Zen Principles Observed in Cunningham Technique and Their Practical Applications by Justin Tornow

Dance practitioner, educator, and Merce Cunningham devotee Justin Tornow writes the following post about Cunningham's application of Zen principles in his choreography. This philosophy grew from having attended classes at Columbia University with partner and collaborator John Cage. 
Tornow highlights this connection and continues to apply it while teaching Cunningham technique in her classroom.  As a 2018-2019 Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow, she focused her research on Cunningham and delivered a paper entitled "Cunningham Technique as a Practice of Freedom" at our annual symposium on January 25, 2019.    

Dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham is known for being most interested in direct action—he has been quoted saying, in so many ways, that the dancing is where the information is, that "the only way to do it is to do it." He gets a rap for not being particularly philosophical (and furthermore, not interested in speaking much about his work). But the Merce I’ve come to know through his writing is someone deeply concerned with ideas and values.

And to be sure, the ideas underlying the action are fascinating. His investigations into chance procedures (throwing dice, tossing coins, using the I Ching) and creating intermedia works involving a roster of experimental artists were radical shifts in choreographic process and performance, and very much the product of an ideology based in Zen thought. Ephemerality, openness, and expressing ideas through practice are all tenets of Zen.
Zen, broadly, is anchored in the individual experience—it is not about dogma, and it is not about intellectualizing. It is about practice, presence, and one’s personal experience with Zen ideas. Merce’s dancing, teaching, and making all align with principles of Zen and the Zen arts: the ephemerality of each artistic expression, seated in a deep interest in the uniqueness of each moment in space and time; an interest firmly anchored in the process, with a clear detachment from known outcomes; the absence of ego in the practice and process; and an absorption in the exploration of possibilities.

These interests are based in Zen principles of non-attachment, no-mind, impermanence, and beginner’s mind, and are just some of the ideas that Merce Cunningham and John Cage likely encountered during their time attending D.T. Suzuki’s classes and workshops at Columbia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This encounter with Zen visibly affected their perspectives on life, practice, and art from that point forward.

My recent  work as a 2018-2019 Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow centered around an excavation of these ideas as they relate to the Cunningham Technique: Specifically, I have been looking at how they shape the pedagogy of the practice. In other words, how these ideas support the action.

One Zen principle stands out as particularly useful in the dance classroom: beginner’s mind. Shunryu Suzuki explains beginner’s mind as such: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's, there are few." It is clear to me that Cunningham operated with this kind of mindset. For if one were to be so confident that there was little left to know, they wouldn’t be so open to all the options! Instead, he was driven to explore the possibilities for dancing in the classroom, on the stage, in non-traditional spaces, for the camera, on a computer…

I think beginner’s mind is my favorite principle to integrate into the technique classroom, not only because of the principle itself, but also because it creates a way of considering that allows us to hang up our ego, our expectations, and our attachments, and bring mindfulness into our practice—and, of course, as is central to Cunningham’s work, to be open to all the possibilities.

My time in Special Collections was spent looking through years of Merce’s class plans, workshops, and lecture notes. I listened to many hours of interviews with Merce, Cage, David Vaughan, and Cunningham dancers, watched specials and documentaries, and located incredible literature on Zen, dance technique, and pedagogy.  
Particularly important works to the research ran the gamut: a dissertation connecting Zen and Merce's work ("Freedom of the Eye: Some Roots of an Unfocus" by Brina Gehry *MGRL 15-174 ); a conference paper aligning Merce’s use of the word "freedom" with the Zen definition ("Merce Cunningham's concept of 'freedom' and its philosophical background"  by Haruko Sako *MGZA 95-1346); and an interview transcript with Cunningham dancer Chris Komar (*MGZMT 3-1823 [transcript]).

I also used my teaching and dancing practices as resources to investigate the ideology supporting the practice: I taught, took, and observed Cunningham classes through this lens, mining the teaching methods, classroom environment, and physicality of the practice for pedagogical reflection.

What has emerged from this fellowship is research that proposes that teaching skills about how to approach a practice is as important as the content of the practice itself. The actions are integral, but they aren’t everything. In Cunningham Technique, the outlook directly supports the physicality: the work is based on experimentation, possibility, and freedom. Being confident and open to risk are essential to training in the technique—my goal is to be explicit about these aims when teaching the work so that students know that they are accruing strength, range, and technical skills that will support them as they push past their edges, so to speak. They are encouraged in each class to fully appreciate their capacity, and then experiment, go further, and surprise themselves.

There is a clear synthesis between the Cunningham Technique’s unique approach to training and Zen thinking on practice. Moreover, each conveys that freedom is the desired outcome. This is especially important to me, in that it implies the possibility of more than just acquiring greater physical skill, that the process of learning can offer an individual autonomy, independence, agency.

In his essay "The Function of a Technique for Dance," Merce says, "The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to be moments of dancing too. And not in any sense the feeling that each class gives an eager opportunity for willful and rhapsodic self-expression, but that each class allows in itself, and further the dancer towards, the synthesis of the physical and spiritual energies."It could be easy to approach dance class (or any practice) with the same kind of resistance we might have towards anything we’re simply too tired to do, or not in the mood for—going to the post office, spending an hour on the treadmill, cleaning out the litter box—if your approach is based in going through the motions, of simply completing the actions. What Merce is suggesting is that we shift our way of thinking. So to his point, by teaching the ideas that support the action, I find that dancers are better able to move away from thinking about a technique class as being a series of exercises to accomplish. I am able to impart the importance of having an integrity of practice: to me, that means not only being devoted to the daily discipline, to the possibility for growth, but also about cultivating a mindful, contemplative curiosity about the work of the classroom. Because it’s not just about doing, it’s about being.

As Shunryu Suzuki says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, "when you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity."