Feel the down. Listen to the floor. Hear the rhythm of your own feet against the floor. Hear your breath. Land in the down.

There is a moment right before falling asleep when you fall. One times, if you get to it too fast, when you’re still thinking the dreams of the awake, it jolts you sharply awake, and, lying there quiet in the dark, your heart beats fast. But, if it catches you at the right moment, it takes you and you transfer somewhere else,

There is something about the emphasis on down in Cunningham that reminds me of this. Because there is no music, because there is no story. Because there is nothing but the rhythmic, sometimes illogically rhythmic, movements of your own body and the bodies moving around you. Because space and time, because stretch and motion are all around you. This is not lyric dance where the illusion created is the goal. This is not sport where the score, the competition, is the goal. And it is not pedestrian walking or movement which has the purpose of taking you somewhere. Each of these three have a purpose outside the movement themselves.

But here, in this dance, you must give into the falling sense. You must let the ground love you, pull you down. Want you. More than having a partner among your fellow dancers, your partner is the ground. Gravity. And if it catches you at the right time. If you are just ready for sleep, for movement, for the next step. You are able to fall into it. To loose consciousness of all this noise, stuff, of life out her. And past that fall, down there, you exist apart. And when you “wake,” return here to thought and lyricism and scores, to traffic and logic, meaning and purpose, you feel somehow released. Rested. Refreshed.