one of each of their Judson pieces, noting how these concerns followed them into Grand Union.
One of Paxton’s walking pieces was the solo Flat (1964). Wearing a suit, he walked in a circle or a straight line; occasionally struck an athletic pose, like being up at bat; and sometimes sat on a chair. He would periodically stop, then strip off one piece of clothing, revealing hooks affixed to his bare skin. He then hung his jacket, shirt, or trousers on one of those hooks. He also sometimes froze mid-dressing, for instance when sitting on a chair while peeling off a sock. You’d hold your breath because it really felt like he was interrupting himself. Paxton experienced an almost unbearable urge to leave the room: “The more I felt that I was exposed, I wanted to get out of there…. I knew I was transgressing that whole aesthetic of pacing and keeping things moving.” He called Flat “pedestrian and boring…. On the other hand, it delivers this gentle weirdness.” Like many Judson dances, Flat required a flat delivery, but there was a structural arc in that the cycle happened three times: first when he was fully clothed, then partially clothed, then again fully clothed. By the end, as Paxton later said, “You know something very intimate about someone’s body that doesn’t show through your clothes, covered up again. It’s like a secret has been revealed and concealed.”53 The shunning of theatrical pacing and the “gentle weirdness” of Flat were aspects that Paxton brought to Grand Union as well.
Rainer had loved the action of running ever since childhood. For We Shall Run, she asked twelve performers—both dancers and nondancers—simply to run, but in highly complex patterns. A recording of the powerful “Tuba Mirum” section of Berlioz’s Requiem provided a contrast to the familiarity of running, reflecting Rainer’s taste for Dadaist juxtapositions. This was “everyday” dance with a vengeance. Village Voice writer Jill Johnston, who championed Judson Dance Theater from the start, wrote that the dance “finally bloomed absolutely heroic. The heroism of the ordinary. No plots or pretensions. People running. Hooray for people.”54 The idea that the performers are people rather than dancerly figures was a key element of Grand Union.
Lightfall (1963), by Trisha Brown, Judson Memorial Church. With Brown and Steve Paxton. Photo: Al Giese © Hottelet (Giese).
In Brown’s Lightfall (1963), she and Paxton took turns perching on each other’s backs until the supporting person moved, eventually causing the sitter to fall off. Much of the dance was spent awkwardly sliding off the other person’s back or sprawled on the ground. This typified Brown’s interest in falling, and since Paxton was her partner, possibly contributed to the development of Contact Improvisation a decade later. According to Banes, Lightfall grew out of the improvisations she had been working on with Forti and Dick Levine outside of Dunn’s classes. The sound for Lightfall, a recording of Forti whistling, was a way to include Forti, who was not involved in Judson. (Forti had acquiesced to the request of her new husband, experimental theater director Robert Whitman, to participate only in his work and not to create her own.)55
David Gordon’s Random Breakfast (1962) consisted of six mostly improvised sections, each with its own characters and costumes. It appeared on Concerts #5 and #7 after premiering in Washington, D.C., at the America on Wheels Skating Rink in May 1963.56 His compulsion to make himself and his audience uncomfortable was fully aired. In the section called “Prefabricated Dance” he lectured off the cuff about how to make a dance, satirizing the methods of both Louis Horst and Robert Dunn—while Valda Setterfield, his wife and Cunningham company member, danced to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. It was intended as a comment on what he called “the Judson Church Dance Factory Gold Rush in which choreography ran rampant.”57 “I talked about timing, subject matter, content, and how to get the audience in the palm of your hands…. I conceived of it as a scathing dismissal of current values and methods. The audience thought it was very funny.”58 The performance earned Gordon and Setterfield the term “classic wits” in Jill Johnston’s review.59 In another section, Gordon spoofed a Spanish dance while wearing full Carmen Miranda regalia. “I’ll be made so uncomfortable by appearing in a strapless dress and a wig and a mantilla I’ll do anything!”60 Gordon’s talking while dancing, commitment to embarrassing himself, and penchant for exotic costumes all bloomed into full flower in Grand Union.
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Although the dance artists could follow their individual interests at Judson, there were also collaborative occasions. As Paxton has said, Judson was “a big barbecue, with all the neighbors dropping in.”61 The evening that most typifies that description was Concert #13, subtitled “A Collaborative Event, November 19–20, 1963” (ending only two days before the assassination of President Kennedy). The sculptor Charles Ross, who had worked with Halprin on the West Coast, proposed an evening wherein all the choreographers on the program would address, confront, or coexist with the environment he created. In the Judson sanctuary, Ross constructed two different edifices. One was a big trapezoid made from metal pipes, a kind of swing set without the swings. The second was a huge wooden platform about ten feet above the floor that served as a kind of diving board for Rainer and the other performers to jump into a pile of tires.62 Toward the end of the evening, Ross started piling folding chairs on top of that platform, so that Ross in action and the growing mountain of chairs were part of the set. In between the nine pieces were interludes of “free play” that made it hard to distinguish when one choreographer’s work ended and another’s began. The choreographers included Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Alex Hay, and Carla Blank.
Rainer remembers Concert #13 as a highlight. She felt her escapade for that concert, Room Service (1963), was her only real collaboration with a visual artist. But the whole collaborative event registered on her even more strongly than her single piece. “I think that was one of the most amazing evenings. Everyone’s thinking was so radically changed by these enormous structures. We had to deal with them … and everyone came up with quite different pieces.”63
In Concert #13, the “neighbors who dropped in” were not necessarily from the same discipline. But they could all partake of the same meal, as it were. The sharing process at Judson, which began in Robert Dunn’s classes and continued through the leaderless workshops held in the basement, reflected a growing interest in a democratic process in the wider art world. Other performing arts groups, like Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Living Theatre, The Performance Group (later the Wooster Group), Mabou Mines, Pilobolus, the Negro Ensemble Company, Sonic Arts Union, and Videofreex, were also at least partly collaborative. In the visual arts, artist-run galleries like Hansa, Tanager, and Brata Galleries of the Tenth Street Gallery scene were cooperatively run. Most of these galleries, like SoHo spaces later on, were places where artists could, according to gallery director Lynn Gumpert, “experiment with new art forms in unexpected and blatantly noncommercial venues.”64
Judson Dance Theater did not produce masterworks, nor was that its goal. The whole idea of a masterpiece had already been thrown into question by happenings and Fluxus. The literary counterpart, The Floating Bear, produced poetry, drawings, and art reviews that were about new forms—the Beats, the Black Mountain writers—without regard for existing masterworks. This homemade newsletter was delivered free to subscribers. Like Judson Dance Theater, it was a collaborative effort among artists of different disciplines: poets Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) edited, James Waring typed, jazz pianist Cecil Taylor ran the mimeograph machine, and dancer Fred Herko collated. Other writers who contributed were Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg. This newsletter was inextricably interlaced with Judson Dance Theater. Taylor played for Fred Herko’s Like Most People in the first Judson dance concert, and The Floating Bear carried the only review of that concert, written by di Prima.65
INTERLUDE
SIMONE FORTI’S LIFE IN COMMUNES
Simone Forti, who was an active member of the Robert Dunn class, was also part of the art world. In 1960 Claes Oldenburg, who had