grin flitted across his face. He was “in the moment,” easily absorbing the world around him—rather than shutting it out, as some performers do. That kind of chance element is what the Grand Union thrived on: being open enough to respond to an unexpected event.
Another common ability is that they could all dance in silence. They didn’t need music in order to dance. In fact, much of their own work during that period was done in silence—or to sounds rather than music (although John Cage would not make that distinction). They considered music that “matched’ the dance to be old school. Rainer even wrote a screed against music as part of a performance text in which she called herself an “unabashed music hater.” Although she invented playful spellings like muzak and moossick in her hilarious diatribe, her main point was that dance should stand on its own.5 Paxton made a dance in which he used an industrial vacuum cleaner to pump up a room-sized plastic bag and then emptied the air out, intending to record the noise for use in his nearly nude duet with Rainer, Word Words (1963). (The recording never did get used for its intended purpose.) Trisha Brown, too, was happy to make dances in silence in the early days—or sometimes to a tape of Forti making sounds, as in Trillium (1962), Lightfall (1963), and Planes (1968). When I was on tour with Trisha in the seventies and we gave lecture-demonstrations, someone would ask, “Why don’t your dances have music?” She would counter with, “Do you need music when you are looking at sculpture in a gallery?”
This attitude toward music was of course influenced by Cage and Cunningham, who famously separated dance and music in the working process. It was left for each individual viewer to make aesthetic sense of their convergence. This is related to the Dadaist idea that the eye/ear/mind will create its own cohesion when faced with radically different elements. The Cage/Cunningham mode influenced Grand Union’s method of choosing music, which was … haphazard. The dancers would bring in records to put on the record player; on tour, they would shop at a local store, buy a pile of records, and give them to the stage crew.6 Then they might, during the performance, say to a stagehand, “Let’s have music here,” or motion to a crew member to put a record on, or, trusting even more to chance, allow the crew to choose which record to play when. Because Paxton, Dilley, and Douglas Dunn had all danced with Cunningham, they were familiar with the state of not knowing the music until the moment of performance.
Cunningham revolutionized choreographic use of space as well as of sound. He decentered the stage in much the same way that Jackson Pollock decentered the canvas, so the center of the space was no longer the most compelling spot. As mentioned in chapter 1, Cunningham had proposed in his 1957 lecture on Halprin’s deck that the entire performance space could be activated. The audience had to choose where to focus in this new “allover” space (to use a term often applied to Pollock). Another point Cunningham made in that lecture is that it was not necessary to have a single front.7 In many Grand Union performances, the audience sat in an arc, a circle, or a square surrounding the dancers. These two issues contributed to the democratization of the space, which could affect the way the audience experienced the performance. Barbara Dilley, while watching the archival tapes of the LoGiudice Gallery performances (in which the audience sat on three sides), noticed, “One person looks right, the person beside her is gazing left. There’s no proscenium focus here, but rather a three-ring circus.”8
From Cunningham, they also learned to have a steadiness in phrasing. None of the dramatic Martha Graham–type dynamics or the noble arcs of Doris Humphrey for them. (Trisha once said to me, “I don’t know why Martha Graham shoots her wad on every movement.” She was talking about the lack of subtlety, the predictability, and what she perceived as false urgency.) Cunningham’s sense of timing had an Eastern tinge to it; his phrasing seemed to be ongoing rather than building toward a climax. That ongoingness could have been influenced by Cage’s interest in Zen. But it also reflected Cunningham’s locating the choreographic impetus in “the appetite for dancing” rather than the desire to tell stories.9
Related to this aesthetic was the deadpan, or what Sally Sommer called the “calm face,”10 which was natural to all GU members. Give nothing away, dramatize nothing. This relaxed expression goes back to Judson Dance Theater. As Paxton wrote when looking back, “there seemed to be some unspoken performance attitude at Judson which called for a deadpan façade.” He felt they were searching for a new performance demeanor to match the new choreographic approach in which performers could make choices, and that the solution was to be absorbed in the process. “So we tended to inhabit movement,” he concluded, “but not animate it.”11
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The classic deadpan can be construed as being influenced by an African American aesthetic. Dancer/scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild calls this kind of facial composure “the mask of the cool.”12 In her landmark book, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, she enumerates the ways that black culture has affected contemporary dance and performance. She doesn’t deny the influences of Dada and Bauhaus from Europe, or Zen and martial arts from Asia, but she contends that the Africanist influence (meaning African American as well as African diasporan) has been overlooked. When she focuses on postmodern dance, she claims that “the Africanist presence in postmodernism is a subliminal but driving force.”13 To be specific, she writes, “The coolness, relaxation, looseness, and laid-back energy; the radical juxtaposition of ostensibly contrary elements; the irony and double entendre of verbal and physical gesture; the dialogic relationship between performer and audience—all are integral elements in Africanist arts and lifestyle that are woven into the fabric of our society.”14 Dixon Gottschild identifies Rainer, Gordon, Brown, Dunn, and Paxton as having absorbed some of these qualities.15 She points out that Contact Improvisation, which emerged from Grand Union, adopted the lingo of black jazz, using the term jam for their sessions. When Dixon Gottschild identifies a “cool, mellow state that can be termed ‘flow,’” it sounds like a pretty good description of Grand Union’s aesthetic. The word “cool” can be used by many people to express many qualities, but I think the following spontaneous remark, taken broadly, could be said to support Dixon Gottschild’s point of view: When I gave a presentation on Grand Union showing archival videos at the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation in 2018, one woman in the audience blurted out, “Did they know how cool they were?”
Of course all artists draw from a variety of sources. The attraction of white artists during that period to black culture is nicely described by producer/curator Robyn Brentano: “The white avant-garde’s interest in and appreciation of African-American dance, music, visual art, and literary idioms, style, and values was motivated by a complex mixture of genuine respect for and appreciation of African-American artistic achievements, a romanticization of blacks that reinforced certain racial stereotypes, and a sense of a shared antibourgeois stance.”16 I think this stew of responses reflects both conscious and unconscious attitudes.
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Some of the GU dancers, like many in the Cunningham/Cage milieu, were on the rebound from Martha Graham’s dominating aesthetic. No one discredited Graham as the pioneering American artist who brought modernism to dance. But these young dancers wanted to go their own way. As mentioned, Halprin had done battle with the Graham theatricality in the mid-fifties. Not much later, Rainer also came up against the Graham aesthetic. At first she was overwhelmed by this icon’s artistic and psychological force but later came to prefer Cun ningham’s subtler style, or what she called his “implicit humanity.”17 The aversion to Graham’s style for those who favored Cunningham at the time was perhaps best expressed by Carolyn Brown. She wrote that the classes at the Graham school “seemed to demand a kind of emotional hype that felt dishonest, extraneous, external, and artificial—unrelated to my understanding of Dance (with a capital ‘D’).”18
Some had also done battle with Louis Horst, Graham’s mentor, music director, and one-time lover. He had been determined to give
