THIRD LOGIUDICE VIDEO, MAY 1972
In some ways, this session, which is the third of the four LoGiudice performances, is about voices. Barbara finds the voice of mock indignation, crystal clear despite being in a made-up language. Yvonne finds a complaining/blaming voice, possibly unleashed because of bending over like a beast of burden. Her shouting voice sparks an argument, and all are rescued by Trisha’s and Nancy’s resilient sense of humor. David finds that saying nothing can become a chant. This video does not start in the beginning of a performance but the middle. Two oft-used Grand Union “bits” that show up here are the staged argument and the fake audition. They never repeated themselves verbatim, but these were two types of, one could say, situation comedy skits that GU members easily fell into.
Trisha and David are playing, goading each other. She’s wearing bell bottoms flared at the knee; he’s wearing boots. They bump hips; she butts her head against his chest. He takes a spinning whack at shoulder level, knowing Trisha will duck precisely at the right moment. She’s enjoying this fake, harmless aggression.
Meanwhile, Steve is laying down a narrow cloth in a big circle on the floor. It is actually a long, stretchy tube of pink fabric. (I know the color, not from the black-and-white video, but from a review.) Nancy is rolling around on top of it. We hear Barbara’s voice, off camera, singing and chirping in a wordless language. As she enters the frame, we see that she is on the floor, scooching forward with her legs inside the cloth, which extends many yards in front of her. The tube cloth ahead of her bisects the playing field of Trisha and David. We see the collision coming.
Trisha and David plant their legs on the tube cloth, determined to block Barbara’s path. When Barbara reaches the blockade, she stops and looks up at them. Her face is like a little gnome’s, both inquisitive and defiant. She shoves their legs, using her elbows to push them out of her way, still singing in gibberish. Trisha and David do what they can to annoy her: Trisha softly kicks her and David flips her hair up. Barbara, indignant, puts a hand on her hip and gives them what for. Sounds like a mix of Swedish and Chinese. She’s hilariously self-righteous, with perfect intonation and gestures to make herself understood without a word of English.
Music with a beat starts up, and Trisha and David jounce slightly while continuing to taunt Barbara. Trisha goes into high-gear mock belligerence, yelling and swearing and pushing and almost hitting. It’s quite a brawl now, and David tries to break it up between the two women.
As the fracas subsides, Nancy enters the frame from the other end of the tube cloth and inches toward Barbara. Having created a full circle with the cloth, they are now on the floor facing each other. Have they been planning to converge like this all along?
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Yvonne has placed her body, prone and facing up, in the laps of audience members, asking to be passed along. After she flips over, it seems more of a struggle for the audience to handle her weight. As Yvonne gets passed to Valda Setterfield, Valda says to her, “I don’t understand why you’re so heavy, Yvonne; all I ever see in your refrigerator is celery.”1
David takes Trisha into slow-dancing mode. She is telling him about her dance background, but in a voice that is fraught with despair.
Trisha, sad and tearful: “I did acrobatics, toe, and ballet. I was real good in acrobatics. I got better in tap but I was lousy in ballet.” Desperate: “I went to college and I majored in dance.” Shouting: “I graduated with honors.”
David, in a quiet, calm voice, asks who her teachers were.
Trisha, tearful: “Becky Fuller. Eleanor Lauer. Marion Van Tuyl.”2
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Yvonne is bent over, carrying Barbara on her back. As the two approach David and Trisha, Barbara reaches out and gamely taps David on the back. Trisha and David pull slightly apart. In response to Trisha’s résumé recitation, David says, “I studied with Jimmy Waring and I studied with Merce Cunningham, and I studied with …” Now he faces Barbara: “How much more do you want to know before you choose which one of us you want to dance with?”
GU at LoGiudice Gallery, 1972. From left: Brown, Gordon. Photo: Gordon Mumma.
Steve, holding the microphone, takes a drag of a cigarette and blows out smoke.
Yvonne’s complaints, at first inaudible, escalate to yelling: “This is the nastiest concert I’ve ever been to!”
Barbara: “Wait a minute, Yvonne. You know, you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.”
David: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, Barbara.”
Barbara: “Did you hear what she said?!? She said this is the nastiest concert she’d ever been to!”
David, also outraged: “But you said she doesn’t have to be here if she doesn’t want to. If it weren’t for Yvonne …”
Barbara: “I don’t think she should go around badmouthing what’s going on.”
Yvonne, still bent over, yelling: “Everybody’s been badmouthing everybody all night!”
Barbara: “I haven’t been talking bad.” To Yvonne: “Has somebody been bad to you?”
Yvonne: “No.”
Trisha, setting the record straight: “Right in the beginning, when we first started …”
Yvonne: “Let’s hear it.”
Trisha: “The thing that set the tone …”
Yvonne: “Yes, let’s hear it.”
Trisha: “was that thing that came ’round the room, like this:” Trisha makes a distorted monster face and walks stiffly. [Laughter.]
Barbara: “Who was that who was doing that, Trisha?”
Trisha: “Uh, your partner and my partner.”
Barbara: “You mean these two?” She points to Yvonne and David.
David starts singing in a low voice, “your partner and my partner,” while swaying forward and back, arm still around Trisha.
Yvonne: “I only did it because they … made me.”
David, suddenly pointing to his left: “Nancy was doing it.”
Barbara: “Nancy made her do it!”
Yvonne: Yelling/singing, “You made me do it!”
David to Nancy: “Are you sure you didn’t do it? ’Cause that was the best thing that ever happened.”
Steve puts a mic in front of Nancy, who is fixing her hair, ignoring Yvonne’s wailing. She turns on the charm and looks straight into the camera: “Are we on camera? Are we on television?”
David: “Did you do it?”
Nancy: “How many are gonna watch?” All innocence, she waves. “Hi Mom.”
David: “Did you do it, Nancy?”
Nancy: “Gosh it was a sunny day today and I took the kids to the beach and they looked great. Hi Geoff [the name of her brother and her younger son]…. What was the question?”
David: “The question was, Did you do it?”
Nancy, looking lovingly into the camera: “Sure, I do it all the time.”
David: “And did you do it today?”
Nancy: “Yeah.” Then, whipping her head toward David as though he were being fresh: “Stop asking me those questions!” She blows on the mic and makes big eyes to keep the sexual innuendo going. Steve is still holding the mic. “I didn’t want to do it but” … Now she addresses David more casually: “I just fall into your energy and I can’t help myself. I have to do whatever David does.”
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Not visible but audible: Barbara speaks gently to Yvonne, who replies only in a loud, yelling voice.
Barbara: “Are you ready [for me to get off you]?”
Yvonne: “No, I don’t want you to get off.”
Barbara: “On your mark.”
Yvonne: “No, don’t you threaten me!”
Barbara: “Are you ready?”
Yvonne: “No.”
Barbara: “Get set … Yvonne?”
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David and Trisha, still with their arms around each other, are rocking forward and back. Trisha slips away, backs up to prepare, and launches into a single, spectacular, twisted leap, probably related to her pole-vaulting past.
Barbara to Yvonne, on whose back she still comfortably sits. “OK, sing me a song.”
GU at LoGiudice Gallery, 1972. Dilley sitting on Rainer’s back. Photo: Gordon Mumma.
Yvonne, suddenly calm: “OK, what do you want to hear?”
Barbara: “Anything you wanna sing.”
Yvonne, still bent over, starts singing/yodeling. The song seems to be a version of “Hush Little Baby.” Barbara hums along, patting her on the back, then softly clapping.
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We don’t see David, but we hear him speaking into the mic in a deep voice: “I really don’t have anything to say.” The camera zooms in on Steve putting the mic in front of David and pulling it away each time David starts to speak. His eyes are fixed on David as he teases him in this way. David goes for it, holds still, then tries again to catch the mic.
Yvonne and Barbara have finished their song.
Yvonne, quietly: “Wanna get down now?”
Barbara: “ Yes.”
GU at LoGiudice Gallery, 1972. Yvonne Rainer standing; Lewis and Dilley on floor. Photo: Gordon Mumma.
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Douglas takes Barbara by the hand and leads her, along with Trisha, Yvonne, and Nancy, to a new place in the room. He quietly explains some kind of plan while Barbara weaves in and out, gently touching them, like a fish swimming through seaweed. Douglas finishes and walks to a new spot for himself. Trisha, Yvonne, and Barbara are standing still. Barbara covers her face with her hands. Trisha and Yvonne close their eyes. Quiet. Stillness. Trisha suddenly collapses to the floor, loosening each part of her body separately. It’s a magnificent fall. She stands up, turns around with closed eyes, does it again. Barbara collapses in a more all-in-one, melting way. Nancy and Douglas have fallen to the ground outside the camera’s view. Only Yvonne is left standing.
David has finally gotten access to the mic. We hear his voice, soft and whispery but growing more audible, repeat this sentence over and over: “I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything to say.”
PAXTON’S CLARIFYING THOUGHTS
Steve Paxton wrote an essay about his experience in Grand Union for the September 1972 issue of The Drama Review (pp. 130–34). Since an academic journal like this has a long lead time, my guess is that he wrote it in late 1971, when Grand Union was still very physical and not as verbal as it later became. In any case, readers familiar with Contact Quarterly will recognize the style of his writing: focusing on sensation and a sense of discovery through improvisation. These excerpts offer hints of Paxton’s thinking on the path from Grand Union to Contact Improvisation. It also reflects his lifelong resistance to hierarchy of any kind.
Improvisation seems the form in which all could participate equally, without employing arbitrary social hierarchies in the group.
In a work of this kind [referring to Falling Duets, conceived by Trisha, and the falling section in CP-AD], the eyes learn to judge more acutely, the skin becomes hypersensitive to qualities of touch, particularly the arms; timing in the arc of the topple becomes a game in which you trust as long as nerves allow, pushing your limits. Understanding where another’s focus is becomes easy since it is instinctive. It is also crucial to safety and to communication.
Any two people, even superficially aware of each other, are in communication with each other; but I am talking about reinforced communication, in which both parties are sure that the other is aware of the communication and is actively involved in it, however swift. Overt mind-fucking is to be avoided.
Trust, the developing trust, or the acceptance of a condition of frustrated trust (missed trust) seems to me the basis of mutuality and quickness in the transitions between those naturally arising phrases, the “bits.” Acceptance is the beginning of trust, bringing in information about the actual state of the other person, and erasing images of the other person as one would have liked him to be. No expectations, no disappointments, no blame. Just results.
Theatrical improvisation is a model of earliest experiences, like infants’ cumulative awareness of increasingly complex references, connotations and forms. The Grand Union process is this, coupled with the adult ability to comment on the experience, and with the all-too-human contradictory effort to re-live earlier visions.
I am balanced on my head on the slightly rough floor, pressing painfully, pivoted by an unseen friend at the other end of my body (lower, upper)…. After being turned over and over in slow time, I am uncoiled to the floor and squat on one leg. Then we huddle, nine of us, and blend our softness together and feel close warm breath and hugs. We stand for a time.
Then one person thrusts away and runs around the room alone. I join and soon we are all hurling ourselves thru the air at each other, colliding forcefully, rebounding to collapse on the floor, and up again to twine about each other in the air, falling as a unit. The arms and legs grip from digits to armpits; the muscles of two bodies blend into a single falling mass, mutually sensitive to reinforce physical communication thru soft-surface, verification of movements too quick for consideration. Crash. Roll and balance across a hip which turns under, propelling me onto a rising back which takes me into a scheme of poses and standing balances, rigorous rules instantly known and quickly discarded for a continuing group boogie around the room. (Paxton’s italics)
Freed of habitual denial, the sense of touch can expand beyond the usual allotment of personal space to the architectural enclosure, becoming larger, softer, easily penetrated, or easily encompassing others’ personal space. Contact with the body becomes a matter of degree, already initiated with the first possibility of touching or blending enlarged personal space-fields.
The preparation is opening the senses, judgment, building trust; tuning the body for strength, elasticity, getting it ready for quick changes through the range from relaxed to tense. Body and head must be ready for fast control or instant release of that control, when personal control must yield to that imposed by the situation.
A mark of the dancer used to improvisation is his quickness of response. This quickness is faster than habitual movement/thought and is based on acceptance of the imminent forces, letting the body respond to the reality it senses and trusting it to deal with the situation intuitively. Trust is an organic form of communication.
New material comes into range with the ability to relax into contact and attune movement awareness to the demands of the situation. The body can move more swiftly when it acts out of intuition rather than prejudice. Relationships become possible at high speeds that would be arduous if slowed. It becomes evident that dancers have been only touching the surface.
© 1972 by New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reprinted by permission of the MIT Press.
