Lives of Performers. Judson Dance Theater
In the early 1960s a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers gathered in
Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in
New York’s Greenwich Village, for a series of workshops that ultimately redefined the notion of dance. Emphasizing spontaneity and everyday gestures, the Judson artists questioned and examined the very fundamentals of choreography, rejecting the glamour and virtuosity of traditional dance.
Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934, San Francisco), author of the notorious No Manifesto (1965), was one of the instigators of the collective. In the light of a major exhibition exploring the history and legacy of the Judson Dance Theater
(MoMA, New York), we have republished two excerpts from Rainer’s autobiography Feelings Are Facts.
[…] On returning to New York I continued with ballet and Cunningham and got involved with Robert Dunn’s composition workshop. Dunn, a musician and follower of John Cage who often provided piano accompaniment for classes, had been persuaded by John to offer this weekly course in the Cunningham studio. There were very few of us at the beginning: Steve Paxton, Marni Mahaffey, Paul Berenson, Simone, and I.
Bob spent a lot of time showing us and explicating the chance scores used by John Cage for his Fontana Mix and other pieces and analyzing the time structure of Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies. The idea was that we might be interested in combining them in some way. In the studio on Great Jones Street that I shared with Simone and Bob Morris, I worked on the movement phrases I would use in Three Satie Spoons, my particular resolution of Dunn’s assignment. I also rehearsed with Simone and Bob Morris on her See Saw, which she was about to show at the Reuben Gallery. Around this time I saw Simone do an improvisation in our studio that affected me deeply. She scattered bits and pieces of rags and wood around the floor, landscape-like. Then she simply sat in one place for a while, occasionally changed her position or moved to another place. I don’t know what her intent was, but for me what she did brought the god-like image of the dancer down to human scale more effectively than anything I had seen. It was a beautiful alternative to the heroic posturing that I felt continued to dominate my dance training. (At the Graham School I had been told to become more “regal” and less athletic!)
The Reuben Gallery storefront on East 2nd Street was used by artists Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, and Allan Kaprow, all of whom wanted to escape the constraints of static gallery installation and explore a time-based medium. Simone had been invited to present two works at their Christmas show of 1960. Her See Saw was on a program with Rollers (in which she and La Monte Young caromed and were pulled around in two gocarts) and Jim Dine’s Shining Bed (Dine lay on a bed and wiped dough along its metal posts). In See Saw Bob Morris and I began by sitting at either end of the crude wooden seesaw, then executed mildly athletic moves like walking along it and balancing while making tiny, almost imperceptible shifts in weight. The piece had a climax, the outcome in rehearsal of Simone’s throwing a jacket on the floor and ordering me to “Perform that!” at which I had a screaming fit on my end of the seesaw (don’t ask why) while Bob read an art magazine to himself at his end. It was the precursor of another screaming fit two years later in a solo dance of my own, Three Seascapes. George Sugarman, after seeing Simone’s piece, exclaimed enthusiastically, “It’s like a Chekhov play!” (The screaming/reading climax now reminds me of the night in Chicago with John Bottomley drunkenly thrashing while I sat in quiet detachment.) One of the most compelling evenings I witnessed at the Reuben Gallery was Jim Dine’s Car Crash, in which, as a spectral figure in gleaming gray makeup and cloak, he wrote on a blackboard and Patty Oldenburg sat on a high stool intoning catastrophic phrases describing auto accidents.
[…] Howard Moody was the radical director/minister of Judson Memorial Church in the 60s. A former marine with a crew cut and twinkly eyes, he made the church into a social and cultural magnet. During his tenure it became more than a haven for experimental art and theater events. Besides running a gallery on Thompson Street that showed work by Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and other up-and-coming artists, and producing numerous collaborations between composer Al Carmines and director Larry Kornfeld, the church operated a draft counseling service and organized around issues of civil rights, free speech, abortion rights, and the decriminalization of prostitution. Its small but devoted congregation came to many of the cultural events. The first Concert of Dance turned out to be a three-hour marathon for a capacity audience of about 300 sitting from beginning to end in the un-air-conditioned 90º heat. It seemed a very heterogeneous group: Greenwich Village residents, artists, dancers, drop-ins, congregation members. The selection of the program had been hammered out at numerous gab sessions, with Bob Dunn as the cool-headed prow of a sometimes overheated ship. He was responsible for the organization of the program. It began with a sequence from The Bank Dick as the audience was coming in. Judy Dunn stage-managed and also performed in my Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms with me and Bill Davis. David Gordon performed his inspired proto-feminist solo, Mannequin Dance, in which he wore a blood spattered lab coat and sang all the verses of Second Hand Rose and Get Married, Shirley, Get Married in his gruff baritone while descending in a slow-motion pivot to the floor. Also on the program were Fred Herko on roller skates with an umbrella; Carolee Schneemann’s Lateral Splay, in which a dozen or so people scuttled across the space as low and fast as
possible; composer John Herbert McDowell with red sock and mirror; Steve Paxton’s Transit and Proxy, in which Steve, Jennifer Tipton, and I performed; and dances by Elaine Summers, Ruth Emerson, Deborah and Alex Hay, Bill Davis, Gretchen MacLane, and others. I also performed a solo, Ordinary Dance, during which I recited the names of my grade-school teachers and the streets on which I had lived from early childhood. We were all wildly ecstatic afterward. As the audience enthusiastically applauded at the end, I clasped Judy around the waist, hoisted her in the air as we both exclaimed “It’s a positive alternative!” The church would become our home, its basement gymnasium available for weekly workshops and additional performance space, an alternative to the once-a-year, hire-a-hall mode of operating that had plagued the struggling modern dancer before. Here we could present things more frequently, more informally, more cheaply, and — most important of all — more cooperatively. If I thought that much of what went on in the workshop was a bunch of nonsense, I also had a dread of isolation, which made me place great value on being part of a group. As I look back, what stands out for me, along with the inevitable undercurrents of petty jealousies and competitiveness (from which I was not exempt), is the spirit of that time: a dare-devil willingness to try anything, the arrogance of our certainty that there was ground to be broken and we were standing on it, the exhilaration produced by the response of the incredibly partisan audiences, and the feverish anticipation of each new review in the Village Voice by our champion, Jill Johnston.
* From: Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts. A Life, 2006. MIT Press, Cambridge / London (pp. 195-197; 222-225).