Introduction
1. Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 226.
2. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 114.
3. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017. The full quote is: “Grand Union, which was a miracle, for all the years of it until the end. I remember feeling embarrassed and preposterous and How could I be doing what I’m doing at this moment? And all of that worked splendidly and changed my life and changed everything that ever happened to me afterwards.”
4. The tapes from the LoGuidice Gallery performances of 1972 are lodged in three places. I discovered them in this order: the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Fales Special Collection at New York University’s Bobst Library, and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. At the Library for the Performing Arts, it was not necessary to make an appointment, so I went to view the tapes often.
5. Sally Banes, “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater,” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 359; originally published in Choreography: Principles and Practice, ed. Janet Adshead (Surrey, UK: University of Surrey Press, 1987) and in Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 211–26.
6. Sally Banes’s project at the time was her dissertation, which was eventually published as Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). My project was the Bennington College Judson Project. I assigned Sally to write the essay “Earthly Bodies: Judson Dance Theater” for the BCJP’s catalog in 1981 (pages 14–19). We shared resources, had many discussions about the material, and quoted from each other’s interviews.
7. I have described this anxiety at greater length in Wendy Perron, Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 8–10; previously published as “One Route from Ballet to Postmodern,” in Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, ed. Sally Banes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 137–50.
8. Claire Barliant, “112 Greene Street,” Paris Review, July 25, 2012, accessed January 8, 2018, www.theparisreview.org.
9. Skura’s comment was part of a Q&A following my presentation about the Grand Union at the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, Velocity Dance Center, in 2017.
10. As a dance faculty member at Bennington College, I conceived and co-directed the Bennington College Judson Project, which comprised artistic residencies at the college, a series of video interviews, a traveling exhibit of photographs and video, and two programs of reconstructions hosted by Danspace Project in New York City, ca. 1980–1983. Some of the videos, which are lodged at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2018–2019 exhibit Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done.
11. I co-curated the exhibition Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, California and New York, 1955–72 in 2017.
12. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 18.
1. Anna Halprin, John Cage, and Judson Dance Theater
1. Wendy Perron, “Simone Forti: bodynatureartmovementbody,” in Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972, exhibition catalog, ed. Ninotchka Bennahum, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson (Art, Design and Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara in association with University of California Press, 2017).
2. Arch Lauterer was teaching stage design at the Bennington School of the Dance, including the summer of 1939, when it was hosted by Mills College in California. One of the performance spaces there was the Mills College Greek Theatre, which was a small, arena-style outdoor theater with steps for the audience to sit on. I think it’s possible that this arrangement influenced his codesign of the Halprins’ dance deck.
3. Ninotchka Bennahum, “Anna Halprin’s Radical Body in Motion,” in Bennahum, Perron, and Robertson, Radical Bodies, 63.
4. Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 87.
5. Perron, “Simone Forti: bodynatureartmovementbody,” 93.
6. John Rockwell, “A Collaborative Community: Ann Halprin and Her Composers,” in Bennahum, Perron, and Robertson, Radical Bodies, 164.
7. Libby Worth with Helen Poynor, Anna Halprin (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004), 23.
8. Perron, “Simone Forti: bodynatureartmovementbody,” 93; and Laura Kuhn, ed., The Selected Letters of John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), 216.
9. Ross, Anna Halprin, 123.
10. Anna Halprin, quoted in Rockwell, “A Collaborative Community,” 162, quoting from David W. Bernstein, ed., San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 238.
11. Quoted in Rockwell, “A Collaborative Community,” 167.
12. Kuhn, Selected Letters of John Cage, 265.
13. Richard Foreman (experimental theater director), interview with author, August 7, 2017.
14. Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix, eds., Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–71 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 106–9.
15. Quoted in Biesenbach and Cherix, Yoko Ono, 128.
16. Quoted in David Vaughan, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (New York: Aperture, 1997), 100.
17. Vaughan, Merce Cunningham, 101.
18. Mary Overlie, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice (self-published, 2016), 90–91.
19. Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 314.
20. “I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation. I became less disturbed and went back to work.” “John Cage: An Autobiographical Statement,” accessed June 19, 2018, http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html.
21. Jill Johnston, “The New American Modern Dance,” in The New American Arts, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967),172.
22. Rockwell, “A Collaborative Community,” 166.
23. Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer (2015), dir. Jack Walsh.
24. Other students that summer included June Ekman, Ruth Emerson, and Shirley Ririe.
25. Trisha Brown accepting an honorary degree at the Columbia College Chicago commencement in 2009: “Trisha Brown, ’09 Columbia College Commencement,” YouTube, posted January 6, 2011, accessed May 22, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=409&v=q1s3IMdimlg.
26. Told by, among others, Don McDonagh in The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York: New American Library, 1970); Sally Banes in Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image; Banes in Judson Dance Theater: 1962–65 (Bennington College Judson Project, 1981), exhibition catalog; Ramsay Burt in Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (London: Routledge, 2006); Perron in “What Was Judson Dance Theater and Did It Ever End,” in Danspace Platform 2012: Judson Now (Danspace Project, 2012), exhibition catalog; Bennahum, Perron, and Robertson in Radical Bodies; and Ana Janevski and Thomas Lax, eds., in Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018).
27. McDonagh, Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance, 76.
28. The other two were Paulus Berensohn and Marni Mahaffey.
29. Using indeterminacy in composing is usually attributed to Cage, but Carolyn Brown contends that composers Earle Brown and Morton Feldman deployed this form before Cage. See Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007), 356.
30. Banes, “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater,” 352.
31. Banes, “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater,” 353.
32. David Gordon, untitled remembrance of Robert Dunn, Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997), 19.
33. Trisha Brown, conversation with author, 1970s.
34. “Simone Forti: Style Is a Corset,” interview by Christophe Wavelet, Writings on Dance, nos. 18/19 (Winter 1999): 151.
35. In a 1983 letter to Bernstein, Cage writes: “Improvisation is not related to what the three of us are doing in our work” (Kuhn, Selected Letters of John Cage, 289). The two composers he is referring to are Earle Brown and Morton Feldman.
36. Trisha Brown, quoted in Contemporary Dance: An Anthology of Lectures, Interviews and Essays with Many of the Most Important Contemporary American Choreographers, Scholars and Critics, ed. Anne Livet (New York: Abbeville Press in association with The Fort Worth Art Museum, 1978), 45.
37. Yvonne Rainer, email to author, February 20, 2018.
38. For more on the history of the Y’s place in modern dance, see Naomi M. Jackson, Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 2000).
39. Jackson, Converging Movements, 88.
40. Yvonne Rainer has mentioned Jack Moore’s presence several times. Moore had assisted Louis Horst in his composition classes at ADF. Later he was a faculty member at Bennington College, spanning the time from when I was a student there (1965–1969) to when I was a teacher (1978–1984).
41. Steve Paxton, group interview with author, July 26, 2017. Hoving was a prominent member of the José Limón Dance Company from 1949 to 1963 and a favorite teacher at American Dance Festival.
42. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 77.
43. Walker, “Talking Dance: Yvonne Rainer and Sally Banes,” Fourth Wall (blog), September 26, 2001, accessed March 5, 2016, https://walkerart.org/magazine/talking-dance-yvonne-rainer-and-sally-banes.
44. Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 15.
45. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 174.
46. Ross, Anna Halprin, 49–69.
47. Kuhn, Selected Letters of John Cage, 5.
48. The prepared piano involves inserting objects like screws and bolts into the strings inside a piano. Cage first used this method in an effort to make an African sound for a dance by Sylvilla Fort at the Cornish School. For more on his discovery, see “How the Piano Came to Be Prepared,” in John Cage, Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979).
49. Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (exhibit at Museum of Modern Art, 2017); Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 20–21; and Mary Emma Harris, quoted in Joan Acocella, “Whose Pants: Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener and the Playful Legacy of Merce Cunningham,” New Yorker, November 26, 2018, 80–82.
50. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 362.
51. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 82; and Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 439–40.
52. “Judson at 50: Steve Paxton,” Interviews: Steve Paxton, Artforum, July 24, 2012, accessed October 2017, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/judson-at-50-steve-paxton-31419.
53. All of Paxton’s quotes in this paragraph are from an interview with the author specifically for an article titled “Misha’s New Passion” that appeared in Dance Magazine, November 2000.
54. Johnston, quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 88.
55. “Simone Forti: Style Is a Corset.” After describing to Wavelet how she complied with Whitman’s request, Forti laughed and said, “I was so in love…. You can see that, in respect of feminism, I still had a lot to learn” (151).
56. David Gordon, “1963 — Random Breakfast,” ’60s Archiveography, accessed October 17, 2019, http://davidgordon.nyc/works/1963/random-break fast.
57. David Gordon, “It’s About Time,” The Drama Review 19, no. 1 (March 1975): 45.
58. Gordon, quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 124.
59. Jill Johnston, “From Lovely Confusion to Naked Breakfast,” Village Voice, July 18, 1963, posted on davidgordon.nyc.
60. Banes, “An Interview with David Gordon,” eddy, Winter 1977, 20.
61. “Judson at 50: Steve Paxton.”
62. Yvonne Rainer, email to author, February 20, 2018.
63. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, Bennington College Judson Project, 1981.
64. Lynn Gumpert, introduction to Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, exhibition catalog, ed. Melissa Rachleff (New York: Grey Art Gallery, NYU in association with Delmonico Books, 2017), 22.
65. Thomas J. Lax, “Allow Me to Begin Again,” in Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, 22. Fred Herko was a ballet-trained dancer who was very involved in Judson from the first concert. Tragically, he jumped to his death in 1964.
Interlude: Simone Forti’s Life in Communes
1. Howard Moody, A Voice in the Village: A Journey of a Pastor and a People (New York: Xlibris Corporation, 2009), 59.
2. Ellen Pearlman, Nothing and Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde, 1942–1962 (Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions, 2012), 52–53.
3. Judith Stein, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 107–8.
4. Quoted in “Simone Forti: Style Is a Corset,” interview by Christophe Wavelet, Writings on Dance, nos. 18/19 (Winter 1999): 151.
5. See-Saw was first performed at the Reuben Gallery in 1960 and was not termed a “dance construction” until years later. It consists of two people, usually a woman and a man, playing out the balancing of a relationship on a seesaw. It is largely improvised. The first cast was Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris. For more, see Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (Northampton, MA: Contact Editions, 1998), 39. Also see Meredith Morse, “Between Two Continents: Simone Forti’s See-Saw,” in Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, exhibition catalog, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Salzburg: Museum der Moderne, in association with Hirmer, 2014), 37–44.
6. In Huddle, a group of people hunkers down in a football-style huddle. One at a time, each person extricates from the group and climbs up and over the mound formed by their upper backs. Slant Board is performed on a slanted surface with ropes attached. The task is to cross the space holding onto the ropes while feeling the pull of gravity. In Herding the performers herd the audience into a different area within the space. During the 1961 performance at Yoko Ono’s loft, the audience was standing, as in a gallery, rather than seated as in a theater. For more detail on these dance constructions, see Forti, Handbook in Motion, 59, 56, and 67; and Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, 80–126.
7. Simone Forti, quoted in “Simone Forti: Style Is a Corset,” 151 and 153.
8. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 18.
9. Richard Foreman, interview with author, August 7, 2017.
10. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 18.
2. Only in SoHo
1. Laurie Anderson, “I’m Thinking Back,” in The Kitchen Turns Twenty: A Retrospective Anthology, ed. Lee Morrissey (New York: Haleakala, 1992), 37.
2. Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro, Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo (Vilnius, Lithuania: Jonas Mekas Foundation, 2010), 49.
3. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 128.
4. Richard Kostelanetz, SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (New York: Routledge, 2003), 48–49.
5. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 65.
6. Kostelanetz, SoHo, 52; and Philip Glass, Words without Music: A Memoir (New York: Liveright, 2015), 231–33.
7. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 78.
8. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 82, 98, 78.
9. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 77, 80.
10. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 50.
11. Glass, Words without Music, 97.
12. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 90.
13. Trisha Brown accepting an honorary degree at the Columbia College Chicago commencement in 2009: “Trisha Brown, ’09 Columbia College Commencement,” YouTube, posted January 6, 2011, accessed November 18, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1s3IMdimlg&t=412s.
14. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 191.
15. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 120–21. It was here, at 80 Wooster, that he began to explore light and prisms, which became his mature work.
16. Trisha Brown with Susan Rosenberg, “Forever Young: Some Thoughts on My Early Work Today,” in Trisha Brown Dance Company: A Year-Long Series of Performances at Dia:Beacon, exhibition catalog (Dia Art Foundation, [2009-2010]), unpaginated, https://www.diaart.org/media/_file/brochures/trisha-brown-dance-company-2.pdf.
17. Now available via ArtPix DVDS and on the Internet.
18. Richard Nonas, interview with author, April 3, 2018; Jared Bark, interview with author, June 20, 2018; and David Bradshaw, interview with author, August 21, 2018.
19. Trisha Brown, “How to Make a Modern Dance When the Sky’s the Limit,” in Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001, exhibition catalog, ed. Hendel Teicher (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, distributed by MIT Press, 2002), 289.
20. The LoGiudice Gallery was on Broome Street in SoHo, just downstairs from The Kitchen Center. It exhibited some of the major minimalists in the early seventies like Richard Serra, Mark Di Suvero, and Jo Baer and was the first in the United States to sponsor a wrapped building by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. However, it didn’t last long. The owner, Joe LoGiudice, borrowed money he could not repay and fled to Mexico in 1973. Judith Stein, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
21. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 99–101.
22. Hendel Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 316.
23. Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 133–34.
24. Wendy Perron, “Exporting SoHo,” in Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 32–36; originally published in SoHo Weekly News, December 30, 1976.
25. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 60.
26. Richard Foreman, interview with author, August 7, 2017.
27. Kostelanetz, SoHo, 52.
28. Kostelanetz, SoHo, 78; David Gordon, interview with author, May 21, 2018.
29. D. Dunn, email to author, October 23, 2017.
30. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 70.
31. Mary Overlie, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice (self-published, 2016), 132–33; the performance pieces were titled Glass Imagination I (1976) and Glass Imagination II (1977).
32. Jessamyn Fiore, ed., 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) (New York: David Zwirner in association with Radius Books, 2011), exhibition catalog, 19.
33. Bernstein and Shapiro, Illegal Living, 175.
34. For more on Matta-Clark, see Fiore, 112 Greene; and Lydia Yee, ed., Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene (New York: Barbican, 2011), exhibition catalog.
35. Richard Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 123.
36. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 9.
37. Bill Beckley, interview with author, July 11, 2018.
38. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 21.
39. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 10.
40. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 21.
41. Judy Padow, interview with author, August 4, 2017.
42. Steve Paxton, email to author, August 24, 2017.
43. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
44. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, January 15, 2019.
45. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 26.
46. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 19.
47. Claire Barliant, “112 Greene Street,” Paris Review, July 25, 2012; and Roberta Smith, “Back in the Bronx: Gordon Matta-Clark, Rogue Sculptor,” New York Times, January 12, 2018, C21.
48. Beckley, interview with author, July 11, 2018. The dumpster event is listed in Fiore, 112 Greene Street as a “sculptural installation” as part of an open house on May 19–21, 1972.
49. Terry O’Reilly, email to author, January 14, 2019.
50. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 147.
51. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 159, 187.
52. Barliant, “112 Greene Street.”
53. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 27.
54. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 33.
55. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 53.
56. Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 107.
57. Beckley, interview with author, July 11, 2018. This performance/installa tion is listed as occurring on March 17–29, 1973, in the “Timeline,” in Fiore, 112 Greene Street, 184. I note that decades later, Elizabeth Streb, who maintained a friendship with Trisha Brown in the latter part of the older choreographer’s life, also created a “flying machine.”
58. Glass, Words without Music, 214.
59. Jared Bark, interview with author, June 20, 2018.
60. Ben Schaafsma, “Other Options: A Closer Look at FOOD,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, no. 6, accessed November 6, 2018, http://www.joaap.org/6/lovetowe/schaafsma.html.
61. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 126.
62. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 4, 2017.
63. Lori Waxman, “The Banquet Years: FOOD, A SoHo Restaurant,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 8, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 28.
64. Waxman, “The Banquet Years.”
65. Barliant, “112 Greene Street.”
66. Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart, 100–101.
67. For complete information on Clark Center, see clarkcenternyc.org, accessed August 9, 2018.
68. Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 103.
69. Sally Banes, “Spontaneous Combustion: Notes on Dance Improvisation from the Sixties to the Nineties,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 82.
70. Gus Solomons, email to author, March 20, 2018.
71. Kostelanetz, SoHo, 149.
72. Woody and Steina Vasulka, a married couple who were early video artists, cofounded The Kitchen in the former kitchen of Mercer Arts Center at the Broadway Central Hotel in 1971. See Lee Morrissey, ed., The Kitchen Turns Twenty: A Retrospective Anthology (New York: Haleakala, 1992).
73. Kathy Duncan, “On Dance: Grand Union,” SoHo Weekly News, June 13, 1974.
74. Glass, Words without Music, 227.
75. Waxman, “The Banquet Years,” 27.
3. How Continuous Project—Altered Daily Broke Open and Made Space for a Grand Union
1. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 334.
2. The film of this work session, shot by Michael Fajans, is viewable, under the title Continuous Project—Altered Daily, at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, *MGZIDVD 5-6123.
3. Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: NYU Press, 1974), 126.
4. Marcia B. Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 268–69.
5. Quoted in Jack Anderson, The American Dance Festival (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 133.
6. Rainer, Work: 1961–73, 146.
7. I’m referring to her “disappearing” as the leader of Grand Union, then her suicide attempt in 1971, and finally her departure from the dance world when she began to make films in 1972–1973. She reentered the dance world in 2000, but in a 2017 collaborative performance with Forti and Paxton titled Tea for Three at Danspace Project, she preset a suitcase so she could make a staged getaway before the ending—or to prompt the ending—of the performance.
8. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 96.
9. Rainer, Work: 1961–73, 148.
10. Rainer, Work: 1961–73, 149
11. Tresa Hall, “Yvonne Rainer,” University News [University of Missouri, Kansas City], 7, no. 6, November 1969.
12. Margaret Hupp Ramsay, The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 37.
13. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 317–18.
14. Annette Michelson, “Yvonne Rainer, Part One: The Dancer and the Dance,” Artforum 12 (January 1974): 60.
15. Quoted in Jeffrey S. Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with Castelli Gallery, 2013), exhibition catalog, 307.
16. Rainer talks about her “rage at the narcissism of traditional dancing” in “The Performer as Persona: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer,” interview by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, Avalanche, no. 5, Summer 1972, 50.
17. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 225–26.
18. Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), 265–76.
19. Yvonne Rainer, interview by Tim Griffin, Index Magazine, 2002, accessed February 10, 2017, http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/yvonne_rainer.shtml.
20. Rainer, Work: 1961–73, 134.
21. Peggy Phelan, “Yvonne Rainer: From Dance to Film,” in A Woman Who … Essays, Interviews, Scripts, by Yvonne Rainer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8.
22. My source here is a ten-minute video excerpt of Continuous Project—Altered Daily (1970) at the Whitney Museum archive.
23. The other readers, as listed in Rainer, Work: 1961–73, 128, were George Sugarman, Norma Fire, and Carrie Oyama.
24. Don McDonagh, “Films Are Backdrop for Robust Dances of Yvonne Rainer,” New York Times, April 1, 1970, 38.
25. McDonagh, “Films Are Backdrop for Robust Dances of Yvonne Rainer.”
26. Don McDonagh, “Rainer Troupe Seen in Rose Fractions,” New York Times, February 6, 1969.
27. Nancy Mason, “Yvonne Rainer and Co. in Continuous Project—Altered Daily,” Dance Magazine, June 1970, 74–75.
28. Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 176.
29. Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 190.
30. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
31. Quoted in Ramsay, Grand Union, 37–38.
32. Rainer, Work: 1961–73, 109.
33. Catherine Kerr, interview with author, July 18, 2018.
34. Quoted in Jack Walsh’s documentary film, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer (2015).
35. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 322.
36. Asking dancers to create movement within a structure was part of the process for many choreographers, including Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, and me.
37. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
38. Sally Banes, “An Open Field: Yvonne Rainer as Dance Theorist,” in Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, 2002), 24.
39. David Gordon, ’70s Archiveography, accessed November 15, 2017, http://davidgordon.nyc/script/70s-archiveography-part-1. For those too young to remember or not from that region, Grand Union was a supermarket chain primarily in the northeastern United States from roughly the 1950s to the 1980s. Because of the supermarket, they had to incorporate under a different name. So the legal entity became Rio Grande Union.
40. Nancy Lewis, email to author, December 31, 2017.
41. Douglas Dunn, email to author, December 29, 2017.
42. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 245.
43. Anna Kisselgoff, “Casual Nude Scene Dropped into Dance by Rainer Company,” New York Times, December 16, 1970, accessed July 20, 2019, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/12/16/78822492.html?pageNumber=51.
44. Deborah Jowitt, “Yvonne Say No Roses,” Village Voice, January 14, 1971, 44.
45. Pat Catterson, interview with author, July 15, 2017.
46. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
47. John Rockwell, “Disciplined Anarchists of Dance,” New York Times, April 18, 1976, 50.
Interlude: The People’s Flag Show
1. Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, The Guerrilla Art Action Group: 1969–1976: A Selection (New York: Printed Matter © 1978).
2. Howard Moody, A Voice in the Village: A Journey of a Pastor and a People (New York: Xlibris Corporation, 2009), 256.
3. Moody, Voice in the Village, 259.
4. Moody, Voice in the Village.
5. Hendricks and Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group.
6. Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 172.
7. Becky Arnold, interview with author, July 23, 2018.
8. Grace Glueck, “A Strange Assortment of Flags Is Displayed at People’s Flag Show,” New York Times, November 10, 1970.
9. Paul Krassner, “The Trial of Abbie Hoffman’s Shirt,” Huffington Post, June 8, 2005, accessed January 13, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/the-trial-of-abbie-hoffma_b_2334.html.
10. Glueck, “Strange Assortment of Flags.”
11. Moody, Voice in the Village, 259–60.
12. Hendricks and Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group.
13. Quoted in Michael Kiefer, “Tempest in a Toilet Bowl,” Phoenix New Times, June 6, 1996, accessed January 13, 2018, http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/tempest-in-a-toilet-bowl-6423956.
14. For an account of the various versions of Trio A, see “A Dancer Writes: Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A Now” and essays by Pat Catterson and Jens Richard Giersdorf, Dance Research Journal 41, no. 2 (Winter 2009).
4. A Shared Sensibility
1. Mimi Johnson, interview with author, September 30, 2017.
2. Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 303–37.
3. Steve Paxton, “Performance and Reconstruction of Judson,” Contact Quarterly 7, no. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1982): 58. This essay is based on a performance residency and reconstructions that I produced as part of the Bennington College Judson Project. Paxton would have observed Cage with musicians while he was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1961 to 1964.
4. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007), 217.
5. Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 111.
6. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
7. Quoted in David Vaughan, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (New York: Aperture, 1997), 100.
8. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 114.
9. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 4.
10. Sally Sommer, phone interview with author, March 20, 2018.
11. Paxton, “Performance and Reconstruction of Judson,” 57.
12. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 16.
13. Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, 50.
14. Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, 51.
15. Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, 50–58.
16. Robyn Brentano, “Outside the Frame: Performance, Art, and Life,” in Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object: A Survey History of Performance Art in the USA Since 1950, exhibition catalog (Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994), 38.
17. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 170.
18. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 31.
19. Janet Mansfield Soares, Louis Horst: Musician in a Dancer’s World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 208.
20. Robb Baker, “Grand Union: Taking a Chance on Dance,” Dance Magazine, October 1973, 42.
21. American Dance Festival, “Trisha Brown,” YouTube, posted October 30, 2008, accessed January 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmowfl Vkork.
22. Jack Anderson, The American Dance Festival (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 117–18.
23. Interview with author, January 11, 2017.
24. Dilley, This Very Moment, 95.
25. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 343–44.
26. Quoted in Martha Eddy, Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2016), 58.
27. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 235.
28. “Barbara Dilley … in the Dancing Room: A Dialogue with Liza Béar,” Avalanche, no. 12, Winter 1975, 35.
29. Steve Paxton, “The Grand Union: Improvisational Dance,” The Drama Review 16, no. 3 (September 1972): 130.
Interlude: Richard Nonas’s Memory
1. Richard Nonas, email to author, March 31, 2018.
5. Barbara Dilley
1. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 51.
2. Barbara Dilley, interviewed by Jean Nuchtern (Colonomos), April 26, 1976, Oral History Project transcript, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 18.
3. Dilley This Very Moment, 62.
4. Dilley, Oral History Project transcript, 18. Helen Tamiris, a notable modern dancer, was a charismatic performer as well as a choreographer of concert works and musicals. Her themes were usually related to social issues like unemployment, war, and racism, and she helped start the dance wing of the Federal Theater Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. From 1960 to 1964, she and her then husband, Daniel Nagrin, codirected the Tamiris-Nagrin Dance Company. Nagrin was also a major modern dance figure who, in the seventies, started his own improvisation group, the Workgroup.
5. Aileen Passloff was active in the pre-Judson group called Dance Associates, along with David Vaughan, Paul Taylor, Donya Feuer, and James Waring. It was her solo, titled Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, performed at the Living Theatre, probably in 1959, that inspired Rainer to want to choreograph.
6. Dilley, This Very Moment, 63.
7. All of the information about Story and Field Dances and the rest of this paragraph are from Vaughan, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (New York: Aperture, 1997), 129–31.
8. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
9. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 195.
10. Robb Baker, “Grand Union: Taking a Chance on Dance,” Dance Magazine, October 1973, 44.
11. Dilley, This Very Moment, 65.
12. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 92.
13. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 168–69; and Jill Johnston, “Fall Colors,” October 31, 1963, in Marmalade Me, new and expanded ed. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 95.
14. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
15. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, February 13, 2017.
16. Barbara Dilley, “Barbara Dilley … in the Dancing Room,” Avalanche, no. 12, Winter 1975, 34.
17. Dilley, Oral History Project transcript, 25.
18. Quoted in Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 222.
19. Dilley, This Very Moment, 75.
20. Dilley, This Very Moment, 47.
21. Dilley, Oral History Project transcript, 29.
22. Dilley, Oral History Project transcript.
23. Dilley, Oral History Project transcript, 22.
24. Dilley, Oral History Project transcript, 28.
25. Quoted in Baker, “Grand Union: Taking a Chance on Dance,” 46.
26. Email to author, February 23, 2018.
27. Dilley, This Very Moment, 65.
28. Quoted in Melinda Buckwalter, Composing while Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 15.
6. Douglas Dunn
1. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
2. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
3. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
4. Douglas Dunn, Dancer Out of Sight: Collected Writings of Douglas Dunn (New York: Ink, Inc., 2012), 115.
5. Margaret Hupp Ramsay, The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 91–92; Lewis Segal, “Improvisation by Grand Union,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1976.
6. Dunn, Dancer Out of Sight, 42.
7. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
8. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
9. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
10. Dunn, Dancer Out of Sight, 43; originally quoted in Dance Ink 1, no. 2 (December 1990): 25.
11. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
12. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
7. David Gordon
1. This citation and those in the rest of this paragraph can be found on David Gordon’s website Archiveography, where his own account of his life and work is listed decade by decade (http://davidgordon.nyc/).
2. In his email of July 21, 2019, David enumerated these names as teachers; Ilya Bolotowsky, Ivan Chermayeff, Burgoyne Diller, Jimmy Ernst, Harry Holtzman, Ad Reinhardt, and Kurt Seligman.
3. Sally Banes, “An Interview with David Gordon,” eddy, Winter 1977, 18.
4. This list draws from David Gordon’s email to the author, July 27, 2017, as well as Gordon’s untitled reminiscence from Movement Research Performance Journal, no. 14 (1997): 19.
5. Gordon, Movement Research Performance Journal, 19. The name Pete was Paul Taylor’s childhood nickname.
6. David Gordon, email to author, August 3, 2017.
7. Deborah Jowitt, “Pull Together in These Distracted Times,” in Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews 1967–1976 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977), 133; originally published in Village Voice, March 31, 1975.
8. Joyce Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft (New York: Routledge, 2004), 45.
9. Quoting from Arlene Croce, “Profiles: Making Work,” New Yorker, November 29, 1982, accessed March 8, 2018, http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1982-11-29#folio=050, 81.
10. David Gordon, interview with author, May 21, 2018.
11. David Gordon, email to author, July 21, 2019.
12. Quoted in Robb Baker, “Grand Union: Taking a Chance on Dance,” Dance Magazine, October 1973, 42.
13. David Gordon, “It’s About Time,” The Drama Review 19, no. 1 (March 1975): 44.
14. David Gordon, interviewed by Gia Kourlas, June 4, 2012, Oral History Project transcript, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 30.
15. Quoted in Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 101, original review by Robert Morris, Village Voice, February 10, 1966, 15.
16. Banes, “An Interview with David Gordon,” 22. I want to add that, since the concert in question was shared with Rainer and Paxton, the ethics of Rainer’s lover writing the review are questionable.
17. Baker, “Grand Union: Taking a Chance on Dance,” 44.
18. Banes, “Interview with David Gordon,” 22.
19. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
20. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
21. David Gordon, email to author, July 21, 2019.
8. Steve Paxton
1. Steve Paxton, Gravity (Brussels: Contredanse Editions, 2018), 6.
2. This quote is from a public preperformance conversation between Paxton and Simone Forti at REDCAT, May 11, 2016, accessed December 14, 2018, https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2016/06/notes-from-simone-forti-and-steve-paxton-in-conversation/.
3. David Gordon, untitled reminiscence, Movement Research Performance Journal, no. 14 (1997), 19.
4. Steve Paxton, quoted in Wendy Perron, “Simone Forti: bodynatureart-movementbody,” Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972, exhibition catalog, ed. Bennahum, Perron, and Robertson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 107; originally from Paxton, email to author, August 27, 2015.
5. Steve Paxton, “Trance Script: Judson Project Interview,” interview by Nancy Stark Smith, Contact Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 20; originally interviewed for the Bennington College Judson Project around 1980.
6. As seen on the Rauschenberg Foundation website, accessed January 14, 2018, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/archive/66v00400.
7. Quoted as part of an email exchange between Paxton and Ralph Lemon in March 2016, in Thomas Lax, ed., Ralph Lemon, Modern Dance Series (New York: MoMA, 2016), 53.
8. Steve Paxton, email to author, May 23, 2018.
9. Paxton, “Trance Script,” 17–18.
10. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 241.
11. This episode is described by Deborah Jowitt, “Yvonne Say No Roses,” Village Voice, January 14, 1971, 44.
12. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 241–42.
13. Quoted in Bennington College Judson Project, Judson Dance Theater: 1962–1966, exhibition catalog, ed. Wendy Perron (Bennington, VT: Bennington College, 1981), 50.
14. “Judson at 50: Steve Paxton,” Interviews: Steve Paxton, Artforum, July 24, 2012, accessed October 2017, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/judson-at-50-steve-paxton-31419.
15. Steve Paxton, “The Grand Union: Improvisational Dance,” The Drama Review 16, no. 3 (September 1972):130.
16. Quoted in Wendy Perron, “Trisha Brown on Tour,” Dancing Times 86, no. 1028 (May 1996).
17. See Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 79. Note: Larson talks about Cage being taken with the combination of Dada and Zen. She did not use the term Dada Zen, but I felt it was apt.
18. Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project, Columbia Center for Oral History Research, Columbia University, accessed August 25, 2018, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/artist/oral-history/yvonne-rainer, 55.
19. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
20. “Judson at 50: Yvonne Rainer,” Interviews: Yvonne Rainer, Artforum, July 10, 2012, accessed April 2, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/judson-at-50-yvonne-rainer-31348.
9. Trisha Brown
1. Louisa Adams (Trisha Brown’s sister), email to author, July 13, 2018.
2. Trisha Brown, “How to Make a Modern Dance When the Sky’s the Limit,” in Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001, exhibition catalog, ed. Hendel Teicher (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, distributed by MIT Press, 2002), 289.
3. Trisha Brown, quoted by Jared Bark, interview with author, June 20, 2018.
4. Trisha Brown, quoted in Contemporary Dance: An Anthology of Lectures, Interviews and Essays with Many of the Most Important Contemporary Ameri can Choreographers, Scholars and Critics, ed. Anne Livet (New York: Abbeville Press in association with The Fort Worth Art Museum, 1978), 44.
5. As pictured in Hendel Teicher, Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001 (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, MIT Press, 2002), 277–80.
6. Quoted in Livet, Contemporary Dance, 45.
7. Quoted in Livet, Contemporary Dance, 48.
8. Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (Northampton, MA: Contact Editions, 1980), 31–32.
9. Yvonne Rainer, “Trisha Brown by Yvonne Rainer,” Bomb, October 1, 1993, accessed December 27, 2017, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/trisha-brown/.
10. David Gordon, interview with author, November 12, 2018.
11. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
10. Nancy Lewis
1. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 16, 2017.
2. Nancy Lewis, email to author, June 18, 2017.
3. Jack Anderson, The American Dance Festival (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 77.
4. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, February 13, 2018. In an email on January 23, 2019, Nancy wrote, “Jack wanted me to act as though putting on lipstick, mentioning Marilyn Monroe looking in a mirror.”
5. Miles Green, conversation with author, September 19, 2018.
6. This feat, in the La MaMa 1976 series, was reported to me by several people. When Robb Baker described it in his review in Dance Magazine (August 1976), he added, “thus effectively climaxing the evening” (21).
7. Marcia B. Siegel, “Did Anybody See My Monster Dress?,” SoHo Weekly News, March 27, 1975, in Watching the Dance Go By (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 322.
8. Deborah Jowitt, dance review, Village Voice, May 24, 1973.
9. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
10. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 16, 2017.
11. Nancy Mason, “Nancy Green in ‘Just Dancing,’” Dance Magazine, February 1972, 82.
12. Nancy Lewis, email to author, June 28, 2017.
13. Linda Shapiro, “Dance: Nancy Lewis and Barbara Dilley: Solo,” Many Corners (a weekly neighborhood newspaper for the West Bank area of Minneapolis), undated review, 19.
11. Yvonne Rainer
1. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 160.
2. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 203. Passloff’s dance was performed at the Living Theatre.
3. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, February 14, 2017.
4. Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 13.
5. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, Bennington College Judson Project, 1981. “What I got into was a look of indeterminacy, which was perhaps a look of a work made by some kind of a collage strategy, whereby there is a kind of provisional look of it: it doesn’t have to be this way; it might be another way. I guess a lot of Judson work had that kind of look to it.”
6. The “No Manifesto” first appeared as a postscript to Rainer’s essay titled “Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called Parts of Some Sextets, performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March 1965,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 168–78. The original version, along with “A Manifesto Reconsidered” (2008), is available at http://www.lavrev.net/2013/12/yvonne-rainers-manifesto.html, accessed April 2, 2018.
7. Yvonne Rainer, untitled reminiscence, Judson Dance Theater: 1962–1966, exhibition catalog, ed. Wendy Perron (Bennington, VT: Bennington College Judson Project, 1981), 54.
8. Rainer’s celebrated 1966 essay with the maximal title, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” first appeared in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 263–73 and reappeared in Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 63–69.
9. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, February 14, 2017.
10. See Bruce Robertson, “Dance Is Hard to See: Yvonne Rainer and the Visual Arts,” in Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972, exhibition catalog, ed. Ninotchka Bennahum, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 120–47. In a different kind of homage, Donald Judd named his daughter Rainer.
11. “Aimless repetition” and “without grace” are courtesy of Frances Herridge, “The Avant-Garde Is at It Again,” New York Post, February 7, 1969; “excruciatingly boring” was Clive Barnes’s phrase in New York Times, February 16, 1969; and “ghastly,” “totally undistinguished,” and “pitiable” buttressed his diatribe “Disaster: Dance: Village Disaster Concert of Old and New Works at Judson Church Unveils Just One Minor Talent,” New York Times, January 11, 1966.
12. Yvonne Rainer, interview with author, February 13, 2018.
12. Lincoln Scott and Becky Arnold
1. Deborah Hay, email to author, June 21, 2018.
2. Barbara Dilley, email to author, February 23, 2018.
3. Four reactions from informal conversations. Jared Bark said, “I remember when he changed his name to Dong, we all rolled our eyes.” Nita Little felt the name was chosen deliberately as an affront to society. David Bradshaw thought maybe he didn’t realize that “dong” is a vulgar word for male genitalia. Steve Paxton thought perhaps Scott was rejecting his given name as a slave name. In any case, he changed it back to Lincoln Scott by the mid-seventies.
4. Theresa Dickinson had been dancing with Tharp in the summer of 1969, when both Tharp and Rainer were at American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. They were working on their respective commissions, Rainer on CP-AD and Tharp on Medley. All the dancers from both groups were living in the same dorm and easily socialized together. So when Grand Union came to the Bay Area two years later, it was natural to connect with the former Tharp dancer. Dickinson points out that there were many personal connections: Douglas Dunn’s partner, Sara Rudner, was in Tharp’s company; Dickinson married Lew Lloyd shortly after his divorce from Barbara Dilley. Theresa Dickinson, email to author, July 24, 2017.
5. Betsy Frederick, interview with author, September 9, 2017.
6. Conversations with Wendy Rogers on February 13, 2017, September 8, 2017, and December 19, 2018, and email, February 14, 2018. In addition, according to Halifu Osumare, Berkeley High School was one of the first American public secondary schools to have an African American Studies Department. See Osumare, Dancing in Blackness (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 166.
7. Wendy Rogers, interview with author, February 13, 2017.
8. Ruth Beckford (1925–2019) is an underappreciated dance hero. As a teenager, she toured with Katherine Dunham, about whom she wrote a biography in 1979, and she was the first African American to dance with Anna Halprin. She created a modern dance program for the city of Oakland, California, through the Parks Department. She helped coordinate the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program for children in 1969. Beckford has also acted in several movies. I spoke with her on the phone in August 2018, and she said she felt that she and Halprin were still “like sisters.”
9. Wendy Rogers kindly sent me an image of the flyer.
10. Betsy Frederick, interview with author, February 5, 2018.
11. Steve Paxton, email to author, May 24, 2018.
12. David Bradshaw, interview with author, August 21, 2018.
13. In this film by Robert Frank, Lincoln Scott enters about thirty-five minutes into it. Available via Electronic Arts Intermix, it is posted at http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_food.html, accessed October 1, 2018.
14. I gleaned this information from conversations with Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton.
15. Cynthia Hedstrom, interview with author, July 26, 2018.
16. Cynthia Hedstrom, interview with author, February 13, 2018.
17. Douglas Dunn, email to author, July 2, 2018.
18. Sally Sommer, interview with author, March 20, 2018.
19. Steve Paxton, email to author, May 24, 2018.
20. Quoted in Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 226.
21. Simone Forti, interview with author, August 24, 2018.
22. David Bradshaw, email to author, August 25, 2018.
23. Forti, interview with author, August 24, 2018
24. Nita Little, interview with author, August 3, 2018.
25. Steve Paxton, email to author, May 24, 2018.
26. Yvonne Rainer, email to author, April 14, 2018.
27. Pat Catterson, email to author, March 14, 2018.
28. Becky Arnold, interview with author, July 23, 2018.
29. Catherine Kerr, interview with author, July 18, 2018.
30. Arnold, interview with author, July 23, 2018.
31. Arnold, interview with author, July 23, 2018.
Interlude: People Improvisation
1. Yvonne Rainer, “Some Thoughts on Improvisation,” in Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 299.
13. First Walker Art Center Residency, May 1971
1. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
2. Letter from Weil to New York Review Presentations, January 2, 1970, Walker Art Center Archives, “Performing Arts 1958 to 1980,” Box 27 of 31.
3. “Suzanne Weil in Conversation with Philip Bither,” Walker Art Center, June 13, 2001, accessed November 13, 2017, https://walkerart.org/magazine/suzanne-weil-in-conversation.
4. Documents in Walker Art Center Archive.
5. Irene Parsons, “The Nose Knows No Color, or: No Confrontation Is in Vain,” June 9, 1971, 53, unidentified publication via Western Press Clipping Exchange, Walker Art Center Archive.
6. Scott Bartell, “Review,” Minnesota Daily, June 3, 1971.
7. Peter Altman, “Spectators, Dance Troupe Collaborate,” Minneapolis Star, May 28, 1971.
8. Elizabeth Garren, interview with author, September 14, 2017.
9. Judith Ragir, interview with author, April 20, 2017.
10. Linda Shapiro, “The Harry Martin Trio,” Minnesota Preview, August 1974.
11. David Gordon interview with author, November 12, 2018.
12. Becky Arnold, interview with author, July 23, 2018.
13. Judith Brin Inger, interview with author, December 2, 2016; and email to author, January 22, 2018. Ingber, a longtime resident of Minneapolis, is a well-known dancer and dance scholar who edited the landmark book Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011).
14. Nancy Lewis, email to author, July 6, 2018.
15. Mike Steele, “Grand Union Performs at Walker,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 29, 1971.
16. Altman, “Spectators, Dance Troupe Collaborate.”
17. Quoted in Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 227.
14. Oberlin College Residency, January 1972
1. Brenda Way, email to author, July 27, 2018.
2. Nancy Stark Smith, interview with author, October 2, 2017. She spoke of the revelatory impact of the Tharp residency, remembering this specific instruction regarding Rose Marie Wright: “Twyla said, ‘Do what she’s doing’—I didn’t even notice she was doing anything; she was scratching her nose and fixing her hair and shifting her weight. But that was the thing we were supposed to be noticing and doing. So the field had already opened up for all kinds of movement to be included in a choreographer’s palette.”
3. Kimi Okada, interview with author, July 23, 2018.
4. Blau was an early director of Beckett plays who started the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. Another connection is that when Blau taught at California Institute of the Arts, he hired Allen Kaprow to teach there in the late sixties and early seventies. Kaprow asked Simone Forti to substitute for him there, and CalArts is where she met and worked with Charlemagne Palestine.
5. Kimi Okada, email to author, August 17, 2018.
6. Nancy Lewis, email to author, November 4, 2018.
7. Video of Paxton’s talk at Juniata College, C136 (thirty-sixth anniversary of Contact Improvisation), 2008, accessed August 5, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUeYbUmhQA.
8. Steve Paxton in Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas, ed. David Koteen and Nancy Stark Smith (Northampton: Contact Editions, 2008), xiv. In an email on January 28, 2019, Steve was more specific: “I think Doug Winter suggested grasping one’s foot with the hand on the same side to induce a safe-feeling shoulder roll.”
9. Doug Winter, interview with author, July 24, 2018.
10. Steve Christiansen, a student at Antioch at the time, had heard about Grand Union through his friend Michael Fajans. Both were early video buffs, and Fajans had filmed Yvonne Rainer’s group in 1969 at Connecticut College, within a year of its becoming Grand Union. The Magnesium video is now included in Contact Improvisation Archive: Collected Edition 1972–1983, produced by Videoda (East Charleston, VT: Contact Editions, 2014), DVD.
11. Steve Paxton speaking at Juniata College, C136.
12. Barbara Dilley, email to author, August 13, 2018.
13. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 388.
14. Quoted in Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 389.
15. Linda Shapiro became a choreographer and director of New Dance Ensemble, the repertory company based in Minneapolis. After NDE folded in the 1980s, she continued to write about dance.
16. Linda Shapiro, interview with author, September 16, 2017.
17. David Gordon, interviewed by Gia Kourlas, June 4, 2012, Oral History Project transcript, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 30.
18. Paul Langland, email to author, July 26, 2019.
19. The Matter has been performed many times in many versions, including at the Danspace Project in 2012 and the 2018 exhibit of Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art.
20. Karen Smith, “David Gordon’s The Matter,” TDR 16, no. 3 (September 1972): 117–27; Gordon’s statement describing Sleep Walking, accessed January 13, 2019, http://davidgordon.nyc/sites/default/files/program_pdf/DG%20Artistic_f004_Sleepwalking%201971%2072%2073_i007_Duet%20version%20197y%20program_p.pdf.
21. David Gordon, interview with author, November 12, 2018.
22. David Gordon, ’70s Archiveography, accessed April 9, 2018, http://davidgordon.nyc/script/70s-archiveography-part-1.
23. This video was also shot by Steve Christiansen in 1972. In 2018, Christiansen unearthed his original Oberlin tapes, and together we arranged for them to be converted, “baked,” and digitized by master converter Maurice Schechter.
24. Doug Winter, interview with author, July 24, 2018.
25. An article, cowritten for the Oberlin student newspaper, contained this statement: “Dong does not consider himself fully a dancer.” It also mentioned that he was the only GU member who had not studied with Cunningham. I know the latter claim to be true but cannot vouch for the former. Quoted in Peter Klein (misspelled as Kelin) and Felicity Brock, “Ongoing Story of a Grand Union,” unidentified Oberlin publication, apparently January 1972. Source is Artservices publicity packet.
26. All Brenda Way’s quotes are from interview with author, July 24, 2018.
27. I realized the role of Steve’s teaching at Bennington in spring 1972 via conversations on August 3, 2018, with Nita Little, who was a student there that semester.
Interlude: Nancy Stark Smith on the Small Dance
1. “Editor Note: Caught by Surprise,” Contact Quarterly 22, nos. 2, 3 (1997): 3.
2. David Koteen and Nancy Stark Smith, Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas (Northampton, MA: Contact Editions, 2008), 28.
3. Nancy Stark Smith, interview with author, October 2, 2017.
4. Nancy Stark Smith, “A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation: Notes from the Editor of Contact Quarterly 1972–1997,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 162–63; originally published in Contact Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1985).
15. The Dance Gallery Festival, Spring 1973
1. Steve Paxton, email to author, January 17, 2019.
2. This quote and the two in the next paragraph are all from Jowitt’s weekly dance review in the Village Voice, May 24, 1973.
3. Nancy Lewis, email to author, January 19, 2019.
4. This episode was reconstructed by Nancy Lewis looking at the photo via email and responding to the author, August 26, 2019.
5. Lisa Nelson, interview with author, October 24, 2017.
6. Additional interviews, Disk Two: Bonus Material, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer.
7. Simone Forti, interview with author, December 4, 2016.
8. Bob Telson, interview with author, January 27, 2019. Telson, a prolific songwriter, became known for composing the award-winning Gospel at Colonus (1983).
9. Quoted in Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 228.
10. Lewis, email to author, January 20, 2019.
11. Steve Paxton, email to author, January 18, 2019.
12. Don McDonagh, “Grand Union Offers Unstructured Dance Experience,” New York Times, April 3, 1973, 49, accessed July 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/03/archives/grand-union-offers-unstructured-dance-experience.html.
13. Sally Sommer, quoted in Margaret Hupp Ramsay, The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 8–9.
14. According to the final report written by Artservices, the dancers were each supposed to receive a minimum of $100 a week for the eight weeks, but because the unearned as well as the earned income fell short, the dancers each received only $100 for the entire run. NYSCA’s grant of $3,000 was expected to be part of a total budget of $9,300, but none of the nineteen foundations approached came through. Also, to recoup their expenses, GU planned to take 25 percent of the box office of their guests, but some of the guests decided not to charge admission. That’s not too surprising because GU itself had often performed for free.
1. Nancy Lewis, email to author, October 27, 2018.
2. Marianne Goldberg, review of The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group, by Margaret Hupp Ramsay, Dance Research Journal 26, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 34–35.
Interlude: Dianne McIntyre and Sounds in Motion
1. This forum was a “Bill Chat” titled “When Did the Avant-Garde Become Black?,” moderated by Bill T. Jones at New York Live Arts, March 24, 2014.
17. Third LoGiudice Video, May 1972
1. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 336.
2. All three were longtime teachers at Mills College. Marian Van Tuyl founded the dance department in 1938 and continued there until 1970, touring with her own group for some of that period. Interestingly, she collaborated with both Louis Horst and John Cage. She made a piece with Horst in 1925 and wrote several articles about him thirty years later. In 1940, she was eager for Cage to establish his dreamed of but never materialized Center for Experimental Music at Mills. Eleanor Lauer had danced in Van Tuyl’s company. Rebecca Fuller is now Emeritus Professor of Dance. All taught composition via Horst’s methods. Trisha has called them “women of achievement.” Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017); Laura Kuhn, ed., The Selected Letters of John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016); Janet Mansfield Soares, Louis Horst: Musician in a Dancer’s World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Marian Van Tuyl, in Dance On with Billie Mahoney, prod. Bill Mahoney (Kansas City, MO: Dance on Video, 1986); and Betsy Frederick, email to author, November 1, 2019.
18. Fourth LoGiudice Video: From Darkness to Light
1. Novak had danced in Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes in 1965 and later came to Oberlin in 1972 to be one of two “narrators” in Rainer’s In the College. For more on Rainer’s suicide attempt, see Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 374–78.
2. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 376.
3. Her journal from that trip appears in Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 173–89, and in a slightly different form in Feelings Are Facts, 353–78.
4. Quoted in William Coco and A. J. Gunawardana, “Responses to India: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer,” The Drama Review 15, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 140.
5. For a fuller discussion of Rainer’s transition from dance to film, see Feelings Are Facts, 390–410; and Peggy Phelan, “Yvonne Rainer: From Dance to Film,” in A Woman Who… Essays, Interviews, Scripts, by Yvonne Rainer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 3–17.
6. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
7. David Gordon, interview with author, May 21, 2018.
8. Steve Paxton, email to author, August 26, 2017.
9. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, August 4, 2017.
10. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 376.
11. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, September 4, 2017.
12. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
19. Gender Play and Iowa City, March 1974
1. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 183.
2. Sally Banes, “An Interview with David Gordon,” eddy, Winter 1977, 19.
3. David Gordon, interview with author, November 12, 2018.
4. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
5. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
6. Documentary film If the Dancer Dances (2018), directed by Maia Wechsler, written and produced by Lise Friedman and Wechsler, shown at Dance on Camera Festival, July 2018, available at https://ifthedancer.com/.
7. Doran George, “Untitled Grief: (This Is Not a Memorial for Diane Torr),” Contact Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2018): 16.
8. Quoted in “The First Burning Question,” Dance Magazine, November 2013, 47.
9. Douglas Dunn, “Disappearances … and a Portfolio,” Tether 3 (2017): 93.
10. Referred to by Nancy Goldner, “Dance,” Nation, April 12, 1975, 444.
11. Barbara Dilley, email to author, August 10, 2018.
12. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 19, 2018.
13. Grand Union Records, (S)*MGZMD 132–2, folder 45.
Interlude: The Judith Dunn/Bill Dixon Improvisation Group
1. David Gordon, email to the author, July 14, 2019.
2. David Gordon, untitled reminiscence, Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 19
3. For example, Robert Dunn deployed his 1959 piece Doubles for 4 to accompany Judith’s Indexes and her Witnesses at Judson in 1963. Four people set up a card table with chairs, sat down, and dealt cards that gave instructions for clapping patterns. When they completed the deals, they packed up and left whether or not her solo was finished. At the same time, Robert was in the audience with a transistor radio tuned to a Latino station. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 184.
4. Judith Dunn, “We Don’t Talk about It; We Engage in It,” eddy, no. 4 (Summer, 1974): 13; originally published in the Bennington publication Quadrille, Fall 1973, 9–12.
5. Quoted in Susan Green, “How Modern Dance Took Root in Vermont,” Burlington Free Press, March 5, 2012, accessed December 19, 2018, https://www.bennington.edu/news-and-features/how-modern-dance-took-root-vermont.
6. Susan Sgorbati, “The Emergent Improvisation Project: Embodying Complexity,” Contact Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2007): 41–42.
7. Barbara Ensley, interview with author, October 21, 2017.
8. Quoted in Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 68.
9. Bill Dixon, “Collaboration: 1965–72, Judith Dunn—Dancer/Choreographer; Bill Dixon—Musician/Composer,” Contact Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1985): 9.
10. Dixon, “Collaboration: 1965–72,” 8.
11. Ensley, email to author, October 17, 2017.
12. Megan Bierman, email to author, January 20, 2019.
13. Cheryl Lilienstein, email to author, January 20, 2019.
20. Second Walker Residency, October 1975
1. Paxton’s typed proposal for a video workshop at Minneapolis College of Art and Design: “Would like to make as long a ‘loop’ as possible with Grand Union format: Daytime T.V. If an hour loop can be arranged, would include soap opera, commercials, talk show and news, with on-the-spot reportage to be used for last performance,” cited in “Steve Paxton and the Walker: A 50-Year History,” walkerart.org.
2. This sequence can be viewed as a clip embedded in my online article, “How the Grand Union Found a Home Outside of SoHo at the Walker,” at walkerart.org.
3. Allen Robertson, “Grand Union,” Minnesota Daily, October 17, 1975, referenced in Margaret Hupp Ramsay, The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 60.
21. Public/Private, Real/Not Real
1. Sally Banes, “Spontaneous Combustion: Notes on Dance Improvisation from the Sixties to the Nineties,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 79.
2. Marcia Marks, review of “James Waring and Dance Company,” Dance Magazine, March 1963, 59.
3. Robertson, “Grand Union.”
4. Richard Lorber, “The Problem with Grand Union,” Dance Scope 7, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1973): 30.
5. Nancy Goldner, “Dance,” Nation, April 12, 1975, 445.
6. Robert Morris, “Re Grand Union” (Artservices publicity materials, Box 132, Folder 16, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts).
7. Susan Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 195.
8. Marcia B. Siegel, “Did Anybody See My Monster Dress?,” SoHo Weekly News, March 27, 1975, in Watching the Dance Go By (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 321–23.
9. Jack Anderson, “Dance View: The Move to Dance Drama,” New York Times, February 14, 1982, accessed November 3, 2018, www.nytimes.com/1982/02/14/arts/dance-view-the-move-to-dance-drama.html.
10. In October 1974, Grand Union members were frustrated by what they felt was obtuse press coverage. They invited critics and friends to a discussion. This meeting included GU members Brown, Dilley, Dunn, Gordon, and Lewis, and critics Robb Baker, Kathy Duncan, Deborah Jowitt, John Howell, and Marcia B. Siegel. Friends included Carolyn Brown, James Klosty, and Sara Rudner. The transcript was edited by Douglas Dunn and Robert Pierce and finally published in April 1976 as “The Grand Union, Critics and Friends,” SoHo Weekly News, April 29, 1976.
11. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, November 1, 2018.
12. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
13. Sally Sommer, interview with author, March 20, 2018.
14. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
15. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
16. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
17. Quoted in Banes, “Spontaneous Combustion,” 78–79; originally spoken in “Beyond the Mainstream,” Dance in America, directed by Merrill Brockway, aired in 1980 on PBS, WNET, New York.
18. Kathy Duncan, “On Dance: Grand Union,” SoHo Weekly News, June 13, 1974.
19. Richard Foreman, interview with author, August 7, 2017.
20. “Ballet: Brides and Turtles in Dance Program: Avant-Garde Throng Turns Out for Show by Rauschenberg,” New York Times, May 13, 1965, C33.
21. Her comment, made in a passing conversation, was quoted in “Thank You for Being a Friend,” a dialogue between Bruce Hainley and David Velasco at Artforum, posted November 25, 2016, accessed January 29, 2019, https://www.artforum.com/performance/bruce-hainley-and-david-velasco-talk-about-tea-for-three-2016-64991.
22. Goldner, “Dance,” 445.
23. David Gordon, Archiveography, davidgordon.nyc.
24. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2018.
25. “Barbara Dilley … in the Dancing Room: A Dialogue with Liza Béar,” Avalanche, no. 12, Winter 1975, 35.
26. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
27. Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 4.
28. Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
29. Robb Baker, “New Dance,” Dance Magazine, August 1974, 70–72. The article was written in all lowercase letters, adopting the kind of eccentric capitalization and punctuation that Jill Johnston made popular. I have converted it to conventional punctuation.
Interlude: Leaderless? Really?
1. Mimi Johnson, interview with author, September 30, 2017.
2. Hoover, quoted in Margaret Hupp Ramsay, The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 106.
3. Paxton, “The Grand Union: Improvisational Dance,” The Drama Review 16, no. 3 (September 1972): 130.
4. Elizabeth Kendall, “The Grand Union: Our Gang,” Ballet Review 5, no. 4 (1975–1976): 52–53.
5. Marcia B. Siegel, “Did Anybody See My Monster Dress?,” SoHo Weekly News, March 27, 1975, in Watching the Dance Go By (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 321.
6. Quoted in Ramsay, Grand Union, 88.
7. Juliette Crump, interview with author, January 23, 2018.
8. Judy Padow, interview with author, August 4, 2017.
9. Carol Goodden, interview with author, November 9, 2018.
10. Johnson, interview with author, September 30, 2017.
11. Theresa Dickinson, email to author, July 24, 2017.
12. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
13. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
14. Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 60. I recommend this book for a more thorough understanding of the tenets of anarchism as laid out by Goldman.
15. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 66.
16. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 108.
17. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 31.
18. Handwritten statement found in Grand Union Records, *MGZMD 132, Box 1, at the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts.
19. Jill Johnston, “Which Way the Avant-Garde?,” in Marmalade Me, new and expanded ed. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 117; originally published in New York Times, August 11, 1968.
20. Deborah Jowitt, “Pull Together in These Distracted Times,” Village Voice, March 31, 1975, in Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews 1967–1976 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977), 132.
21. In response to Christian Felber’s paper, “Contact vs. Capitalism” (presented at the Contact Festival in Freiburg, 2014), Paxton quotes Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902): “The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress.” CQ Unbound, 2015, accessed November 25, 2019, https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/view/contact-vs-capitalism#$.
22. Statement found in Artservices materials, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, MGZMD 132.
22. Getting into the Act
1. Richard Nonas, interview with author, April 3, 2018.
2. Mary Overlie, interview with author, August 17, 2017.
3. Terry O’Reilly, email to author, June 19, 2019.
4. Jared Bark, interview with author, June 20, 2018.
5. John Rockwell, “Disciplined Anarchists of Dance,” New York Times, April 18, 1976, 50.
6. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 222–23.
7. Deborah Jowitt, “Yvonne Say No Roses,” Village Voice, January 14, 1971, 44.
8. The rest of this paragraph is drawn from Catterson’s notes, unpublished, which she gave me excerpts of.
9. Risa Jaroslow, interview with author, October 10, 2017.
10. Robb Baker, “New Dance,” Dance Magazine, August 1974, 70–72.
11. Baker, “New Dance,” 70–72. Two notes for the reader here. First, again, Baker adopted a Jill Johnston–style noncapitalization and nonpunctuation mode. Perhaps he thought it matched the “anarchy” of Grand Union. For the sake of readability, I have applied conventional punctuation to the original text. Second, just a reminder that in the seventies, the race of audience members was usually given no more than a mention in reviews. If Baker were writing today, no doubt he would have elaborated on the racial situation a bit more.
12. Michael Kirby, edited transcript of a lecture, in Anne Livet, ed., Contemporary Dance: An Anthology of Lectures, Interviews and Essays with Many of the Most Important Contemporary American Choreographers, Scholars and Critics (New York: Abbeville Press in association with The Fort Worth Art Museum, 1978), 167.
13. Scott Bartell, “Eccylema,” Minnesota Daily, June 3, 1971.
14. Allen Robertson, “Grand Union,” Minnesota Daily, October 17, 1975.
15. Quoted in Ramsay, Grand Union, 128.
16. Juliette Crump assured me that the dance students appreciated it.
17. Quoted in Ramsay, Grand Union, 128.
18. Quoted in Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 238. I followed up with a phone conversation on November 1, 2018.
19. Robb Baker, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” Dance Magazine, August 1976, 20.
20. Elizabeth Kendall, “The Grand Union: Our Gang,” Ballet Review 5, no. 4 (1975–1976): 45; email to author, July 5, 2018.
21. Deborah Jowitt, “Pull Together in These Distracted Times,” Village Voice, March 31, 1965, in Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews 1967–1976 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977), 132.
22. Nancy Goldner, “Dance,” Nation, April 12, 1975, 445.
23. Arthur Sainer, “The Core Is the Mystery of Life,” Village Voice, May 3, 1976, 116.
24. The quotes are from the October 1974 meeting that was edited and published as “The Grand Union, Critics and Friends,” SoHo Weekly News, April 29, 1976. However, the quote by Robb Baker does not appear in that group interview, but in a less edited transcript found in the clippings file of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
25. Deborah Jowitt, “The Spring Dance Storm Is Here!,” Village Voice, May 17, 1976.
26. Barbara Dilley, interviewed by Jean Nuchtern (Colonomos), April 26, 1976, Oral History Project transcript, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 23–24.
27. Jowitt, “Pull Together in These Distracted Times,” 132–33.
28. Quoted in Robb Baker, “Grand Union: Taking a Chance on Dance,” Dance Magazine, October 1973, 46.
Interlude: Musings on Nothingness
1. Allen Robertson, “Grand Union,” Minnesota Daily, October 17, 1975.
2. Clive Barnes, “Village Disaster: Concert of Old and New Works at Judson Church Unveils Just One Minor Talent,” New York Times, January 11, 1966.
3. Paul Taylor, Private Domain: An Autobiography (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 80.
4. Doris Hering, “Seven New Dances by Paul Taylor,” Dance Magazine, December 1957, 83–84.
5. Mary Overlie, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice (self published, 2016), 31.
6. Untitled diary excerpts, Movement Research Performance Journal 14: “The Legacy of Robert Ellis Dunn (1928–1996),” originally published as “Judson Days,” Contact Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 9–10.
7. Charles Mingus, quoted in Gene Santoro, Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 271.
8. Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2017), quoted in “The Three Essential Elements of Creativity,” Brain Pickings, ed. Maria Popova, accessed January 17, 2018, www.brainpickings.org.
9. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 45.
10. David Gordon, interview with author, November 12, 2018.
11. Douglas Dunn, Dancer Out of Sight, Collected Writings of Douglas Dunn (drawings by Mimi Gross; designed and produced by Ink, Inc., 2012), 42.
12. Nancy Stark Smith, “Taking No for an Answer,” Contact Quarterly 12, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1987): 3.
13. Don McDonagh, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York: New American Library, 1970), 83.
14. Marianne Preger-Simon, Dancing with Merce Cunningham (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 100.
15. Douglas Dunn, email to author, May 16, 2018.
16. John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 109, 119–20.
23. Grand Union as Laboratory
1. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
2. “Judson at 50: Steve Paxton,” Interviews: Steve Paxton, Artforum, July 24, 2012, accessed October 2017, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/judson-at-50-steve-paxton-31419.
3. Steve Paxton, “A Dialogue with Liza Béar: Steve Paxton: Like the Famous Tree … ,” Avalanche, no. 11, Summer 1975, 24.
4. Nancy Stark Smith, interview with author, October 2, 2017. I add here that I was delighted to watch a workshop given by Beijing CI in the summer of 2019. I learned that Beijing CI has more than five hundred WeChat followers.
5. Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 229.
6. Catterson unpublished notes.
7. Quoted in Cynthia Novak, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 64.
8. “The Politics of Mutuality: A Conversation with Steve Paxton at the Kitchen Table,” Contact Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2018): 36–38.
9. “The Politics of Mutuality.”
10. Nancy Stark Smith, interview with author, October 2, 2017.
11. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, May 16, 2018.
12. Linda Shapiro, “Dance: Nancy Lewis and Barbara Dilley: Solo,” Many Corners [weekly neighborhood newspaper for West Bank area of Minneapolis], undated review, 19.
13. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 55–56 and 137.
14. Dilley, This Very Moment, 105; Wendy Perron, Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 19–20.
15. Dilley, This Very Moment, 58–60.
16. Dilley, This Very Moment, 108.
17. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, May 16, 2018.
18. Dilley, This Very Moment, 127.
19. Dilley, This Very Moment, 114.
20. Dilley, This Very Moment, 114.
21. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
22. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
23. Marcia B. Siegel, “Did Anybody See My Monster Dress?” SoHo Weekly News, March 27, 1975, in Watching the Dance Go By (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 322.
24. Douglas Dunn’s experience with the audience members trickling in, including me, is recorded in “Disappearances … and a Portfolio,” Tether 3 (2017): 80–83. I had been rehearsing with Sara Rudner in the loft she shared with Douglas until his construction of 101 made it undanceable, so I was naturally curious to see what kind of performance had blocked our rehearsal space.
25. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, January 15, 2019.
26. Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
27. David Gordon, ’70s Archiveography, accessed May 10, 2018, http://davidgordon.nyc/script/70s-archiveography-part-1.
28. Steve Paxton, email to author August 7, 2017.
29. Although some people call the mid-seventies group Trisha’s “first company,” the official start date of the Trisha Brown Company (later the Trisha Brown Dance Company) is 1970. At that time the company members were mostly her friends—including Suzanne Harris, Carol Goodden, and Sylvia Palacios Whitman—who were visual artists who could move well. The exception was Carmen Beuchat, who had been a professional dancer in Chile. Around 1974, Trisha decided to assemble a more professional company, and I was the first dancer she hired who had already danced professionally in New York. Sometimes people refer to that group (my group) as her first company.
30. Catterson unpublished notes.
31. This final section of Newark (Niweweorce) was so iconic that it was intentionally appropriated, practically verbatim, by choreographer Beth Gill in her New Work for the Desert (2014).
32. Catterson unpublished notes.
33. Diane Madden, interview with author, May 14, 2018.
34. Madden, interview with author, May 14, 2018.
35. Quoted in Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 109; Yvonne Rainer, “Engineering Calamity with Trisha Brown,” Writings on Dance, nos. 18/19 (Winter 1999); originally published in the Village Voice, September 17, 1985.
36. Nancy Mason, “Nancy Green in ‘Just Dancing,’” Dance Magazine, February 1972.
37. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 16, 2017.
38. Don McDonagh, “Admiring Laughter for Nancy Green in Dance Program,” New York Times, December 16, 1971.
39. Linda Shapiro, “Dance: Nancy Lewis and Barbara Dilley: Solo,” Many Corners (a weekly neighborhood newspaper for the West Bank area of Minneapolis), undated review.
40. Quoted in Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, 228–29.
41. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
42. David Gordon, interview with author, May 21, 2018.
43. Gordon, interview with author, May 21, 2018.
44. David Gordon, interview with author, August 7, 2000, for article on Past-Forward.
45. Catterson unpublished notes.
46. Karen Smith, “David Gordon’s The Matter,” TDR 16, no. 3 (September 1972): 117–27.
47. Gordon, interview with author, August 7, 2000.
48. Gordon, interview with author, May 21, 2018.
Interlude: Dancing with Trisha
1. This improvised duet was one of the most kinetically harrowing dances I’ve seen. The trust between Trisha and Barbara was exhilarating to behold. Deborah Jowitt called the duet “gorgeously fearless” in her review, “Country Dance,” Village Voice, April 8, 1971; reprinted in Deborah Jowitt, Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews 1967–1976 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977), 116–18; adapted for Contact Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2018): 10.
2. Anna Kisselgoff, “Review/Dance; For 20 Years, Distinctly Trisha Brown,” New York Times, March 9, 1991.
3. We later built spinoff sections called “Branch” and Spill,” the latter made with our own movement according to Trisha’s written instructions. We learned to reverse or go into one of these adjunct sections on a dime, following the calls of another dancer serving as a kind of square dance caller.
24. The Unraveling, or, As the Top Wobbles
1. Richard Nonas, quoted in Jessamyn Fiore, ed., 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) (New York: David Zwirner in association with Radius Books, 2011), exhibition catalog, 63–65.
2. Steve Paxton, “Two Book Reviews,” Contact Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1994): 10. This passage was part of his review of Margaret Hupp Ramsay’s book The Grand Union (1970–1976).
3. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
4. Quoted in Margaret Hupp Ramsay, The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 71.
5. “Barbara Dilley … in the Dancing Room: A Dialogue with Liza Béar,” Avalanche, no. 12, Winter 1975, 35.
6. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
7. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 16, 2017.
8. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, May 16, 2018.
9. Quoted in Ramsay, Grand Union, 69.
10. Nancy Lewis, interview with author, June 19, 2018.
11. Ramsay, Grand Union, 70–71.
12. Quoted in Ramsay, Grand Union, 67; originally quoted in Robb Baker, “New Dance,” Dance Magazine, August 1974.
13. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, September 18, 2018.
14. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
15. Nancy Stark Smith, interview with author, October 2, 2017.
16. Stark Smith, interview with author, October 2, 2017.
17. Elizabeth Garren, interview with author, September 14, 2017.
18. Elizabeth Kendall, “Performers and Personae,” Dance Magazine, August 1974.
19. Elizabeth Kendall, “The Grand Union: Our Gang,” Ballet Review 5, no. 4 (1975–1976): 54.
20. Kendall, “The Grand Union: Our Gang,” 45 and 50.
21. Don McDonagh, “Grand Union’s Skits Now More Formula Than Improvisation,” New York Times, April 25, 1976.
22. Robb Baker, “New Dance,” Dance Magazine, August 1974.
23. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
24. Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 230–31.
25. Group interview with author, July 26, 2017.
26. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, May 16, 2018.
27. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, January 11, 2017.
28. Quoted in Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, 234.
29. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater: An Expanded New Edition including Six Axioms for Environmental Theater (Montclair: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1973, 1994), 283.
Epilogue and Three Lingering Moments
1. A few of the colleges and universities that offer improvisation are Bennington, Middlebury, Oberlin, Sarah Lawrence, Bates College, Franklin & Marshall College, The Five College Dance Department, Ohio State University, Denison University, Texas Christian University, The University of Utah, University of Michigan, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Juilliard, and UCLA.
2. Examples include Composing while Dancing, by Melinda Buckwalter; Taken by Surprise, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere; Dance Improvisations, by Joyce Morgenroth; Dance Improvisations: Warm-Ups, Games and Choreographic Tasks, by Justine Reeve; The Moment of Movement: Dance Improvisation, by Caroline McCluskey; Sharing the Dance, by Cynthia Novack; Dances That Describe Themselves, by Susan Foster; and The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, edited by Vita L. Midgelow. The venerable journal Contact Quarterly, which is accessible digitally, carries many articles on improvisation.
3. Deborah Jowitt, “Tea for Three? Take a Seat,” DanceBeat (blog), October 28, 2017, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2017/10/tea-for-three-take-a-seat/.
4. David Gordon, email to author July 21, 2019.
5. “Trisha Brown: Early Works 1966–1979,” ArtPix Notebooks, 2005, DVD (available at artpix.org).
6. Douglas Dunn, interview with author, March 6, 2017.
7. Steve Paxton, “Post-Performance Artist Conversation: Steve Paxton and David Velasco,” December 13, 2018 (part of Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, September 16, 2018–February 3, 2019, The Museum of Modern Art).
8. “Barbara Dilley: On Contemplative Dance @ SILO,” Dance-Tech TV, posted January 11, 2015, accessed December 14, 2018, http://dance-tech.tv/videos/barbara-dilley-on-contemplative-dance-silo/.
9. Barbara Dilley, This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing (Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press, 2015), 194.
10. Barbara Dilley, interview with author, September 18, 2018.
11. The PastForward project of Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project involved Gordon, Brown, Paxton, and Forti as well as Deborah Hay and Lucinda Childs.
12. This reconstruction was the brainchild of Emily Coates, who had danced in Yvonne’s work since 1999. Like all of Rainer’s major works since 2006, it was produced by Performa, the organization founded and directed by RoseLee Goldberg that is devoted to works of performance art.