as Grand Union, devoted cover stories to Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Dilley, and Steve Paxton. When Grand Union performed in Buffalo in 1973, Avalanche coeditor Liza Béar, staff photographer Gwenn Thomas, and production person Linda Lawton drove up to Buffalo to shoot and audiotape the performance. They produced a new response form: photographs with dialog bubbles taken directly from the dancer’s improvised conversations.
Excerpt of Avalanche’s comic strip in response to GU’s performance at Buffalo State College, 1973. Design by Willoughby Sharp, photos by Gwenn Thomas, editing by Liza Béar and Linda Lawton, lettering by Jean Izzo. Appeared in Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973). Courtesy of Liza Béar and the Estate of Willoughby Sharp.
INTERLUDE
PHILIP GLASS ON JOHN CAGE
Artists of all disciplines were affected by Cage’s ideas, either directly or indirectly. I find Glass’s interpretation to be less conceptual than most; he focuses on the interdependence of art and audience. The following is an excerpt from his autobiography, Words Without Music: A Memoir.
I had been immersed in Cage’s Silence, the Wesleyan University Press collection of writings published in 1961. This was a very important book to us in terms of the theory and aesthetic of postmodernism. Cage especially was able to develop a very clear and lucid presentation of the idea that the listener completes the work. It wasn’t just his idea: he attributed it to Marcel Duchamp, with whom he was associated. Duchamp was a bit older but he seemed to have been very close to John. They played chess together, they talked about things together, and if you think about it that way, the Dadaism of Europe took root in America through Cage. He was the one who made it understandable for people through a clear exposition of how the creative process works, vis-à-vis the audience.
Take John’s famous piece 4’33”. John, or anyone, sits at the piano for four minute[s] thirty-three seconds and during that time, whatever you hear is the piece. It could be people walking through the corridor, it could be the traffic, it could be the hum of the electricity in the building—it doesn’t matter. The idea was that John simply took this space and this prescribed period of time and by framing it, announced, “This is what you’re going to pay attention to. What you see and what you hear is the art.” When he got up, it ended.
The book Silence was in my hands not long after it came out, and I would spend time with John Rouson and Michel [Zeltzman] talking and thinking about it. As it turned out, it became a way that we could look at what Jaspers Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, or almost anybody from our generation or the generation just before us did, and we could understand it in terms of how the work existed in the world.
The important point is that a work of art has no independent existence. It has a conventional identity and a conventional reality and it comes into being through an interdependence of other events with people….
The accepted idea when I was growing up was that the late Beethoven quartets or The Art of the Fugue or any of the great masterpieces had a platonic identity—that they had an actual, independent existence. What Cage was saying is that there is no such thing as an independent existence. The music exists between you—the listener—and the object that you’re listening to. The transaction of it coming into being happens through the effort you make in the presence of that work. The cognitive activity is the content of the work. This is the root of postmodernism, really, and John was wonderful at not only articulating it, but demonstrating it in his work and his life.
From Words without Music: A Memoir by Philip Glass. Copyright © 2015 by Philip Glass, pp. 94–96. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
CHAPTER 3
HOW CONTINUOUS PROJECT—ALTERED DAILY BROKE OPEN AND MADE SPACE FOR A GRAND UNION
Ever since Judson, Rainer had been hell-bent on challenging every assumption involved in concert dance. With her emphasis on functional movement and the unadorned body (though she also deployed a wide dance vocabulary), she undermined the bedrock of professional dance: technical mastery. Taking this takedown further, with Continuous Project—Altered Daily (CP-AD) she introduced a range of modes that brought the activity of rehearsing into performance. She felt that what went on in rehearsal was as worthy of viewing as a finished piece. Therefore, in addition to performing set choreography, her score (instructions) included the following: marking the choreography (indicating it with a less-than-full-out energy), practicing the choreography, making choices about when an action would occur or whether to join in, and learning new choreography. The last of these plunged the dancers into the state of not knowing, thus robbing them of their physical assuredness. Shorn of set choreography, the performer might as well be shorn of a costume. The dancers were exposed.
For Rainer, the vulnerability of the dancer was part of her plan, part of her aesthetic. With the aid of game structures and absurdist props, she worked toward scraping away any veneer of polish. (She surely agreed with Paxton when he wrote to her in a letter that “finesse is odious.”)1 She wanted the audience to see the labor—the process—of dancing. Toward this goal, she enlisted task, play, pop culture, singular focus, multifocus, dancers bringing in their own material, choosing between options, not knowing what to expect—all of which eventually cracked open the customary director-performer hierarchy.
Rainer was asking questions: How to present two radically different ideas simultaneously? How to let the audience see the process of making? How to give performers creative agency? In addition to the experimental thrust, she valued spontaneity, so she came up with game structures designed to lift the lid on one’s natural impulsiveness.
She, along with her small crew of dancers—Becky Arnold, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton—made CP-AD over a period of about nine months, showing it at different stages along the way. It was never meant to be a finished product, since part of the idea was to show the process of making. During this period, the performers were called either Yvonne Rainer and Group or Yvonne Rainer Dance Company.
In 1969, while in residence at American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, Rainer was experimenting with tasks and objects for CP-AD. The atmosphere during the making process was casual and workmanlike, with a ready sense of play.2 Five dancers (Steve Paxton was not able to join them) were working, lifting, hauling, trying things out. What can a body do with a cardboard box? How can a dancer be lifted the way a box is lifted? What happens if you run with a pillow and use it to cushion another dancer’s fall? What happens when all five dancers sit on the floor and try to use the group leverage to all rise together? All this experimentation fostered a sense of trust that was visible in their comfort with touch, mutual support, and difficult maneuvers.
That summer, augmenting her small group with about eighty ADF students, Rainer created a huge performance called “Connecticut Composite” that spread out over several areas of the Connecticut College gymnasium. Continuous Project—Altered Daily, a work-in-progress at the time, occupied only one area. In a second area was a studio with twenty-eight students doing Trio A, and in a third room one could watch films and hear lectures. Yet another area housed an “audience piece,” which was basically Rainer’s Chair Pillow with an empty seat to be filled by a single spectator. (Chair Pillow, which had already been part of Rainer’s Performance Demonstration at Pratt Institute in March 1969, is a spunky unison piece, setting functional actions like throwing a pillow behind oneself to the beat of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High.”) Marching through the central area was a twenty-strong “people wall” that advanced and retreated inexorably, scattering audience members as it went. According to Rainer’s diagrams, this group changed configuration twenty times.3
About CP-AD that summer, dance critic Marcia B. Siegel lauded the “spontaneity, play, and variety”