An essay by the contemporary Portuguese philosopher José Gil addresses the promi-nent American choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham’s conception of dance. Gil emphasizes that Cunningham approaches dance in a way that is fundamentally different from the traditional mimetic and expressive paradigm. With the help of Giles Deleuze’s observations, Gil proves that even in the case of dance shorn of the faculty to represent and express emotional contents, we can talk about units of dance, about their meaning and unity, and thus about the language of dance. Gil spells out this idea by showing a parallel between dance, in Cunningham’s conception of it, and modern painting.