the arms of two men.” With all that was going on, including audience members sometimes joining in, she called the performance “rowdy” and said it “had the clangor and conviviality of a Horn & Hardart” (referring to the chain of working-class, cafeteria-style lunch spots in New York and Philadelphia of the thirties through the early sixties).4
Don McDonagh wrote that the overall performance, which included Twyla Tharp’s commission that summer, brought “a joyous spirit of adventure” back to the festival, which year after year had presented mostly established modern dance companies like those of Martha Graham and José Limón.5
Later in 1969, Rainer wrote letters to Paxton and Dilley, who were teaching at the University of Illinois, about the upcoming date at University of Missouri at Kansas City. She sent them her tracings of Isadora Duncan photographs with instructions to make a duet based on them. Her notes of what she expected to happen included this bullet point: “YR randomly monologuing, directing, watching, disappearing.”6 A little foreshadowing, perhaps? Her disappearing act was repeated in various forms during the next three years.7
The Kansas City performance, on November 8, 1969, turned out to be a madcap, expansive turning point. Body “adjuncts,” created by Deborah Hollingworth, included a pair of feathered wings, a foam insert that turned the wearer into a hunchback, a lion’s tail, and a humongous sombrero hat. It also provided the performers a chance to laugh at themselves or each other, deflating the self-importance of the performer.
Dilley, looking back, felt Kansas City was the beginning of the evolution toward Grand Union. Writing in the present tense, she recounted the performance in her book, This Very Moment:
Circumstances create unplanned opportunities and, that night, suddenly we make new material in front of the audience. We’ve never done this before. It is outrageous and fresh. There are moments of exquisite joy and revelation.
I write about it in a letter to Yvonne: I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers “In the Midnight Hour” and doing Trio A slow, very slow, and Steve [Paxton] joining me and then fast, with and against Steve’s tempo. It was sheer delight. I felt sexy moving through material I know that slowly. I remember you… grinning at the pleasure we had. Oh, and the wings. I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face. The literary images, the dream images, the animal images… .
After the performance we stay up most of the night, sprawled across some hotel bed, talking through what happened over and over. Yvonne calls it “spontaneous behavior.” There’s no going back. We are about to become the anarchist ensemble the Grand Union, where we make up everything in front of audiences.8
Rainer, too, felt a huge release with the discovery of “behavior” as performance. In a loving, admiring letter to her dancers, she told them that because of their performance, she had an epiphany: “I got a glimpse of human behavior that my dreams for a better life are based on—real, complex, constantly in flux, rich, concrete, funny, focused, immediate, specific, intense, serious at times to the point of religiosity, light, diaphonous [sic], silly, and many leveled at any particular moment.”9 (I would say that her words mesh with my own experience of watching Grand Union.) When Rainer described the specific actions that excited her, they seem quite ordinary. (By then, with the help of past teachers Halprin and Dunn, she had mastered “ordinary.”) That was the point: what is ordinary can be art. The following is from a letter she wrote to her dancers after Kansas City:
Steve’s concentration and presence during the lifting lesson; his lying on the floor at the end; his observation of me doing the pillow-head routine. Doug sitting across the room looking at our shenanigans with a baleful eye…. David seriously working on the new stuff by himself; his interrupting me at the microphone to ask for help. As you see, I am talking mostly about behavior rather than execution of movement. It is not because I value one over the other, but because the behavior aspects of this enterprise are so new and startling and miraculous to me.10
Rainer was delighted to see good ole human behavior in an art context. It aligned with her larger project of putting life onstage, breaking the barriers between art and life.
Although the UMKC audience, having no context for Rainer’s work, could not have perceived the nature of the breakthrough, the student newspaper did report a warm response. “Not knowing what to expect,” wrote Tresa Hall, “yet not expecting what they got, the audience reacted in a very pure and delightful way.”11
After the breakthrough in Missouri, Paxton may have been the only one who saw the possibility of improvisation on the horizon. “While we were in Kansas City having a late-night talk about the performance we had just done, I said, ‘It is very obvious that we are heading for improvisation of material,’ and thereafter came a long series of responses on how impossible that was.”12
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As much as the “behavior” was welcome, the aspect of dance as labor was also central to CP-AD. Rainer was influenced—not for the first time—by the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, her lover and fellow Judson choreographer. Rainer took the title Continuous Project—Altered Daily from an installation he devised at the Castelli Warehouse in Harlem and later performed at the Whitney Museum. For this “installation,” Morris went into the gallery every day and changed the arrangement of a myriad of objects.13 Rainer was impressed that he had created a fluid experience rather than a finished exhibition. (Let’s not forget that, back in the late fifties and early sixties, when Morris was married to Forti, he had tagged along to workshops given by Halprin and Robert Dunn.) Art critic Annette Michelson described how Morris’s Whitney installation involved various craftspeople and museum staff who “worked at the transport of the huge cement, wood, and steel components, converting the elevator into the giant pulley which hoisted them to the level of the exhibition floor.”14 Morris himself describes the installation as “[n]o product, just the heaving and throwing and shoving and stuffing.”15
It is this type of labor that Rainer wanted to get at. She wanted to show dancers as workers. I believe she felt this would demystify dance, move toward a more egalitarian attitude toward women, and scrape away the narcissism that she felt comes with the territory of performing.16
Continuous Project—Altered Daily (1970), Whitney Museum. With Rainer and Dunn. Photo: James Klosty.
Rainer’s love of work, especially women working together, goes back to her participation during Judson Concert #13, “A Collaborative Event in 1963,” mentioned in chapter 1. In her autobiography, she describes the teamwork necessary to accomplish Carla Blank’s piece Turnover, in which eight or nine women literally turn over Charles Ross’s huge trapezoid-like metal frame: “As half the group lifted a lower bar of the contraption from the floor, the other half reached for the top bar on the other side and in the process of bringing it to the ground raised the first four or five performers high in the air. The second group then moved to the other side to lift another part of the structure, thus lowering the dangling ones to the ground. In this fashion the whole configuration rolled crazily around the space. I found it breathtaking to engage in this heavy and slightly dangerous work with a team of women.”17
The audiences of CP-AD also had to work. In order to make sense of the radical juxtapositions (a term coined by Susan Sontag when describing happenings in 1962),18 they had to encompass two contradictory ideas at the same time (F. Scott Fitzgerald, anyone?). Rainer was fond of butting two opposite actions or moods up against each other. She wasn’t interested in snap judgments, in audiences being able to grasp an idea instantly. She wanted to engage them long enough to provoke serious thought. In a 2001 interview, when she had reentered the dance field after making independent films for twenty-five years, she was discussing the relatively new genre of video installation as performance. “I’m still interested in making things that require a certain amount of time to comprehend,”