The Grand Union. Wendy Perron

       INTRODUCTION

      Although Grand Union existed for only six years—a blip in the span of dance and performance history—it made an impact on those who witnessed its collective genius. Word spread, and even now the name of the group is legendary. Grand Union was the bridge between Judson Dance Theater—that explosion of experimentation that changed the face of modern dance—and the illustrious careers of its long-term members, some of whom formed the bedrock of postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, and Nancy Lewis. Grand Union was both a culmination of early experiments and a laboratory for future work.

      The confluence of these brilliantly idiosyncratic minds/bodies gave rise to a flow of human interaction that was wayward, minimalist, excessive, ludicrous, annoying, goading, uproarious, or deeply moving. It epitomized the spirit of the sixties: flaunting freedom from the usual (unwritten) rules, solving dilemmas (largely) peacefully, and creating an accidentally leaderless democracy (while coping with a typical array of resentments).

      Grand Union’s mode was improvisation—the most ephemeral form of an ephemeral form. There is no choreography to look back on and analyze. There was no method, no treatise, no plan. We were watching people deal with whatever came up. They were out there in the wild. This wasn’t improvising on a stated theme, the way jazz musicians and theater people do; this was being thrown into an empty space, onto a veritable blank canvas, with nothing to fall back on but their instincts. They made structures as they went along, or rather they built upon the structures that arose organically during performance. It wasn’t anarchy as we usually think of it, but as I explain in the “Leaderless? Really?” interlude, the antihierarchical stance of anarchism threads through the arts of that time, particularly the thinking of Rainer and Paxton.

      I saw Grand Union only three or four times during its six-year life span. I don’t remember many specific sequences, but I remember how I felt while watching the group perform. I felt wide awake and ready to respond to every new decision as each episode unfolded. Seeing shape and intention materialize before my eyes—and realizing the risks the performers took—put me in a state of high alert. I rode the ups and downs with them from my seat, accumulating new insights about each person/dancer/character and their relationships to dance and to each other. I was in awe of their ability to remain resolutely themselves while also fully participating in the group. They could instinctively either reinforce what was going on or sharply counter it. Harmony and absurdity in equal measure. Giddy Dada Zen.

      I remember one time, in 1975 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, when Nancy Lewis was standing under a blue blanket for a long time. Various duets and trios were going on, and she suddenly asked out loud, from under the blanket, “Am I doing anything important here?” The audience cracked up laughing, and the laughter burst into applause. But it was more than a joke; she was admitting that she didn’t know. Not knowing was a way to start at zero, and stillness was a way to let others take the focus. An acceptance of nothingness as a gateway to somethingness. A possibly “important” foil to a colleague’s more defined plan.

      I remember watching Barbara Dilley and David Gordon chasing each other with pillows around the perimeter of the Eisner Lubin Auditorium of New York University’s (NYU’s) Loeb Student Center. Their physical sparring was impulsive, ambiguous, and intimate. They could have been a pair of particularly witty siblings or impetuous lovers—until strains of hostility crept in. I remember wondering: Are they really mad at each other or just playing?

      Turns out, they were wondering too. The line between art and life, as John Cage, Anna Halprin, and Allan Kaprow had championed, was blurred. That merging was fascinating to behold but was also destabilizing and probably a factor in the group’s demise. But until that collapse, this kind of confusion helped crack open the possibilities of performance.

      Knowing that some archival videotapes existed, I started wondering if the tapes would hold up to my memory. In fact, seeing the tapes is what sent me into Grand Union fever. The screen sizzled with—what?—a kind of readiness to engage, to accept any reality and move through it. Even though what came up on the screen was limited by a single camera angle, I could see the moment-to-moment decisions the dancers made to burrow further into their own private exploration, accept the bid of another player, or interrupt another’s intention.

      After watching a few hours of the tapes, I came away with the thought that Grand Union back then possessed a kind of collective wisdom. The organic flow of the group’s movement/interactions/fantasies revealed a natural, grounded-yet-buoyant way of being in the world, all the while not knowing what the next moment would bring. That not-knowingness led to a state of mind rarely exposed in public, and witnessing it was exciting. It escaped the airtight construction of locked-down choreography. It allowed us to see the dancers not only as

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