think of images in that way.”19 She preferred a complexity of images or actions, not with an obvious center or point. Like Cunningham, who scattered actions all over the stage, she liked to have several tasks going on at once. She wanted the audience to grapple with what they were seeing (the way she grappled with life), rather than to just passively receive it.
Another way that Rainer explored the complexity of images was her insight into the relationship between the body and objects. About the Whitney performance of Continuous Project (which was not only the premiere in 1970 but also its last performance before the group mutated into the Grand Union), Rainer wrote:
I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also, the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision- and action-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like. Active-passive, despairing-motivated, autonomous-dependent. Analogously, the object can only symbolize these polarities: it cannot be motivated, only activated. Yet oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.20
The idea that a woman could be like an object in performance (not, I hasten to add, a sex object) fit nicely with Rainer’s budding feminism. It offered a solution to the “problem” of a woman’s body in performance, which was often exploited as an object of sexual pleasure for men. In the ballet world, a woman was either seducer or sylph; in modern dance, she was often either a matriarch or a woman in various states of desire. In CP-AD, a woman could either lift a box, be lifted like a box, toss a pillow, or help a mate fall or get up. So could a man. In this way, CP-AD was as ungendered as her previous works, like We Shall Run and The Mind Is a Muscle (1966). Rainer’s device of never looking at the audience in Trio A, which was initially part of Muscle, was an attempt to escape the usual tyranny of what was later called the “male gaze.” (Ironically, Rainer has often admitted that she likes being looked at as a performer.) Scholar Peggy Phelan has pointed out that “Trio A in particular anticipates” the concept of the male gaze as coined in Laura Mulvey’s landmark 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”21
The active/passive duality she set up was not keyed to gender. This concept was foundational to CP-AD and continued through Grand Union. It seems to me there were two types of passivity in CP-AD: one was for the body to assume an inanimate state, as object or sculpture, and the other was for the body to go soft, almost liquid, like water. The latter was embodied most expertly by Steve Paxton. In one section, with three limbs being pulled by Gordon, Dilley, and Douglas Dunn, he went limp, trusting them as they pulled him in different directions.22 The necessity of trust became a theme, a challenge, a shared understanding in the Grand Union, and continues to be a cornerstone of Contact Improvisation. (More about Contact Improvisation in Nancy Stark Smith’s interlude and in chapter 22.)
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As part of the Whitney performance of CP-AD (March 30 to April 2, 1970), Rainer arranged for several spoken recitations during the performance. She had always fed her intellectual hunger with an array of serious reading. For the Whitney, she invited prominent people in the arts to read passages she’d found about performing—written by Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Barbra Streisand, W. C. Fields—thereby adding another layer of inquiry into the nature of performance. Among the readers were fellow choreographer Lucinda Childs, theater director Richard Foreman, filmmaker Hollis Frampton, and art critic Annette Michelson.23 The readings at the mic, juxtaposed to the game-like physical actions, left some audience members confused, or merely unmoved. But New York Times reviewer Don McDonagh found it stimulating that “an almost contagious joyfulness” could appear side by side with a section that he considered “drained of freshness.” He felt it was all part of Rainer’s “voracious embrace of all movement full of its own weight and justification.”24
Because the task-oriented movement did not require highly trained bodies (though most of the dancers were trained professionals), McDonagh wrote, “A curious side effect of the work was the frustration of not being able to participate except vicariously in something that appeared to be fun.”25 This illusion that anyone could do it (which continued as CP-AD morphed into the Grand Union) had its roots in Halprin’s explorations in public spaces and her wish to blur the line between performer and audience, making dance more democratic.
In some ways, McDonagh (who had only the year before called Rainer’s Rose Fractions “leaden” and “stultifying”)26 represented the ideal viewer. First, because he relished the challenge of making sense of radical juxtapositions. Second, because he had enough physical responsiveness to catch the fun of it.
Another critic who enjoyed the range of moods, though she was far from effusive, was Nancy Mason of Dance Magazine: “Projecting different sides of their personalities—reserved and methodical, warm and whimsical—they use their bodies in unique ways to ventilate a primitive urge to move and express.” Mason also enjoyed Hollingworth’s bizarre “adjuncts” that were donned, at random times, by the dancers: “Barb affects an imitation lion’s tail, which bobs jauntily around as she buries her head in a pillow on the floor. David looks like a mini-Mexican beneath his giant, colorful sombrero.”27
Rainer was under no illusion that she was doing something new by allowing process into performance. Rauschenberg had created “live décor” while on tour with Cunningham; in addition to providing an assortment of found items to wear for Story, he sometimes loaned himself as part of the scenery. When the company performed Story in Devon, England, he and Alex Hay were ironing shirts upstage.28 Charles Ross had done it in the collaborative event at Judson, when he was amassing his mountain of chairs during the performance, and then again with Anna Halprin in her Apartment 6 (1965), in which he was making a paper animal—a different one each time—upstage during the performance.29 Performing process was just one device in Rainer’s arsenal in deconstructing the conventions of the theater.
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Rainer had a history of crossing from private to public that prepared her for the vulnerability in CP-AD. How intimate can a work of art be? She’d seen Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) mounted on the wall. Was it a painting, a sculpture, a found object, a private corner? Mattresses, pillows—the domestic realm, the woman’s realm—were now fair game to include. She had performed in Forti’s See-Saw in 1960, which suggested a domestic relationship seeking balance. In Inner Appearances (1972, a prelude to her first film, Lives of Performers), her most private thoughts—erotic, rebellious, political, mundane—were projected onto the back wall while she was vacuuming the floor. Perhaps this short trip from private to public was best expressed in the language she used recently when referring to her decision to expose dancers to process in CP-AD: “Let it all hang out—or make new stuff right in the performance.”30
Although Rainer asked the dancers to contribute ideas, she still considered herself the choreographer. According to Paxton, it was a step-by-step process that led to the transformation of CP-AD into Grand Union. He enumerated the progressive invitation to dancers to make decisions, to bring in new material, to experiment with learning in performance. He said that “misunderstandings would continue until we had assumed more and more functions that she had under stood were her own.”31 Eventually it became clear that the logical next step in this experiment was for Rainer to relinquish control.
Continuous Project—Altered Daily (1970), Whitney Museum. With Gordon and Rainer. Photo: James Klosty.
But that was not her intention. She felt she was encouraging her dancers to experiment, not to mutiny. She wanted to give them agency as creative people instead of serving merely as “people-material.” She wanted to acknowledge the brilliance of her performers. But in a statement read aloud during the 1969 performance