A Space of Nothing

Twelve dollars for two years of class. Before Contact Improvisation had a name, its founders sat in the same room. Fall 1960 to spring 1962, at the Merce Cunningham Studio on 14th Street, a composition class ran for ten to twelve sessions at a time, taught by a man almost nobody outside dance history has heard of: Robert Ellis Dunn.¹ The class fed directly into the first Judson Dance Theater concert. One of the people in the room was Steve Paxton, twelve years before he had a word for what he'd go on to build.

Cage's idea, someone else's classroom

Dunn didn't set out to start anything. In his own account, written twenty years later: "I was asked to give these courses by John Cage, who had himself given such in the past and was banking on my knowledge of dance and current practices in several other fields or arts."² Cunningham donated the studio for free. Dunn's wife, Judith Dunn, co-taught. The fee for an entire course was twelve to fifteen dollars, and anyone who came back for the later courses paid nothing at all.

Later histories of the period place Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Simone Forti among the students who passed through those years of classes: three people who would each go on to reshape what a body could do on a stage without anyone choreographing it.³ Dunn's own surviving account doesn't name them; what it does tell us, in detail, is what the room was actually built to do.

The refusal that mattered

Dunn describes his own approach as a kind of clearing: "the notion in teaching of making a 'clearing', a sort of 'space of nothing', in which things could appear and grow in their own nature. Before each class, I made the attempt to attain this state of mind, with varying success of course."²

And then the line that I think matters most, for anyone who teaches anything improvised: "We sometimes worked from 'principles', but in the sense of 'starting points' rather than regulating controls. My refusal to provide a 'recipe' toward which to work for approval or disapproval periodically got me in hot water emotionally with members of the class."²

He wasn't withholding a method he had and wasn't sharing. There was no recipe to give. Each dance, in his words, was "an animal of which there is only one of the species", something with its own nature, not a variation to be graded against a standard.² That is not a comfortable thing to sit inside as a student. It is, by his own account, the thing his students sat inside for two years, and what came out the other side of it was a dance form built on nobody leading.

Why I keep coming back to this

I didn't grow up in this lineage. I met Contact Improvisation forty-odd years after Dunn's last class. But when I read his account for the first time, I recognized the room. Every time I open a lab with "what do you think you really need" instead of a plan, I am doing the smaller, later version of what Dunn describes doing on 14th Street: making the clearing, and trusting the group to grow something in it that I could not have handed them.

It also means something to know that this refusal, no recipe, no approval, no disapproval, got a teacher in real trouble with real students, twenty years before he wrote it down and admitted it plainly. The discomfort was never a bug in the method. It was the method.

One thing to practice

Next time you teach, or next time you dance: catch the moment you want to hand someone the "right" way through a shape, and don't. Offer the clearing instead. Notice what it costs you to withhold the recipe, and what it gives the room.

A question to carry

What is the recipe you keep almost handing people, and what would happen if you let the class stay a clearing instead?

In presence,
Eric