a being there, then dragged and done up to a here, now, and becoming a there, gone, again. This kind of keeping alive is also as a passing on.” To reperform something is never to fully reconstitute it, it’s always partial. The work I’m doing now is to take the remains of a moment in Cunningham history and, rather than ‘reconstruct’ it ‘as it was’, to attempt to make live some part of that moment. For Schneider “to consider the live a record of precedent material flips on its head the supposition that the live is that which requires recording to remain…The same could be said for…any inscribed set of performatives written to require repetition where repetition is both reiteration of precedent and the performance of something occurring ‘again for the first time’.” I have turned to Cunningham class as the site of study in order to examine these questions.

A few times a week I take this single class. Take the sound from the video and play it, play with it, tand in a room different from where it was recorded, listen to Robert’s voice and Pat’s piano, sometimes just Pat’s piano, sometime’s just Robert’s voice. My voice enters the mix, too. Take the class from the past and bring the exercises to the present (which is now the past and will probably occur again in the future). Remember the exercises, and work like I was a student in the class, but also sometimes skip exercises, or close my eyes and engage in the space with senses other than sight. Through repetition, the class has entered the realm of memory for me, and its from memory that I continue to practice.

Her question stayed with me. I came to understand the weight of the reconstruction was with me, and had been there since Place. What was the work I was I doing onstage? Michelson’s question suggested that Cunningham’s dances weren’t only a series of intricately related steps and movements, but that they were activated somehow by the person of Cunningham. If I didn’t understand what a Cunningham dance is with Merce, how could I begin to understand what it was without him? What is the mark of a Cunningham dance and a Cunningham dancer? While Cunningham’s work had been performed by other companies during his lifetime, dancing in Crises we were the first dancers to begin our training with the Merce Cunningham Trust, not the Company or the Foundation. Cunningham existed for us in mythological form, as an absent presence.

Tip

Tip