who missed the California landscape, found an artistic home, or laboratory, in Dunn’s class: “There was an atmosphere of intense freedom, coupled with a very analytical approach to each person’s compositional solutions. It was incredibly stimulating.”34
Improvisation, however, was not part of Dunn’s classes. Nor did Cage condone improvisation as an element in performance. (In fact, he was offended when Leonard Bernstein interpreted his idea of indeterminacy—giving performers certain choices—as improvisation.)35 Whatever the stylistic differences between Halprin and Dunn’s workshops were, they were both focused on process. The discussions were never about whether a student’s piece was good or not. As Brown recalled, Dunn always asked, “How did you make that dance?”36 Sometimes the dancers were taken aback by his mode of curiosity rather than evaluation. Rainer remembers that one of the students “did a kind of quasi burlesque strip tease which embarrassed me, but Dunn was only interested in how she made it!”37
Dunn’s class was remarkably productive. After about a year and a half, the students showed some of their works at the Living Theatre, on the first floor in the same building. (James Waring, who was a major pre-Judson influence, had already presented a program of work there by his students, including David Gordon.) They started looking for a larger venue. First stop: the 92nd Street Y, the stronghold of American modern dance, where one could see choreography by Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Pearl Primus, José Limón, and the young Alvin Ailey.38 Rainer, Paxton, Gordon, and Ruth Emerson auditioned before a panel of modern dance mavens to be considered for its Young Choreographers series. The jury consisted of Marion Scott, who taught Humphry-Weidman technique;39 Jack Moore, an Anna Sokolow dancer who had gotten attention for his own choreography;40 and Lucas Hoving, already a luminary within the Limón circle.41 This jury watched each of the pieces, one by one, and turned them down. (Considering that the Y presented dance on a proscenium stage, I now think they made the right decision—for the Y and for the future of dance. But their rejection does speak of a certain obliviousness toward the artistic potential of these young dancers.) Undaunted, the students kept looking. Rainer knew that Judson Poets’ Theater and Judson Gallery were already thriving at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. So Rainer, Paxton, and Emerson “auditioned” for senior minister Al Carmines, and he accepted them with open arms (i.e., an offer of rehearsal space as well as performance space). Their first concert, on July 6, 1962, comprised twenty-three dances by fourteen choreographers. The group soon called themselves Judson Dance Theater.
The students worked so well together—no doubt a result of Dunn’s avoidance of competitiveness—that when Dunn stopped teaching the course after that first concert, they continued to meet. This came about because Rainer suggested that they create their own leaderless workshop, and Paxton spread the word.42 After the first month in Rainer’s studio, these weekly workshops moved to the basement gymnasium of Judson Church. For each new concert, a three-person committee was organized to make decisions on program order, publicity, and technical needs.43 The numbered concerts (some of them at venues other than the church) continued up to number 16, in April 1964.
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I’d like to take you on a brief detour to the Bauhaus movement. The Bauhaus artists who migrated from Europe to the United States in the thirties and forties provided an underpinning for both the Cage/Cunningham approach and the Halprin approach. In fact, art historian Susan Rosenberg, author of Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, calls both Halprin’s and Dunn’s workshops “post-Bauhausian interdisciplinary experimental workshops.”44 The Bauhaus center in Dessau, Germany, which had cultivated the mixing of disciplines, was shut down by the Nazis in the thirties, and many of the artists fled to the United States. Lázló Moholy-Nagy landed in Chicago, where he established the School of Design; Walter Gropius led an arts program at Harvard; and Josef and Anni Albers came to Black Mountain College.
Five Bauhaus concepts were instrumental in the development of the new dance on both coasts. First, choose materials that are close at hand. (Anni Albers made necklaces out of paper clips.) Second, pay attention to the uniqueness of the materials. (What does wood do, what does copper do, what does the human body do?) Third, think of art as functional in society, not merely decorative. Fourth, experiment with collage, combining radically different elements. (Robert Rauschenberg, who had been a student at Black Mountain, created Monogram [1955–1959], for which he hung a car tire around the middle of a stuffed goat. This was one of his early “combines”—and it made Yvonne Rainer almost fall down laughing when she first saw it.)45 And last, a corollary of the fourth: cross different disciplines, creating new forms.
Halprin, whose husband Lawrence was pursuing a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Harvard in the forties, would tag along to lectures by Bauhaus figures Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. The Bauhaus ideas of the functionality of art—that art serves society rather than exists merely as a passive object of beauty—as well as the Bauhausian crossing of disciplines, made a lasting impact on both Halprins.46
During the same period, John Cage found the teachings of Josef Albers at Black Mountain stimulating. The Bauhaus approach reinforced his idea that the line between art and life should be as permeable as possible. (He had briefly been on the faculty of Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design in Chicago in 1941.)47 It was in the dining hall of Black Mountain in 1952 that he created Theater Piece No. 1, which later became known as the first “happening.” This storied event was so discombobulating that each of those who were present remembers it differently. David Tudor played the prepared piano48—but Katherine Litz remembers Cunningham also at the piano (!). Robert Rauschenberg suspended his white paintings like a canopy above the audience while he cranked up an old gramophone. Cage spoke at a lectern—or maybe a stepladder—delivering a lecture with timed silences. Charles Olson read poetry from another ladder and possibly handed out strips of paper with poetry fragments written on them. Either slides or films were projected. The audience was divided into quadrants; Cunningham danced in X-shaped aisles between them—chased by a dog that was either barking or not barking. Possibly gamelan instruments from composer Lou Harrison’s collection were played in a corner. There were two cohesive elements: Cage’s “time brackets,” meaning periods when the performers could or could not be active, and the fact that an empty cup placed near each audience seat in the beginning was filled with coffee at the end—if it hadn’t already been used as an ashtray.49
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which was formed at Black Mountain College the following year, continued to experiment, at least occasionally, with chance and spontaneity in an interdisciplinary setting. For Cunningham’s Story (1963), Rauschenberg decided to assemble a different set each time, depending on what materials he found in the neighborhood of the theater where they were appearing. He stuffed two duffel bags full of found clothing for the dancers to change into at will. According to longtime Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown, Rauschenberg “presented us with an endlessly inventive, deliciously unexpected succession of surprises. To add more spice to the indeterminate mix, we could select anything from the outlandish array of thrift-shop garments and other oddities, including football shoulder pads.”50 The order and choice of the eighteen possible sections were determined by chance and posted backstage a half-hour before curtain. On tour in Tokyo, Rauschenberg placed the clothing bags onstage instead of in the wings. While Cunningham, Brown, and Viola Farber performed a trio, Barbara Dilley changed costume and was momentarily nude upstage, causing a bit of a stir, presaging the chutzpah she brought to Grand Union.51
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Although the dances produced at Judson were usually short, they served as springboards for long-term explorations. It was partly because of this that Rainer has referred to Judson as “the crucible.” Paxton describes it this way: “You get this parade of formal explorations that were mind-boggling. Judson was that for me. It was an idea about questioning what the elements of dance were. So in my question, I started removing choreographic ploys. I wanted to work with an element of human beings that was not constructed, technical movement, and I began to look at walking.”52
If Paxton’s long-term interest was walking, then one could also point to Rainer’s