what a world.1
PART II The Gifts They Brought
In this section I describe the physical and expressive gifts that each dancer brought to Grand Union. I am not including their abilities as choreographers, though obviously those are huge in almost every case. Rather, I am focusing on who they were as performers/improvisers at the time of Grand Union. Each one had a searing uniqueness that is a challenge to describe. I start each mini-profile with a single paragraph about that person’s dancing as I remember it in the seventies, a snapshot of the dancer in motion. Then I go on to give a bit of background and describe the dancer’s abilities that relate to Grand Union. In order to provide a sense of immediacy—to give you the very present sense that I have while I call the dancers to mind—I have put each initial paragraph in the “literary” present tense. Midway through each mini-profile you may notice that I drop the convention of referring to the artist by surname and start using the more casual first name. This is for two reasons: first, I want you to get to know them each in a more familiar way, and second, in the (white) modern dance tradition (as opposed to ballet), we call even the most respected artists by first names: it’s Isadora, Martha, Merce, Paul, and Trisha. In the black tradition, it’s Miss Dunham and Mr. Ailey. I don’t know why these differences occur, but it’s been that way for generations.
CHAPTER 5
BARBARA DILLEY
With a sweet face and a beautifully unforced quality in her dancing, Barbara Dilley is a quietly magnetic force. Small in stature, her presence is contemplative yet captivating. She may begin an evening with simple walking, stretching, or spinning, with the faith that a steady motion will grow into something larger. Though she can stay with a kinetic investigation for so long that it becomes a meditation, she can just as easily glide into another person’s scenario. Her serene, velvety dancing is rooted in the downtown aesthetic of modest and minimal, but she readily crosses into more rambunctious terrain. Grounded yet somehow lofty, she can embody a range of qualities from task-like to mystical.
Barbara Dilley (born 1938) grew up in a family that moved around. Born in Chicago, she also lived in Pittsburgh; Barrington, Illinois; Darien, Connecticut; and Princeton, New Jersey. It was in this last city that she started taking ballet lessons with Audrey Estee (who also taught Douglas Dunn a few years later.) For Dilley, dance was a refuge from always being the new kid at school.1 After high school she spent a summer at Jacob’s Pillow, where she studied with Ted Shawn, Myra Kinch, Margaret Craske, and “ethnic dance” specialists Carola Goya and Matteo. She went on to Mount Holyoke, where she took Graham technique with Helen Priest Rogers, who steered her to a summer at American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. There, in 1960, she was drawn to Merce Cunningham’s work. “I liked silence, liked Merce’s physicality.”2 Decades later she said, “Nothing compares to his piercing clarity and large moving presence and to his passion for making stuff up.”3
Rainforest (1968), by Merce Cunningham. From left: Cunningham, Dilley, Albert Reid. Décor of “Silver Clouds” by Andy Warhol. Photo: Oscar Bailey, courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust, all rights reserved.
After arriving in New York City that fall, she danced briefly with the Tamiris-Nagrin Dance Company.4 She studied with ballet greats Alfredo Corvino and Anatole Vilzak as well as with James Waring and Aileen Passloff.5 She savored meeting dancers “living on the other side of convention.”6
In 1961 she married Lew Lloyd, whom she had met five years earlier in New Jersey, when she was cast in a local play that he was stage managing. (Lew went on to become business manager of the Cunningham company.) Soon after giving birth to their son, Benjamin, in 1962, she joined Cunningham’s company in 1963 and continued until 1968. The first pieces she performed were Story and Field Dances, both of which made more use of indeterminacy than was usual in the Cunningham repertoire. Cunningham archivist David Vaughan surmised that this sudden (and fleeting) openness to greater choice for dancers was influenced by the young dancers of Judson Dance Theater.7
Dilley had already dipped into improvisational sessions here and there. In a studio with Forti and Brown she experienced some of Halprin’s basic structures;8 in Judson Dance Theater Concert #14, the “improvisation” concert, she danced in Deborah Hay’s piece.9 Her own choreography after leaving the Cunningham company involved improvisation, film, or props like candles.10 She also made herself available for other performances with a measure of indeterminacy. In one of Claes Oldenburg’s Ray Gun happenings (ca. 1962), she walked across a wooden plank suspended between two ladders—her pregnant belly covered in bright pink.11 In Bill Davis’s Field (1963) at Judson, she and Davis wore belts attached to transistor radios tuned to different stations.12 For Paxton’s Afternoon (A Forest Concert) (1963), she danced on moist dirt near a tree trunk wrapped in camouflage and later played in a clearing with another cast member, her two-year-old son, Benjamin Lloyd.13
But CP-AD was the first time she felt she had agency while improvising in performance. “It was beginning to seep in, the whole idea of letting each performer be able to make decisions in the performance environment.”14 She found she enjoyed this form of dance making, so she pushed for Rainer to invite more contributions from the dancers. According to Rainer, it was Dilley who kept egging her on to let the dancers have more input.15
Over time, Dilley developed an exquisite awareness of the dualities of improvisation: individual versus group, public versus private, consciousness versus subconsciousness. She felt the porousness of those binaries. In a 1975 interview she said, “[I]n improvisation you cross back and forth on that bridge between your consciousness and your unconscious energy.”16
Dilley wanted dance to be more democratic and less elitist. Part of being democratic, along the lines of the Cage/Dunn definition, was the embrace of the “ordinary.” She learned that lesson well and made the ordinary resonate:
[Y]ou take something that’s very ordinary and you distort it very slightly. Slightly through time or through absurdity or through gesture that doesn’t necessarily go with what you’re saying. And it becomes readable as a much larger thing. It starts reverberating…. You learn through experience when you are feeling a certain way which generates that possibility. That vibration…. It’s not planned or intended, but it suddenly happens. And you’re aware of it and you go with it. And you support it because its rich. It’s not only rich to do but it’s rich to be around it.”17
“To be around it” means to me that Dilley was generous with her attention. She was a good collaborator and supported her colleagues’ decisions in intelligent, fertile ways. Gordon has said that Barbara “was extraordinary at picking up on someone’s material and reinforcing it by lending her body and her mind to the action, stretching the ideas as well as following them.” In fact, her support early on helped Gordon to arrive at a turning point. Said Gordon, “I began to realize my material by watching her participation in it.”18
One of the gifts that she brought from her work with Cunningham was her sensitivity to space. “Space is this aliveness that vibrates every time the curtain goes up.” While contemplating a 1963 photo of the Cunningham company in Suite for Five, she writes, “We are alone and together in a deep full way.”19 Clearly, she felt that Grand Union continued this sensibility. She often used the term tribe to describe the group.
Barbara was highly attuned to feelings and sensations, which could perhaps be traced to being treated for polio as a child.
