The Cunningham technique classes which did take place exist in the indicative. While they may be expressions of principles, they are also concrete and definite moments in time and space, thus they may be reenacted, rearticulated, restored. Robert Swinston did this in his class on July 29, 2009, where explicitly reteaches Cunningham’s final class. He says jokingly, “I can’t quite find a way to give it as fast as he does!” And on July 30, 2009 he attempts to reteach Cunningham’s own phrases again: “This is sort of a reduced version of one of the combinations we did with Merce in June. Alright? It’s a reduced version… I mean, in other words, it’s not as impossible, alright?” When the Merce Cunningham Trust published videos of these classes on YouTube, it exposed publicly these citations, suggesting that a certain amount of restored behavior is part of Cunningham technique, or at least permissible in a trademarked expression of the technique. I take it once further, and continue to restore them again, again, again, again, again, again, again , again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again 

In order to articulate the distinction between what the technique offers in itself and what I’m attempting to do with the this single expression of the technique, I see this class as a score which can be activated again and again. I argue that Cunningham technique class fits Schechner’s definition of a score: a “ritual by contract” which involves “fixed behavior that everyone participating agrees to do.” As a score, Cunningham technique can be seen as restored behavior, as performance in Schechner’s definition. This class takes place not for the first time but for the nth time. Cunningham technique exists in the subjunctive, the “as if”, the possible. I am not reconstructing the class but restoring it. 

For Cunningham class to be  considered restored behavior, it needs an origin story that it can become independent from. While Merce Cunningham himself taught countless technique classes over the course of his nearly ninety years on Earth, on September 11, 2012 Cunningham class became Cunningham Technique™, a registered trademark with the 

United States Patent and Trademark Office. Ken Tabachnick, the current executive director of the Merce Cunningham Trust, wrote in email correspondence regarding the quality of the trademark that, “A fundamental part of the Technique and Cunningham's intention and practice is that the Technique is a set of principles that are embodied in each class as articulated by the instructor. Although the beginning back exercises are set, the rest of the class, albeit structured, is not.” Cunningham didn’t leave a compendium of exercises               to be combined in order to create a Cunningham Technique™ class, yet the status of a trademarked technique suggests that there are classes which approach or approximate Cunningham technique but which don’t meet the quality of a Cunningham Technique™ class. Further, even if a single class is judged to meet the quality of the trademark (as the filmed video of Robert Swinston’s class 

In his 1985 book Between Theater and Anthropology Richard Schechner uses ‘restored behavior’ as a term to describe performed acts which are “independent of causal systems…which brought them into being” but nevertheless have an origin. This origin can be actual or fictional, but this restored behavior becomes a material that is used, rehearsed, and worked on.  Schechner uses the helpful metaphor of film strips to describe these restored behaviors, though they are not limited to cinema, nor even to the realm of the aesthetic, but involve “all kinds of performances from shamanism and exorcism to trance, from ritual to aesthetic dance and theater, from initiation rites to social dramas, from psychoanalysis to psychodrama.”       Schechner expands his study of performance acts to fields beyond theater and examines how the 

 on July 30, 2009 ensures) an amount of repetition of that class is not seen as “the proper approach to the Technique” and therefore does not uphold the principles embodied in the technique, according to Tabachnick. In a regular repetition of this single class I do not claim to be representing an embodiment of Cunningham Technique™. This is a study of the commitment to the daily work that lies at the center of my dancing practice. 

the non-theatrical contains this aspect of performance as well. These strips of restored behavior are actions taken in relation to a community.“The self can act in/as another; the social or transindividual self is a role or set of roles.” In Schechner’s thinking, through 

restored behavior a performer’s action can be understood not        as an expression of subjectiveness but        as participating                            in a symbolic convention. The audience (and performer) understands “It has happened before and it will happen again. Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time.” Restored behavior necessarily involves repetition. 

Am I dancing in the past?

Was I there? No.

Was I then? No.

Am I 'taking' the class, even if it wasn't offered to me? Specifically?

Or am I taking as in partaking, stealing, appropriating, [indecipherable], pretending it's mine?