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INTRODUCTION

Although Grand Union existed for only six years—a blip in the span of dance and performance history—it made an impact on those who witnessed its collective genius. Word spread, and even now the name of the group is legendary. Grand Union was the bridge between Judson Dance Theater—that explosion of experimentation that changed the face of modern dance—and the illustrious careers of its long-term members, some of whom formed the bedrock of postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, and Nancy Lewis. Grand Union was both a culmination of early experiments and a laboratory for future work.

The confluence of these brilliantly idiosyncratic minds/bodies gave rise to a flow of human interaction that was wayward, minimalist, excessive, ludicrous, annoying, goading, uproarious, or deeply moving. It epitomized the spirit of the sixties: flaunting freedom from the usual (unwritten) rules, solving dilemmas (largely) peacefully, and creating an accidentally leaderless democracy (while coping with a typical array of resentments).

Grand Union’s mode was improvisation—the most ephemeral form of an ephemeral form. There is no choreography to look back on and analyze. There was no method, no treatise, no plan. We were watching people deal with whatever came up. They were out there in the wild. This wasn’t improvising on a stated theme, the way jazz musicians and theater people do; this was being thrown into an empty space, onto a veritable blank canvas, with nothing to fall back on but their instincts. They made structures as they went along, or rather they built upon the structures that arose organically during performance. It wasn’t anarchy as we usually think of it, but as I explain in the “Leaderless? Really?” interlude, the antihierarchical stance of anarchism threads through the arts of that time, particularly the thinking of Rainer and Paxton.

I saw Grand Union only three or four times during its six-year life span. I don’t remember many specific sequences, but I remember how I felt while watching the group perform. I felt wide awake and ready to respond to every new decision as each episode unfolded. Seeing shape and intention materialize before my eyes—and realizing the risks the performers took—put me in a state of high alert. I rode the ups and downs with them from my seat, accumulating new insights about each person/dancer/character and their relationships to dance and to each other. I was in awe of their ability to remain resolutely themselves while also fully participating in the group. They could instinctively either reinforce what was going on or sharply counter it. Harmony and absurdity in equal measure. Giddy Dada Zen.

I remember one time, in 1975 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, when Nancy Lewis was standing under a blue blanket for a long time. Various duets and trios were going on, and she suddenly asked out loud, from under the blanket, “Am I doing anything important here?” The audience cracked up laughing, and the laughter burst into applause. But it was more than a joke; she was admitting that she didn’t know. Not knowing was a way to start at zero, and stillness was a way to let others take the focus. An acceptance of nothingness as a gateway to somethingness. A possibly “important” foil to a colleague’s more defined plan.

I remember watching Barbara Dilley and David Gordon chasing each other with pillows around the perimeter of the Eisner Lubin Auditorium of New York University’s (NYU’s) Loeb Student Center. Their physical sparring was impulsive, ambiguous, and intimate. They could have been a pair of particularly witty siblings or impetuous lovers—until strains of hostility crept in. I remember wondering: Are they really mad at each other or just playing?

Turns out, they were wondering too. The line between art and life, as John Cage, Anna Halprin, and Allan Kaprow had championed, was blurred. That merging was fascinating to behold but was also destabilizing and probably a factor in the group’s demise. But until that collapse, this kind of confusion helped crack open the possibilities of performance.

Knowing that some archival videotapes existed, I started wondering if the tapes would hold up to my memory. In fact, seeing the tapes is what sent me into Grand Union fever. The screen sizzled with—what?—a kind of readiness to engage, to accept any reality and move through it. Even though what came up on the screen was limited by a single camera angle, I could see the moment-to-moment decisions the dancers made to burrow further into their own private exploration, accept the bid of another player, or interrupt another’s intention.

After watching a few hours of the tapes, I came away with the thought that Grand Union back then possessed a kind of collective wisdom. The organic flow of the group’s movement/interactions/fantasies revealed a natural, grounded-yet-buoyant way of being in the world, all the while not knowing what the next moment would bring. That not-knowingness led to a state of mind rarely exposed in public, and witnessing it was exciting. It escaped the airtight construction of locked-down choreography. It allowed us to see the dancers not only as movers, but also as thinkers, craftspeople, rebels—each with a defined voice. They were (unintentionally) teaching me/us lessons that reflected the slogan of the day, “Go with the flow,” in the deepest, most complex ways. They responded to any impulse with bristling readiness and to any overture with a fearless range of options.

Watching the tapes, I got that same sense of awe that I had had more than forty years earlier. I felt I could learn a lot from studying the videos—not only about dance, or performance, or improvisation, but about life. I didn’t want to dance with them (anachronistically speaking) or to attain their mastery at improvisation. What I wanted was to be able to navigate through my life the way they were navigating through unforeseen circumstances.

What they had found together was, in Douglas Dunn’s words, a “possible ideal world.”¹ They could give voice to their innermost selves and at the same time weave an intricate tapestry of the whole group. Barbara Dilley’s explanation is that there was a “group mind” at work.² In David Gordon’s words, Grand Union was “a miracle.”³

The videos spurred questions: What was happening in the culture to produce such an egalitarian world, however flawed and temporary? How did these dancers ride the ebb and flow so organically? To what extent were they a utopian society, and to what extent did they reveal/conceal antisocial behaviors? How could they be such a strong performing unit while refusing to rehearse together? What other improvisation collectives were around at the time? What made the seventies audience so ready for GU’s brand of anarchy? What pulled the group apart after six years?

After watching a few hours of this material⁴ I started talking to my husband Jim about it. He was about to go out, but when he saw my excitement—and that I couldn’t stop talking about it—he sat down, still wearing his jacket, to listen. I was raving about how natural the dancers were, how their bodies erupted with the kind of impulsiveness that children have, yet they also had a disarming sophistication. After the first wave of my gushing, he said, “I think this is your next book.”

A quick Internet search showed that not much had been written about Grand Union in the burgeoning “dance studies” field. Fortunately, a dissertation from the eighties had been published in 1991 as part of a theatrical series. I am indebted to Margaret Hupp Ramsay for her book The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group, which has interviews as well as listings of performance dates and reviews. She supplied good interview material, but the book is thin on historical and artistic context. I have the advantages of first, knowing the Grand Union members and their work as individual choreographers; second, having danced with some of them; and third, having access to archival videos that were not available in the eighties.

Nothing that’s been written on Grand Union comes close to Sally Banes’s last chapter at the end of her landmark book Terpsichore in Sneakers. Banes divided this section into two parts: her scholarly analysis and the dancers’ written responses to her questions. Her loving attention to them was clear. She didn’t have to say, as she did in a later essay, that Grand Union was “one of the most brilliant projects of the postmodern dance.”⁵ Sally and I were close friends, sharing similar tastes and curiosities since the mid-seventies. In the early eighties we worked together on separate but overlapping projects for Judson Dance Theater, involving some of the same dance artists who were in Grand Union.⁶ We remained close until her tragic stroke in 2002. I sometimes feel, as I embark on this book, that we’re doing this together, that she is looking over my shoulder, checking in with me.

There are many approaches to dance improvisation today. Melinda Buckwalter has described twenty-five of them, from Simone Forti to Min Tanaka to Lisa Nelson, in her book Composing While Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion. The Wesleyan anthology Taken by Surprise is another excellent source. And Contact Quarterly regularly publishes ideas and reports on many approaches to both improvisation and somatic practices. These publications provide an array of starting points, methods, and discussion topics for those who may have had only conventional dance training. I was one such student in the sixties, when my solid training in ballet and modern dance didn’t put a dent in my stomach-churning dread of improvising.⁷

But the book in your hands now is not a manual for learning improvisation; it will not coax anyone into improvising or give advice on how to form a collaborative improvisation group. Perhaps Grand Union was a fluke, never to be repeated. I feel the stars aligned briefly to create something as rare as a total solar eclipse. As Claire Barliant has written about 112 Greene Street (more about that commune-like artists’ space in chapter 3), “[T]he reason these projects and venues are so fantastic is precisely that they’re not meant to last forever.”⁸ As my improvising colleague Stephanie Skura pointed out, very often a particularly vital period of creativity has a finite life span.⁹ In the case of Grand Union, between six and nine artistically fertile, eccentric, and delightfully subversive dance artists came together to create a potent mix of elements, a union of grandeur. Their process required a kind of psychic nakedness—and once or twice, the other kind too.

I am writing this book as a witness to a slice of dance history that could disappear. In some ways, it’s a continuation of my research on Judson Dance Theater¹⁰ and Anna Halprin and Simone Forti.¹¹ As opposed to Judson Dance Theater, which I did not witness firsthand, I saw and heard Grand Union and never forgot it.

While watching the videos, I found myself transfixed by every entwinement and interaction, not to mention the dancing, so vivid and so unique to each person. I was hungry to speak with all the living GU members and find people who had seen them more often than I had. Three of my dance colleagues confessed to having been “groupies.” Grand Union was kind of like a rock band but on a smaller economic scale: a leaderless group (not that rock bands don’t have their power struggles) with a special synergy that excited fans. Sometimes people would declare their favorites, as in, “Who is your favorite Beatle?” As with the Beatles, each member was essential to the whole. The interactions could be brazen, bristly, odd, unpolished, combative, or unexpectedly tender.

The audience in the downtown milieu was ready for Grand Union. I was ready for it. Many young, post-Judson dance artists were ready for it. As Marcel Duchamp pointed out, a work of art is not complete without the audience. “The onlooker is as important as the artist,” he has said. “In spite of what the artist thinks he’s doing, something stays on that is completely independent of what he intended, and that something is grabbed by society…. [I]t’s the onlooker who has the last word.”¹² Each new art has to find its audience, and in the case of Grand Union, it was the other artists of SoHo. It was also the audiences in places like Oberlin College in Ohio and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the group had time to cultivate familiarity.

An extra poignancy comes with this project for me: I joined the Trisha Brown Dance Company in November 1975, just a few weeks before her last appearance with Grand Union in Tokyo. Trisha’s desire to start a more full-time company was her second reason for dropping out (the first being her ambivalence from the start). I danced with her until 1978, and we remained friends until her death in 2017. Her departure from Grand Union prompted David and Steve to also call it quits. So in some circuitous, time-machine way, having participated in the group that ferried Trisha away from Grand Union, to the current moment when I am writing about this, I am making a full circle.

Much has been written about Trisha Brown’s choreography, but no scholar has discussed her performances in GU as part of her work. Watching the tapes is a way for me to fit her improvisational work into her oeuvre as a whole. The same could be said for David, Steve, Barbara, and Douglas: though reams have been written about each of them, very little focuses on their remarkable contributions to Grand Union. I try to remedy this in chapter 22, on GU as a laboratory for their individual work.

I embark on this book, too, as a challenge to what I’ve come to see as the arbitrariness of dance history. Some of the most astonishing dance artists I saw in the seventies, like William Dunas and Kenneth King, are not part of the canon of dance history. I feel that the work of Grand Union is similarly imperiled.

Although writing this book has been daunting in many ways, I feel comfortable riding in this particular saddle. My path has crossed with almost all the Grand Union members in the last forty-plus years. I danced with Steve when he was a guest artist in Trisha’s company. I pulled in Yvonne, Steve, and Trisha to the Bennington College Judson Project in the early eighties; I invited Steve to teach at the Jacob’s Pillow-at-Bennington workshop that I directed in the early nineties. In 1980 I hung out with David and Yvonne in France at the Festival de la Sainte Baume, where we were all teaching workshops (I learned Trio A from Yvonne there); I’ve done several curatorial projects with Yvonne since then. I share with Nancy two choreographers we have both danced for, Jack Moore and Twyla Tharp; I have taken a workshop from, and written about, Barbara; and I was part of a fleeting improvisation group with Douglas in the late nineties. In working on this book, I have deepened my knowledge of each of them through scrutinizing the videos and engaging in multiple conversations.

This book looks back at an ecosystem that valued collaboration as well as the individual imagination. In the twenty-first century, it feels like a luxury for me to be spending hours and days with these artists I admire so much … a luscious immersion … swimming in the waters of collective creativity. The fact that Grand Union existed at all is due to the spirit of collaboration encouraged in that milieu and to the possibilities of functioning (gloriously) without a leader. Although Grand Union was very much of its time, it refracted the timeless issues of the individual versus the group, freedom versus cooperation, virtuosity versus the everyday, and the relationship between art and life.

NOTE TO READERS

NAMES

The names Barbara Lloyd and Nancy Green were used during Grand Union up until 1974 or 1975. At that point, the two women reverted to their maiden names, Barbara Dilley and Nancy Lewis. I have chosen to honor that decision and use their maiden names throughout. 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.