cut away one piece of clothing, and walked away with the swath of cloth in their hands.14 As each person wielded the scissors close to her body, the expression on Ono’s face maintained a serenity flecked by the tiniest hint of anxiety behind the eyes. This was a typical Fluxus act, fraught with contradiction and not repeatable. According to Ono’s longtime associate Jon Hendricks, Cut Piece reflected her “desire to free herself from cultural straightjackets.”15
Halprin, Cage, and Merce Cunningham were also trying to free themselves from various cultural confines. For Cunningham, it had to do with space. During a lecture he gave on Halprin’s deck in 1957, he said that what he liked about the wooden platform amid the madrone trees was the freedom it gave the dancer. “There is no necessity to face ‘front,’ to limit the focus to one side.”16 In his remarks, he included the fluidity of time as well as space: “My feeling about dance continuity came from the view that life is constantly changing and shifting, that we live in a democratic society, and that people and things in nature are mutually independent of, and related to each other.”17
Cunningham’s idea of fluidity in space and time, Cage’s idea of creativity through chance procedures, and Halprin’s blurring of performers and audience are all part of the larger shift from modernism to postmodernism. All three tried to strip down to essentials, which is a hallmark of modernism. But they went further. While modernism presented a monolithic statement, postmodernism is pluralistic. Dance artist Mary Overlie has characterized that change in a nutshell: “Modernists were looking for the truth, the answer, and they were sure that these were possible to find…. Postmodernism, by adopting a pluralistic Both/And approach, challenges the very basis of Modernism.”18
One cannot overestimate Cage’s influence on the arts. Deborah Jowitt called Cage the “godfather to many works produced during the sixties by composers, choreographers, artists, dancers, playwrights, and directors. His book, Silence, came out in 1961, disseminating a wealth of unsettling ideas.”19 One of those ideas was the permeability of art and life, another was that there is no need for the music to “match” the dance, and a third is that choreography can be structured in ways other than the conventional theme-and-variations or A-B-A format.
As a precursor to postmodernism, the Dadaists in Europe, with their cut-ups and collage techniques, had embraced a pluralistic view of reality in the early twentieth century. Viewers could not count on a cohesiveness ready and waiting for them; they had to choose where to focus. Cage’s use of chance was another method of disrupting the cogency of modernism. He felt, as the Dadaists did, that methods that tapped into a certain level of randomness were more like life. For him, deploying chance methods like tossing dice or consulting the I Ching (The Chinese book of changes) reflected the belief that, quoting philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.”20
Jill Johnston wrote about the gradual, if limited, acceptance of Cage’s subversive ideas: “The heresy of Dada and Cage is the abdication of the will. In a culture brought up on the pride of accomplishment in subduing the brute forces of nature, the admission of chaos seemed like madness from the beginning. But the philosophy has persisted and Cage has had an enormous influence on contemporary artists. The madness has become a new kind of order, and the possibilities extend in every conceivable direction.”21
Although the Cage/Cunningham revolution and the Halprin revolution both fueled the transformation from modern to postmodern dance, their styles differed markedly. Cunningham held the body upright, with limbs extending away from the center (as in ballet). He was a master choreographer, creating brilliant movement sequences while keeping the separation between performer and audience intact. Halprin was less formal and less formalist, more connected to the natural environment, and determined to merge performer and audience. She was more affected by—and part of—the sexual revolution. Nudity was commonplace for her. One could point to a Dionysian aspect of her work, while Cunningham and Cage were primarily Apollonian. Rockwell writes, “Cage remained esthetically distant from the California scene. His and Cunningham’s chance procedures were ultimately too controlling for the looser, more improvisatory, more natural and nature-oriented Halprin and her musical cohorts.”22
Halprin would send students into the surrounding landscape on the side of Mount Tamalpais, asking them, for example, to walk on various textures underfoot: the wood of the deck, the soft earth, dead leaves, prickly plants. They would then convene to share the sensations and movement impulses they had experienced.
Cunningham scattered spatial patterns across the stage and made the dynamics appear random, but he never accepted quotidian movement into his palette. Cage’s philosophy that all sounds can be music did not extend, in Cunningham’s studio, to all movement being accepted as dance. That particular aspect of Cage’s teachings was left to the Judson dancers to realize; they yoked the exploratory wishes of Halprin to Cage’s expanding definition of performance. “Cunningham used to say that we were John’s children and not his,”23 Rainer recalled.
The person who stood at the intersection of Halprin and Cage/Cunningham was Simone Forti. A bridge between West and East Coasts, Forti carried the improvisational urge in her body across the country after four years of working with Halprin. It was Forti who persuaded Yvonne Rainer to come study with Halprin in August 1960, and that is where they both met Trisha Brown.24
Brown, who was from Washington State, shared with Halprin a love of the outdoors, but for her, too, it was with Forti in New York that Halprin’s approach took root. Brown once called Simone “the leader of us all.”25 Forti had a luscious movement quality, which, coupled with her clear intention while improvising, attracted Brown and Rainer as well as Paxton. Forti could seem like an oracle at times, so elemental were her movement desires. She had ideas that were not Ideas, but poetic musings and wonderings (or wanderings off to the zoo to watch the bears). Her connection to nature, nurtured by Halprin, was a strong foundational aesthetic for her. She only needed to find a conceptual framework.
And that happened in Robert Dunn’s composition class.
Now we get to the central part of the oft-told creation myth of Judson Dance Theater and postmodern dance.26 For our purposes, I tell this story slightly differently, emphasizing its bearing on what ultimately became the Grand Union.
In the fall of 1960, John Cage was tired of teaching dance composition in the Merce Cunningham Studio, which was on the top floor of the Living Theatre’s building on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street. He asked Robert Dunn, who had taken his course at the New School, to teach the class. Dunn had been an accompanist at several dance studios and had seen, firsthand, how formulaic the composition classes of Louis Horst and Doris Humphrey had become. (Interestingly, he felt that Martha Graham’s composition classes were OK—more intuitive, less didactic.)27 He was determined to teach differently, to give the students multiple avenues into their movement imaginations.
The class started with five students, including Paxton, Forti, and Rainer,28 the last two of whom were fresh from Halprin’s deck. Forti soon persuaded Brown to come to New York and study with Dunn. The class grew to include not only Brown but also Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Elaine Summers, Rudy Perez, Sally Gross, Ruth Emerson, and David Gordon. Visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris (who, as Forti’s then husband, had participated in Halprin’s workshops in the late fifties), as well as musicians like Philip Corner and John Herbert McDowell, attended the class less regularly.
Like Cage at the New School, Dunn gave assignments in indeterminacy,29 which enabled performers to make choices on the spot. He discussed Satie’s attention to durational lengths and turned the composer’s mathematics into physical problems to solve. Students could create their own scores (structures), using chance methods to generate movement. For instance, one student decided to let the rotation of the moon provide a timeline.30 Sometimes the assignment was a simple time limit: make a three-minute dance in three minutes. Other assignments involved game structures or the minimalist idea of a unifying “one thing.”31 The students responded unabashedly with an anything-goes fervor—even those students who, like David Gordon32 and Trisha Brown,33