sisterhood as an element of feminism, if you think of equity between genders as another element, then Rainer had introduced the elements of feminism before it caught fire later in the seventies. She was generous enough to facilitate her dancers’ growth in many ways. She wanted the group to be a democracy of adults. She presented female dancers onstage as thinking, speaking, assertive women. These were some of the reasons Sally Banes called Rainer a “proto-feminist.”38
If a man were to step down under those circumstances, I think he would have closed shop completely. It seems to me that when a man has power or authority, he usually does everything he can to hold onto that power. But Rainer wasn’t interested in power. She was interested in work—and teamwork.
∎
It was only weeks after CP-AD’s official premiere at the Whitney that Rainer proposed, amid all her ambivalence, to step down as leader. She talked about it with David Gordon after a performance in Philadelphia. Gordon’s rendition of how the name of the newly configured group came about is posted on his Archiveography website. (On this site, which carries a very personal account of his career up until 2017, Gordon talks about himself in the third person.) “Yvonne don’t wanna be boss no more—she starts to say to us. No more Yvonne Rainer Dance Company—she says. David says—in Philly—after a Rodin Museum visit together—what about a new no dance company name? Like a rock band—he says. How about Grand Union? Like the super market—David says.”39
The evolution of Rainer’s group into Grand Union was confusing and disorienting. During the fall of 1970, three new people joined the group: Nancy (Green) Lewis, Lincoln Scott (aka Dong), and Trisha Brown. Apparently even the new people participated in the discussions of what the group would be. Lewis remembers those sessions: “We sat around a table in Yvonne’s loft on Greene Street discussing what and how to do things … to rehearse or not to rehearse … to stay together or not…. The others were breaking loose from Continuous Project. They were ready to simply mess around … with no one in charge. I recall it was kind of hard for Yvonne to relinquish.”40
Douglas Dunn remembers the decision to keep going: “When Yvonne absented herself [as leader], our focus was lost. We tried to rehearse. People brought in improvisational structures, but resistance was obvious. We were not enjoying ourselves. We had to decide: did we want to perform? Yes. Did we want to rehearse? No. The obvious—if outrageous—answer was staring us in the face: to walk onto the stage with no preparation. No preparation, that is, other than who we were and what we, each of us, harmoniously or not, wanted to do next.”41
Adding to the confusion was a performance at Rutgers on November 6, when Rainer’s big group piece WAR (1970) was performed concurrently with Grand Union but in a different room. This arrangement, repeated later in the month at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., reflected Rainer’s interest in what art scholar Carrie Lambert-Beatty calls her split-screen or multichannel mode. Lambert-Beatty points out that “Rainer’s aesthetic of concurrence meant that, no matter what you were watching, you were aware of what you were not seeing—of the thing coincident in time but distant in space.”42 Although confusing at the time, this “aesthetic of concurrence,” which had clearly been in operation during “Connecticut Composite,” became foundational to Grand Union.
Another incident, just a few weeks later, again blurred the line between Grand Union and Rainer’s work. In a review of Grand Union at NYU’s Loeb Student Center in December 1970, Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times that the program was performed by Rainer “and six members of her company, a group that calls itself the Grand Union.”43
Deborah Jowitt reflected the confusion of this period in her review of GU’s performance at NYU in January 1971, in which all GU members except Scott were present: “The Grand Union is Yvonne Rainer’s gang. Now officially leaderless, Becky Arnold, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Green, Barbara Lloyd, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown tear Rainerideas [sic] to tatters, worry them, put them together cockeyed, add their own things. Rainer says, ‘It’s not my company.’ Hard to tell from her tone of voice whether she’s relieved or regretful.”44
Later that spring the confusion continued, partly because Rainer was still choreographing. When she created her India-inspired, faux-mythological Grand Union Dreams, which premiered in May 1971 at the Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA (now the 14th Street Y), she utilized Grand Union dancers in the choreography. By that time Trisha Brown was a member of Grand Union and did not expect to have to follow anyone’s orders. According to Pat Catterson, a dancer/choreographer who was cast as a “mortal” while Brown and other GU members were playing “gods,” Trisha’s hackles were raised, and the room was filled with tension.45
About the other attempts to share and rehearse each other’s choreography, Dilley recalls: “The outcome of it, in my memory is that nobody wanted to be anybody’s dancer. We just didn’t want to surrender any more, to anybody. It was out of that kind of irritation and frustration and bad behavior and acting out that we just said, OK next time, there are no rules, we’ll just show up and begin.”46
Gordon’s version, as told succinctly to John Rockwell at the New York Times, was this: “We were not comfortable performing each other’s work, but we were comfortable working together.”47
In pulling back from being the director, Rainer ended one thing—Yvonne Rainer and Group—but she set something else in motion: the Grand Union.
INTERLUDE
THE PEOPLE’S FLAG SHOW
In the fall of 1970, a political protest was brewing against censorship. In the art world, the spurring incident was the arrest of a gallery owner who had shown the work of artist Steven Radich, which supposedly denigrated the American flag. During the late sixties and early seventies, the flag had come to represent US military aggressions against Vietnam and Cambodia. In solidarity with the gallery owner, a coalition of arts and justice groups held meetings to decide on a public action they could take. Among them were the Art Workers Coalition, New York Art Strike, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group. They formed the Independent Artists Flag Show Committee with an eye to inclusiveness, aiming for “equal representation, women and men, of Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Whites.” The committee sent out a call for proposals for works of art that would reimagine the flag. More than 150 artists of all disciplines, including Jasper Johns, Leon Golub, and Kate Millett, responded to the call. The three organizers were Jon Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, and Jean Toche.1
Hendricks, who had been director of the Judson Gallery, knew that Reverend Howard Moody was a longtime supporter of the arts within community. When Hendricks approached Judson Church to host The People’s Flag Show, Moody was already aware of the issue. He had written a long letter of support to a Long Island woman who had been arrested for hanging a flag upside down as a protest against the Vietnam War.2 On Sunday, November 8, the day the exhibit opened, he gave a sermon defending the artists. He sent the written version to the Village Voice, which printed it. Here is the last paragraph: “The flag is a simple symbol, half a lie and half true; more of a promise than a reality. Its respect must be elicited, not commanded; the love of what it means must be given, never forced. When the flag becomes a fetish, we’re on our way to a tyranny that all patriots must resist.”3
After the Sunday service, the artists began arriving with their offerings. This was not a curated exhibit because the participating groups wanted it to be democratic and inclusive. The show officially opened at 1:00. According to Moody, Mayor John Lindsay sent staff to protect the artists.4
At 5:00, Hendricks and Toche, representing the Guerrilla Art Action Group and the Belgian Liberation Front, held a flag-burning ceremony in the Judson courtyard.5 At
