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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), Ono sat demurely on the floor with a pair of scissors next to her. One at a time, audience members approached, 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 considered Dunn more of a catalyst than a prime mover.

Forti, 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 interest in running, Brown’s in falling, and Gordon’s in talking while dancing. To give you an idea of how these preoccupations surfaced, I describe 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 cofounded Judson Gallery,¹ and Jim Dine, who had visited Cage’s class at the New School,² invited her to contribute to an evening at the Reuben Gallery. This was a short-lived, unheated space that Kaprow had helped establish as a place for performances and happenings.³ “At that time there weren’t any firm boundaries between different artistic practices,” said Forti in an interview, echoing Halprin’s sense of the ferment on the West Coast. “We were all more or less concerned with an art of process rather than with producing stable, marketable aesthetic objects.”⁴

In the Cage-influenced tradition of happenings by Kaprow and theater pieces by her then husband, Robert Whitman, Forti did not feel the need to classify her pieces. In 1961, when La Monte Young invited her to create an evening at Yoko Ono’s studio on Chambers Street, she came up with several events she called “dance constructions.” Both Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton performed on this evening—Rainer in See-Saw (1960)⁵ and Paxton in Huddle, Slant Board, and Herding.⁶ In each of these pieces the object and movement are essential to each other. Many years later, in 2015, the dance constructions were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art as part of its recognition of performance as art.

In 1969, after Forti’s marriage to Whitman broke up, she attended the Woodstock Festival. When the festival was over, she roamed from one commune to another for about a year. Here she speaks about what one might call the dreamy side of communality:

It was an extraordinary moment in my life. Like everyone else I took a lot of drugs—hash, marijuana, acid, mescaline. But the most important thing had something to do with a way of being together—which was not at all theoretical, on the contrary. There was at one and the same time an incredible freedom and a mutual respect that was unheard of until then. It took me a year to come down. I lived communally—in a situation where the only tacit rule was to value silence. You could develop a practice of listening, of attention: to others, to space, to time, and to action. In this way I never stopped dancing—in a thousand different ways. I remember one morning I got up at dawn and while two friends prepared breakfast I was outside in the landscape, perched on a large rock, another small rock balanced on my head. I was experimenting with the degree of flexibility of my dorsal spine that such an arrangement permitted. You see, these were often very simple experiments and experiences. And there was an intensely pleasurable but unspoken connection and understanding between this activity and that of my friends who were cooking their porridge.⁷

Freedom. Respect. Silence. Listening. Dancing. Experimenting. Connection. Was it absolutely necessary to ingest drugs to attain these states of mind? Forti has speculated that “drugs had a lot to do with it, everybody tripping together so much.”⁸ Perhaps so. As Richard Foreman recently reminded me, Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out” was useful when it came to breaking habits and opening one’s eyes to other ways of living.⁹

But qualities like silence and listening are aspects of creativity that both Cage and Halprin valued—with or without substances. And they fed into Forti’s improvisational abilities, which she passed on to Rainer, Paxton, and Brown. She listened to her own impulses when she danced; she could stick with something for a long time, and she could just as easily spring away from it. If she was banking in circles, she could get so caught up in the momentum that she would keep it up for a long time. But if another image or thought suddenly occurred to her, she would go for it. There was no conflict between mind and body—like a cat that is tired of scratching the sofa and suddenly pounces on a ball. Forti’s close observations of animal behavior contributed to that kind of impulsive break.

Simone Forti in her Fan Dance (1975). Photo: Babette Mangolte. Courtesy of the artist and The Box, LA.

In Forti’s world, even objects—or perhaps especially objects, considering her dance constructions—were part of it. As she has written, again about living on a commune, “Objects, though moved by people, seemed to follow their own paths, to be part of the flow.”¹⁰ This sense that both living and inanimate things were part of one big process was bedrock to Grand Union.