course all artists draw from a variety of sources. The attraction of white artists during that period to black culture is nicely described by producer/curator Robyn Brentano: “The white avant-garde’s interest in and appreciation of African-American dance, music, visual art, and literary idioms, style, and values was motivated by a complex mixture of genuine respect for and appreciation of African-American artistic achievements, a romanticization of blacks that reinforced certain racial stereotypes, and a sense of a shared antibourgeois stance.”16 I think this stew of responses reflects both conscious and unconscious attitudes.
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Some of the GU dancers, like many in the Cunningham/Cage milieu, were on the rebound from Martha Graham’s dominating aesthetic. No one discredited Graham as the pioneering American artist who brought modernism to dance. But these young dancers wanted to go their own way. As mentioned, Halprin had done battle with the Graham theatricality in the mid-fifties. Not much later, Rainer also came up against the Graham aesthetic. At first she was overwhelmed by this icon’s artistic and psychological force but later came to prefer Cun ningham’s subtler style, or what she called his “implicit humanity.”17 The aversion to Graham’s style for those who favored Cunningham at the time was perhaps best expressed by Carolyn Brown. She wrote that the classes at the Graham school “seemed to demand a kind of emotional hype that felt dishonest, extraneous, external, and artificial—unrelated to my understanding of Dance (with a capital ‘D’).”18
Some had also done battle with Louis Horst, Graham’s mentor, music director, and one-time lover. He had been determined to give shape to the new twentieth-century dance by teaching musical forms as choreographic forms. Horst tried (some say heroically) to steer modern dance away from the ballet lexicon as well as from the too-vague “interpretive” dance.19 But Horst himself became quite rigid in his teaching. He insisted on the A-B-A format and other musical structures to preserve theatrical cohesiveness. He treated up-and-comers like Trisha Brown and David Gordon with disdain. In a 1973 feature article in Dance Magazine, Robb Baker asked both Gordon and Brown about their experiences with Horst at American Dance Festival, which was hosted by Connecticut College during the fifties and sixties. “He made us work in prescribed forms,” Gordon complained. Gordon didn’t exactly rebel, but he interpreted the definition of a duet with such wide latitude that Horst never called on him again.20 Brown said he was “unforgiving” about her process and was clearly dismissive of improvisation.21 When it came time for Horst and a panel of ADF instructors to decide if her solo Trillium (1962) was to be included in the final concert, they voted No. (In fact, the students protested the panel’s decision and created quite a stir that summer of 1962.)22 She felt that Horst relied too heavily on musical forms in his assignments. Bob Dunn’s class, on the other hand, embraced a plurality of methods, emphasizing process over product—a very sixties philosophy. His approach was both a relief and a stimulation for Gordon and Brown.
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Dilley had this to say about the Grand Union performers’ familiarity with each other as an ensemble:
We had some kind of subterranean associations that we all shared, either from our past history with one another or the fact that we were all living in SoHo at the same time. We shared a kind of collective unconscious … a mutual vocabulary—psychic vocabulary, physical vocabulary, performative vocabulary, intellectual vocabulary. We were in and out of one another’s worlds for many years—not only in the Grand Union but we were in each other’s performances, Cunningham and Cage, and then there was Judson. Some people had stronger roots in Judson than I did. But we shared this atmosphere, this collective environment…. It was, for me, a big part of how I navigated everything.23
One of the hallmarks of this shared vocabulary was patience, a restraint that balanced out the moments of wild abandon. In the 1975 Guthrie performance at Walker Art Center, Brown began the evening by treading softly and slowly around the edge of the space. Eventually Gordon joined in, mirroring her exact angles as she shifted her weight, barely traveling. She kept her arms folded above the waist, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. But the body angles were absolutely parallel. For almost twenty minutes this doubling was the main thing happening. Then Dilley joined Brown and Gordon, also mirroring the slow-change angles, but with her hands clasped behind her. Gradually the three started reaching out and making contact, but before that it was like a walking meditation with a steadily shifting sense of direction. The moment they collided with Paxton laying down a swath of silk, the performance took off. But that encounter wouldn’t have had an impact if the long period of restraint hadn’t preceded it.
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A pacifist air pervaded Grand Union’s concerts. The nonviolent, antiwar protests set the tone of the day, and the dancers were involved in some of those actions. Dilley joined the rough-hewn, peace-loving Bread and Puppet Theater for one of the protest marches down Fifth Avenue.24 Rainer, along with Douglas Dunn and Sara Rudner, led a solemn peace march through the streets of SoHo to protest the invasion of Cambodia.25 An Eastern influence, too, wafted in from yoga, meditation, and martial arts forms like tai chi and aikido. When compared with the current craze for aggressiveness in dance performances, Grand Union seems an oasis of calm. The group had plenty of edginess, but they expressed it without resorting to any kind of physical violence.
GU at 112 Greene Street, 1972. From left: Paxton, Lewis, Rainer, Gordon. Photo: Babette Mangolte.
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Downtown dancers were becoming very involved in body awareness. Performing in lofts and churches, they were focusing on the space in front of them, not “projecting” to the balconies. Those “everyday bodies” were consciously relaxed; they could let go of the strenuousness that is built into dance training. The label “somatic practice” came later, but at the time Elaine Summers, who had been one of the first interdisciplinary artists at Judson, was developing “kinetic awareness.” This technique, also known as the “great ball work,” uses different sized rubber balls to release unnecessary tension. Influenced by pioneering somatic practitioners like Charlotte Selver, Carola Speads, and Mabel Elsworth Todd, she was able to slow down and become conscious of muscle usage to avoid pain. Summers attributes some of the development of kinetic awareness to the Judson aesthetic of more relaxed everyday movement.26 It was a mutual exchange: both Brown and Gordon (and later, Douglas Dunn as well) studied with Summers. Rainer and Lewis studied briefly with June Ekman, who, after spending years in the late fifties on Halprin’s deck, immersed herself in Alexander technique, which repatterns movement habits to promote ease of motion. (Halprin is an acknowledged pioneer of somatic practice, starting in the sixties.) Paxton was a serious student of aikido, a form of Asian martial art that teaches how to soften the body while tumbling or responding to aggression.
Banes points out that the dancers’ brand of somatic practice was part of a larger zeitgeist of body consciousness of the period, partly fueled by Zen studies and psychedelic drugs. Body/mind therapies like Gestalt, Rolfing, Reichian therapy, and encounter groups that were popular at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California (where Halprin had given workshops), infiltrated the mainstream. “[T]he bodies created by the early sixties avant-garde included a conscious body that imbued corporeal experience with metaphysical significance, uniting head and body, mind and gut.”27
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Without any lessons in theater improvisation, all Grand Union members instinctively understood the edict of comedy improv to say “Yes, and.” Whatever was presented by one’s fellow performers, you accept it and take it from there. They each had the physical and emotional flexibility to veer off into a fellow improviser’s gambit and leave their own exploration behind. Dilley called it “opening up your receptors.”28 This relates to the communal sense I spoke of earlier, the willingness to swim in the same waters as another dancer. The GU members’ sense of community meant unwavering support for each other in performance. They each could be leader or follower, active or passive, foreground or background. As Paxton has written, “[F]ollowing or allowing oneself to lead is each member’s continual responsibility.”29