work. The cognitive activity is the content of the work. This is the root of postmodernism, really, and John was wonderful at not only articulating it, but demonstrating it in his work and his life.
From Words without Music: A Memoir by Philip Glass. Copyright © 2015 by Philip Glass, pp. 94–96. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
CHAPTER 3
HOW CONTINUOUS PROJECT—ALTERED DAILY BROKE OPEN AND MADE SPACE FOR A GRAND UNION
Ever since Judson, Rainer had been hell-bent on challenging every assumption involved in concert dance. With her emphasis on functional movement and the unadorned body (though she also deployed a wide dance vocabulary), she undermined the bedrock of professional dance: technical mastery. Taking this takedown further, with Continuous Project—Altered Daily (CP-AD) she introduced a range of modes that brought the activity of rehearsing into performance. She felt that what went on in rehearsal was as worthy of viewing as a finished piece. Therefore, in addition to performing set choreography, her score (instructions) included the following: marking the choreography (indicating it with a less-than-full-out energy), practicing the choreography, making choices about when an action would occur or whether to join in, and learning new choreography. The last of these plunged the dancers into the state of not knowing, thus robbing them of their physical assuredness. Shorn of set choreography, the performer might as well be shorn of a costume. The dancers were exposed.
For Rainer, the vulnerability of the dancer was part of her plan, part of her aesthetic. With the aid of game structures and absurdist props, she worked toward scraping away any veneer of polish. (She surely agreed with Paxton when he wrote to her in a letter that “finesse is odious.”)1 She wanted the audience to see the labor—the process—of dancing. Toward this goal, she enlisted task, play, pop culture, singular focus, multifocus, dancers bringing in their own material, choosing between options, not knowing what to expect—all of which eventually cracked open the customary director-performer hierarchy.
Rainer was asking questions: How to present two radically different ideas simultaneously? How to let the audience see the process of making? How to give performers creative agency? In addition to the experimental thrust, she valued spontaneity, so she came up with game structures designed to lift the lid on one’s natural impulsiveness.
She, along with her small crew of dancers—Becky Arnold, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton—made CP-AD over a period of about nine months, showing it at different stages along the way. It was never meant to be a finished product, since part of the idea was to show the process of making. During this period, the performers were called either Yvonne Rainer and Group or Yvonne Rainer Dance Company.
In 1969, while in residence at American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, Rainer was experimenting with tasks and objects for CP-AD. The atmosphere during the making process was casual and workmanlike, with a ready sense of play.2 Five dancers (Steve Paxton was not able to join them) were working, lifting, hauling, trying things out. What can a body do with a cardboard box? How can a dancer be lifted the way a box is lifted? What happens if you run with a pillow and use it to cushion another dancer’s fall? What happens when all five dancers sit on the floor and try to use the group leverage to all rise together? All this experimentation fostered a sense of trust that was visible in their comfort with touch, mutual support, and difficult maneuvers.
That summer, augmenting her small group with about eighty ADF students, Rainer created a huge performance called “Connecticut Composite” that spread out over several areas of the Connecticut College gymnasium. Continuous Project—Altered Daily, a work-in-progress at the time, occupied only one area. In a second area was a studio with twenty-eight students doing Trio A, and in a third room one could watch films and hear lectures. Yet another area housed an “audience piece,” which was basically Rainer’s Chair Pillow with an empty seat to be filled by a single spectator. (Chair Pillow, which had already been part of Rainer’s Performance Demonstration at Pratt Institute in March 1969, is a spunky unison piece, setting functional actions like throwing a pillow behind oneself to the beat of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High.”) Marching through the central area was a twenty-strong “people wall” that advanced and retreated inexorably, scattering audience members as it went. According to Rainer’s diagrams, this group changed configuration twenty times.3
About CP-AD that summer, dance critic Marcia B. Siegel lauded the “spontaneity, play, and variety” of the activities. She especially noticed the moment when “Rainer took a running leap and swan-dived over two big cardboard cartons into the arms of two men.” With all that was going on, including audience members sometimes joining in, she called the performance “rowdy” and said it “had the clangor and conviviality of a Horn & Hardart” (referring to the chain of working-class, cafeteria-style lunch spots in New York and Philadelphia of the thirties through the early sixties).4
Don McDonagh wrote that the overall performance, which included Twyla Tharp’s commission that summer, brought “a joyous spirit of adventure” back to the festival, which year after year had presented mostly established modern dance companies like those of Martha Graham and José Limón.5
Later in 1969, Rainer wrote letters to Paxton and Dilley, who were teaching at the University of Illinois, about the upcoming date at University of Missouri at Kansas City. She sent them her tracings of Isadora Duncan photographs with instructions to make a duet based on them. Her notes of what she expected to happen included this bullet point: “YR randomly monologuing, directing, watching, disappearing.”6 A little foreshadowing, perhaps? Her disappearing act was repeated in various forms during the next three years.7
The Kansas City performance, on November 8, 1969, turned out to be a madcap, expansive turning point. Body “adjuncts,” created by Deborah Hollingworth, included a pair of feathered wings, a foam insert that turned the wearer into a hunchback, a lion’s tail, and a humongous sombrero hat. It also provided the performers a chance to laugh at themselves or each other, deflating the self-importance of the performer.
Dilley, looking back, felt Kansas City was the beginning of the evolution toward Grand Union. Writing in the present tense, she recounted the performance in her book, This Very Moment:
Circumstances create unplanned opportunities and, that night, suddenly we make new material in front of the audience. We’ve never done this before. It is outrageous and fresh. There are moments of exquisite joy and revelation.
I write about it in a letter to Yvonne: I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers “In the Midnight Hour” and doing Trio A slow, very slow, and Steve [Paxton] joining me and then fast, with and against Steve’s tempo. It was sheer delight. I felt sexy moving through material I know that slowly. I remember you… grinning at the pleasure we had. Oh, and the wings. I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face. The literary images, the dream images, the animal images… .
After the performance we stay up most of the night, sprawled across some hotel bed, talking through what happened over and over. Yvonne calls it “spontaneous behavior.” There’s no going back. We are about to become the anarchist ensemble the Grand Union, where we make up everything in front of audiences.8
Rainer, too, felt a huge release with the discovery of “behavior” as performance. In a loving, admiring letter to her dancers, she told them that because of their performance, she had an epiphany: “I got a glimpse of human behavior that my dreams for a better life are based on—real, complex, constantly in flux, rich, concrete, funny, focused, immediate, specific, intense, serious at times to the point of religiosity,
