But with more high-profile events on deck for the fall and winter, one of Cunningham’s greatest contributions lives on in a less visible forum: the ritual of daily class. On weekdays at City Center, under the auspices of the Merce Cunningham Trust, dancers can study the no-frills modern dance technique he developed, regardless of whether they intend to perform his work.

For a week in July, as my own centennial experiment, I took this class every day, dancing for the first part and observing during the (more athletic) second half. I wasn’t a total novice; in 2010 and 2011, I took beginner-level classes at the Cunningham Studio, on the light-filled top floor of Westbeth Artists Housing in the West Village. Those 90-minute lessons — advancing from a warm-up of the back and feet to more complex coordinations of the torso and legs to jumping sequences that flew across the room — were always a struggle. Yet I grew to love, even crave, the difficulty. I looked forward to coming back and trying again.

The studio at Westbeth was filled with history, as the epicenter of Cunningham’s company and school from 1970 to 2012. But the history of the technique dates back further. It emerged in concert with Cunningham’s early work, as a training system for his dances: a means of preparing the body for the singular demands of his choreography. In a 1951 essay, he offered a definition of technique: “the disciplining of one’s energies through physical action in order to free that energy at any desired instant in its highest possible physical and spiritual form.”

While drawing from the precise legwork of ballet and the spinal articulations of the Martha Graham technique (he danced in Graham’s company before founding his own), Cunningham stripped away the affectations of both, arriving at something more uncluttered, physically and emotionally. As the dancer Carolyn Brown, a pillar of his troupe for its first two decades, wrote in her memoir “Chance and Circumstance,” the technique trained “the whole body so that it could be ready to move in the many ways possible to it, without adhering to any one rigid style.”