At first, the Cunningham movement seems stoic, even robotic. It is at first look a sort of language, a bodily sign system that is based more on its visual elements than any audio-based aspects (especially since sound was added in ex-post-facto as a kind of game of chance to complicate the composition). And yet, when learning the Cunningham movement, one discovers certain rhythms that provide another type of logic. This logic is perhaps more organic, as it grows from the synthesis of human body and machine-like movement. Personally, this rhythm drives my movement, keeping me grounded and focused more on accomplishing the physical exercise rather than achieving a certain shape or aesthetic. This rhythm allows me to focus inward rather than thinking about the audience’s experience of my movement.

Such inward focus has a mainly utilitarian purpose, as Merce’s choreography is decidedly not about personal experience or movement style. Sure, we are still individual bodies with certain tics and differences (and such idiosyncrasies were played with in his early choreography, according to Meg), but these differences are not often highlighted. Instead, we are a group, equal in our sameness and providing a perfect field of people with which to display the many intricacies of Roaratorio, a dance so complicated that an entirely inward focus would lead to collisions and discontinuity. Thus, a paradox emerges: the seemingly robotic Cunningham movement forces us as dancers to have both an internal rhythm and an external awareness, allowing what is at first self-contained to result in a community of dancers working together onstage to achieve the same artistic goals.