An actress I very much admire was known for saying that: “It ain’t that deep,” when other actors or her director were analyzing every little word and sentence, trying to dreg up the deeper meaning of a phrase or interaction. I keep returning to this sentence as I learn more about Cunningham technique both physically and intellectually. There is something beautifully freeing about Cunningham’s movements, in that they are not supposed to be anything particular, other than correct. Here at Yale, a place where the mind is everything and the body largely ignored, it is such a release not to be asked to think about a deeper meaning.

The lack of “deeper meaning” does not, I find, limit the work. But it does change the feel of the room we rehearse in. It is as if Cunningham gathered up a handful of snow, or glitter, or sand, and tossed it into the wind. Or like a storm. We may experience a rush of emotion because of a reference to a memory that perhaps even we cannot identify, but the movements themselves are not meaningful. When dancing Ballet or Martha Graham in the past, I always had the keen sense that I was trying to give something to my audience, and to get something from myself. Not so in Cunningham. Instead I am allowed to precisely throw my body around, to move through the space with a kind of buoyancy. Even when I am dripping with sweat, I somehow feel like I’m not even working. It’s relaxing in a certain way that symbolic or dramatic dance or performance is not. There is something intrinsically powerful about blankness. I have always been attracted to barren landscapes, and to abstract art, perhaps because it gives a sense of release from the constant pressure of the “meaning” that most of our life pushes on us, that we push on ourselves.

There is something in this desire for release that can be equated with working out at a gym or running. The difference is that Cunningham is still dance, it is still a creation, construction. It is still a series of communications that take place, and a meditation on the body, on dance, on movement, in a way that working out with the aim of strength or muscle, or loosing weight, doesn’t have. For, Cunningham, like all dance, is, by nature, collaborative. All dancers must work off each other’s energy. It is not enough to feel one’s own blood and to get each step right alone. It is only enough to move within a network of other bodies. And so, we do not loose the sense of shared experience. Also, because it is motivated towards a performance, we are striving to communicate. We do not quite know what. Perhaps “show” is a better word than “communicate.” Perhaps what we are trying to get across is the same kind of release which we experience through the movement. Perhaps we are giving the audience the same kind of release. Then again, maybe it just ain’t even that deep. Maybe it just is.