interlude and in chapter 22.)
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As part of the Whitney performance of CP-AD (March 30 to April 2, 1970), Rainer arranged for several spoken recitations during the performance. She had always fed her intellectual hunger with an array of serious reading. For the Whitney, she invited prominent people in the arts to read passages she’d found about performing—written by Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Barbra Streisand, W. C. Fields—thereby adding another layer of inquiry into the nature of performance. Among the readers were fellow choreographer Lucinda Childs, theater director Richard Foreman, filmmaker Hollis Frampton, and art critic Annette Michelson.23 The readings at the mic, juxtaposed to the game-like physical actions, left some audience members confused, or merely unmoved. But New York Times reviewer Don McDonagh found it stimulating that “an almost contagious joyfulness” could appear side by side with a section that he considered “drained of freshness.” He felt it was all part of Rainer’s “voracious embrace of all movement full of its own weight and justification.”24
Because the task-oriented movement did not require highly trained bodies (though most of the dancers were trained professionals), McDonagh wrote, “A curious side effect of the work was the frustration of not being able to participate except vicariously in something that appeared to be fun.”25 This illusion that anyone could do it (which continued as CP-AD morphed into the Grand Union) had its roots in Halprin’s explorations in public spaces and her wish to blur the line between performer and audience, making dance more democratic.
In some ways, McDonagh (who had only the year before called Rainer’s Rose Fractions “leaden” and “stultifying”)26 represented the ideal viewer. First, because he relished the challenge of making sense of radical juxtapositions. Second, because he had enough physical responsiveness to catch the fun of it.
Another critic who enjoyed the range of moods, though she was far from effusive, was Nancy Mason of Dance Magazine: “Projecting different sides of their personalities—reserved and methodical, warm and whimsical—they use their bodies in unique ways to ventilate a primitive urge to move and express.” Mason also enjoyed Hollingworth’s bizarre “adjuncts” that were donned, at random times, by the dancers: “Barb affects an imitation lion’s tail, which bobs jauntily around as she buries her head in a pillow on the floor. David looks like a mini-Mexican beneath his giant, colorful sombrero.”27
Rainer was under no illusion that she was doing something new by allowing process into performance. Rauschenberg had created “live décor” while on tour with Cunningham; in addition to providing an assortment of found items to wear for Story, he sometimes loaned himself as part of the scenery. When the company performed Story in Devon, England, he and Alex Hay were ironing shirts upstage.28 Charles Ross had done it in the collaborative event at Judson, when he was amassing his mountain of chairs during the performance, and then again with Anna Halprin in her Apartment 6 (1965), in which he was making a paper animal—a different one each time—upstage during the performance.29 Performing process was just one device in Rainer’s arsenal in deconstructing the conventions of the theater.
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Rainer had a history of crossing from private to public that prepared her for the vulnerability in CP-AD. How intimate can a work of art be? She’d seen Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) mounted on the wall. Was it a painting, a sculpture, a found object, a private corner? Mattresses, pillows—the domestic realm, the woman’s realm—were now fair game to include. She had performed in Forti’s See-Saw in 1960, which suggested a domestic relationship seeking balance. In Inner Appearances (1972, a prelude to her first film, Lives of Performers), her most private thoughts—erotic, rebellious, political, mundane—were projected onto the back wall while she was vacuuming the floor. Perhaps this short trip from private to public was best expressed in the language she used recently when referring to her decision to expose dancers to process in CP-AD: “Let it all hang out—or make new stuff right in the performance.”30
Although Rainer asked the dancers to contribute ideas, she still considered herself the choreographer. According to Paxton, it was a step-by-step process that led to the transformation of CP-AD into Grand Union. He enumerated the progressive invitation to dancers to make decisions, to bring in new material, to experiment with learning in performance. He said that “misunderstandings would continue until we had assumed more and more functions that she had under stood were her own.”31 Eventually it became clear that the logical next step in this experiment was for Rainer to relinquish control.
Continuous Project—Altered Daily (1970), Whitney Museum. With Gordon and Rainer. Photo: James Klosty.
But that was not her intention. She felt she was encouraging her dancers to experiment, not to mutiny. She wanted to give them agency as creative people instead of serving merely as “people-material.” She wanted to acknowledge the brilliance of her performers. But in a statement read aloud during the 1969 performance at Pratt Institute, she said, “The weight and ascendancy of my own authority have come to oppress me.”32 The piece at Pratt had some of the elements of CP-AD, like bringing in independent material and teaching material in front of the audience. Rainer was already questioning the director/performer hierarchy.
Even those weighty questions did not put a damper on the performance. One Pratt student, Catherine Kerr, who later became one of the longest running dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, responded to the group’s exuberance: “I thought it was fabulous…. It was athletic, it was casual, it was everyday movement. I remember being totally engaged by the performance and their antics. I thought, Wow, that’s a doorway.”33
In her letters to the dancers, Rainer was exquisitely clear about what she wanted to keep control of and what she was willing to let go of. She was excited by what she was seeing: the outsize imagination and daring of her dancers, the unleashing of absurdity, and the possibility for spontaneous behavior, including rollicking laughter. In the documentary film about her, she describes her frustration: “It was like letting the horses out of the barn, but then sometimes I’d want to get the horses back in and they weren’t about to get back in.”34
Although she joked about it years later, Rainer was tormented by the uncertainties at the time:
A more serious side of the process necessarily entailed a great deal of soul-searching and agonizing on my part about control and authority. It seemed that once one allowed the spontaneous expression and responses and opinions of performers to affect one’s own creative process—in this respect the rehearsals were as crucial as the performances—then the die was cast: there was no turning back to the old hierarchy of director and directed. A moral imperative to form a more democratic social structure loomed as a logical consequence. What happened was both fascinating and painful, and not only for me, as I vacillated between opening up options and closing them down.35
Rainer’s ultimate decision to pull back from leading the group was not only a moral imperative but also a feminist moment. Feminism is about challenging ingrained hierarchies. As a choreographer, she took charge not because she wanted power but because she wanted to make work. She was a harbinger of the seventies and eighties mode of downtown dance groups wherein the choreographer asked for input from the dancers.36 She respected her dancers and perceived—accurately—that most of them were on the brink of coming into their own as dance artists. (Paxton, of course, had been her equal from as far back as the Bob Dunn classes.) According to Dilley, who credits Rainer with being the first choreographer to be interested in her as a creative artist rather than only as a performer, Rainer
