Cunningham Dance Fellowship + Extended Research

In 2018-2019, I was a Cunningham Dance Research Fellow with the New York Public Library. This fellowship allowed me to follow a hunch into the Cunningham archives to produce original research that locates the pedagogy and practice of the technique in principles of Zen Buddhism. For more, see this post on the NYPL site. During this phase of the research, many supporters shared a wealth of media and documents from their personal archives. I also conducted 13 interviews with numerous generations of artists who danced for Cunningham and taught the technique. This process showed me that the best research doesn’t happen in isolation, and I remain in deep gratitude for their generosity, their contributions to the research, and the enriching conversations.

At the NYPL Fellowship symposium in January 2019, I presented a lecture/demonstration of my findings titled Cunningham Technique as a Practice of Freedom. This research originated in my teaching of the Cunningham Technique as grounded in the pedagogical theories of Paolo Freire and bell hooks. I later extended this process into a class series hosted by Duke University and through workshops and panels at ACDA and the American Dance Festival summer intensive.

The work lives on in both my teaching and doctoral research, which also aligns the technique with John Dewey’s theory of experience and evidences the influence of Black Mountain College on the formation of Merce’s theory of dance and dance education.

Context:
Fundamental to my scope of practice is the interrelation of theory and practice, of history and our present, of self and world, and my research agenda moves from this foundation to confront normative social codes and power imbalances that can arise in the teaching and learning of Western theatrical dance forms.

For over a decade, I have been reconfiguring studio dance courses as embodied inquiry in my own teaching practice and plan to translate this into future research processes to explore how this shift effects the quality of the learning atmosphere as well as the overall student experience and outcomes.

This ongoing research practice examines how rethinking technique as theory serves to transform technical principles into a theoretical framework that reveals the ‘hidden curriculum’ (Stinson) that is often at work in Western theatrical dance technique courses. It also asks how dance educators can facilitate learning in an atmosphere that retains the integrity of developing supportive technical skills for dancing while prioritizing student wellbeing by eliminating competition, individualism, and perfectionism in favor of process, confident experimentation, and community.