Likewise, Douglas Dunn was known during most of Grand Union as Doug, but he now prefers Douglas. Anna Halprin was known as Ann until the 1970s, but I use Anna consistently as that is the name she goes by now.
The name “Grand Union” was suggested by David Gordon as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the booming supermarket chain at the time. It was initially supposed to be without the “the,” but David, Trisha, Barbara, and Yvonne routinely referred to it as “the Grand Union.” Nancy, Douglas, and Steve use the name bare, without the article in front of it. In keeping with that lack of agreement, I use the “the” sometimes but not at other times.
A final point about names is that I start my story by referring to known figures in the standard way, using surnames. In part II, however, I transition into referring to each dance artist by her or his first name, a decision I explain along the way.
INTERLUDES
In order to provide a fuller picture of Grand Union than I can give alone, I’ve included other voices. Most of the interludes are excerpts of published pieces; one is an edited interview (Dianne McIntyre) and another is an invited reminiscence (Joan Evans), and still another is from an email message (Richard Nonas).
THE “GROUP INTERVIEW”
By July 2017 I had held initial interviews with Yvonne, Douglas, Nancy, and Barbara. When I contacted David to schedule an interview, he requested that we wait till Steve came to town—for the Trisha Brown memorial—so that I could interview them together. We invited Yvonne, and then Douglas, even though I had already interviewed them both, to join us, so it ended up being a group interview in David’s loft—but not with the whole group. Barbara and Nancy do not live in New York, and I did not attempt to include them by phone because I felt the disembodied voices would affect the flow of the conversation. (I had already interviewed both of them anyway.) Therefore, when I refer to the “group interview,” it is with only four people: David, Steve, Douglas, and Yvonne.
PART I Seedbed
Anna Halprin’s deck, ca. late 1950s, Kentfield, CA. Photo: The Estate of Warner Jepson.
CHAPTER 1
ANNA HALPRIN, JOHN CAGE, AND JUDSON DANCE THEATER
In the sixties, the West Coast and East Coast had different styles of rebelling against the conventions of modern dance. Judson Dance Theater, the collective breakthrough of experimentation that ushered in postmodern dance, was a child of both. It was, at least partially, the encounter between Anna Halprin’s nature-loving, task-dance approach from California and the rigorous, John Cage–inspired chance methods of New York that ignited the Judson revolution.1
Living and working in Marin County, Halprin took dance out of the theater and into natural and urban spaces. She infiltrated streets, airports, plazas, and the side of a mountain. She shed her modern dance training in order to honor the natural, unadorned (and sometimes unclothed) body. She deflated the high drama of modern dance with human-scale task improvisations. She wanted to dance where trees were swaying in the wind and birds were chirping. So in 1955 her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, along with designer Arch Lauterer,2 built an expansive outdoor deck as a gift to her. Here she could commune with nature as she developed her own approach to dance. Rather than romanticize the glory of the theater, she romanticized dancing outdoors, harking back to Isadora Duncan.
In her resistance to concert dance, Halprin was reacting to what she had seen at the Bennington School of the Dance, which relocated to Mills College for the summer of 1939. She felt that the officially sanctioned giants of modern dance—Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm—were training dancers to be imitative rather than creative. Dance historian Ninotchka Bennahum writes that Halprin became “disenchanted with modernism’s codified disciplining of the human body.”3 She recoiled from their highly stylized theatricality, reverting instead to the teachings of Margaret H’Doubler, her mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the thirties. Inspired by John Dewey’s idea of the mind and body working together, H’Doubler did not demonstrate steps but taught about kinesthetics with the help of a human skeleton. She was all about exploring rotation and flexion to expand range of motion. Continuing in that vein but, as described by dance scholar Janice Ross, “progressing from raw, improvised action into dance with an emotional resonance,”4 Halprin forsook technique per se and committed herself to wide-ranging exploration. The deck became a place to gather, observe, experiment, and respond to the rustling of nature rather than to prepare choreography for the stage.
Also in the mid-fifties, another gift was bestowed on Halprin: Simone Forti. A budding visual artist with a sensuous movement quality and a poetic imagination, Forti had none of the mannerisms associated with either ballet or modern dance training. She was a sensitive, fearless explorer who, encouraged by her then husband, Robert Morris (later to become a major minimalist sculptor), had been physically active while painting large canvases. Forti’s grounded simplicity, her love of nature, and her mercurial sense of play made her the ideal collaborator for Halprin’s new approach.5 Along with Forti and her other dancers, Halprin developed “scores” (written or drawn instructions to be interpreted by the performers) for the interplay of dance and sound, for paying attention to the environment, and for ritualizing the everyday.
The Bay Area was a hub of artistic collaboration in the sixties, and Halprin got caught up in the swirl of the local music scene. According to critic John Rockwell, who performed in some of Halprin’s events, “[T]he fluid borders between the avant-garde and San Francisco rock music encouraged constant crossovers.”6 Halprin participated in the trippy Trips festival, provided dancers for the Grateful Dead’s light shows, and led the audience in a dance at a Janis Joplin concert.7 John Cage sent his protégé, La Monte Young, to work with her,8 knowing she would be fine with whatever ear-abusing noises or cross-genre actions he came up with. Halprin was delighted to be part of this vibrant arts community, occasionally working with Beat poets like Michael McClure and Richard Brautigan.9 “What was popular art, what was fine art, what was experimental art all got kind of moved together.”10 In addition to the communal, feel-good aspect of these exchanges, Halprin’s embrace of collaborations also yielded artistic breakthroughs. In talking about her best-known work, Parades and Changes (1965), for which she had collaborated with composer Morton Subotnick (known as “the father of electronic music”) and visual artist Charles Ross, she said, “The results are often new forms that not one of us alone would have found.”11
The New York environment also produced new forms during this era. In his famous course in experimental music composition at The New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1960, John Cage challenged the class to break barriers between genres. He wanted to expand the definition of music to include the sounds of everyday life and to expand the definition of theater to include any art event that spanned time. The course unleashed a band of rule-breakers, including Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Richard Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was married to Yoko Ono at the time.12 They created happenings, assemblages, and early performance art before these forms had a label. Like Halprin’s community events, their performances sometimes required the audience to be active. Life was crashing into art and vice versa.
The group that emerged from Cage’s course overlapped with the Fluxus artists. Influenced by Duchamp, Fluxus was a loose group of obstreperous, neo-Dadaist artists that included Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and George Maciunas (more about him in the next chapter). Fluxus events, as well as the happenings by Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and others, were meant to be temporary, not preserved or sold. Not everyone took Fluxus seriously. Experimental theater director Richard Foreman described its events as “an attempt to believe that everyday things could be art.”13 But the Fluxus performers were capable of activities that were both beautiful and daring. One of the rare documented Fluxus events was Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964). As seen in the film (accessible on YouTube),