dance artists I saw in the seventies, like William Dunas and Kenneth King, are not part of the canon of dance history. I feel that the work of Grand Union is similarly imperiled.
Although writing this book has been daunting in many ways, I feel comfortable riding in this particular saddle. My path has crossed with almost all the Grand Union members in the last forty-plus years. I danced with Steve when he was a guest artist in Trisha’s company. I pulled in Yvonne, Steve, and Trisha to the Bennington College Judson Project in the early eighties; I invited Steve to teach at the Jacob’s Pillow-at-Bennington workshop that I directed in the early nineties. In 1980 I hung out with David and Yvonne in France at the Festival de la Sainte Baume, where we were all teaching workshops (I learned Trio A from Yvonne there); I’ve done several curatorial projects with Yvonne since then. I share with Nancy two choreographers we have both danced for, Jack Moore and Twyla Tharp; I have taken a workshop from, and written about, Barbara; and I was part of a fleeting improvisation group with Douglas in the late nineties. In working on this book, I have deepened my knowledge of each of them through scrutinizing the videos and engaging in multiple conversations.
This book looks back at an ecosystem that valued collaboration as well as the individual imagination. In the twenty-first century, it feels like a luxury for me to be spending hours and days with these artists I admire so much … a luscious immersion … swimming in the waters of collective creativity. The fact that Grand Union existed at all is due to the spirit of collaboration encouraged in that milieu and to the possibilities of functioning (gloriously) without a leader. Although Grand Union was very much of its time, it refracted the timeless issues of the individual versus the group, freedom versus cooperation, virtuosity versus the everyday, and the relationship between art and life.
NOTE TO READERS
NAMES
The names Barbara Lloyd and Nancy Green were used during Grand Union up until 1974 or 1975. At that point, the two women reverted to their maiden names, Barbara Dilley and Nancy Lewis. I have chosen to honor that decision and use their maiden names throughout. Likewise, Douglas Dunn was known during most of Grand Union as Doug, but he now prefers Douglas. Anna Halprin was known as Ann until the 1970s, but I use Anna consistently as that is the name she goes by now.
The name “Grand Union” was suggested by David Gordon as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the booming supermarket chain at the time. It was initially supposed to be without the “the,” but David, Trisha, Barbara, and Yvonne routinely referred to it as “the Grand Union.” Nancy, Douglas, and Steve use the name bare, without the article in front of it. In keeping with that lack of agreement, I use the “the” sometimes but not at other times.
A final point about names is that I start my story by referring to known figures in the standard way, using surnames. In part II, however, I transition into referring to each dance artist by her or his first name, a decision I explain along the way.
INTERLUDES
In order to provide a fuller picture of Grand Union than I can give alone, I’ve included other voices. Most of the interludes are excerpts of published pieces; one is an edited interview (Dianne McIntyre) and another is an invited reminiscence (Joan Evans), and still another is from an email message (Richard Nonas).
THE “GROUP INTERVIEW”
By July 2017 I had held initial interviews with Yvonne, Douglas, Nancy, and Barbara. When I contacted David to schedule an interview, he requested that we wait till Steve came to town—for the Trisha Brown memorial—so that I could interview them together. We invited Yvonne, and then Douglas, even though I had already interviewed them both, to join us, so it ended up being a group interview in David’s loft—but not with the whole group. Barbara and Nancy do not live in New York, and I did not attempt to include them by phone because I felt the disembodied voices would affect the flow of the conversation. (I had already interviewed both of them anyway.) Therefore, when I refer to the “group interview,” it is with only four people: David, Steve, Douglas, and Yvonne.
PART I Seedbed
Anna Halprin’s deck, ca. late 1950s, Kentfield, CA. Photo: The Estate of Warner Jepson.
CHAPTER 1
ANNA HALPRIN, JOHN CAGE, AND JUDSON DANCE THEATER
In the sixties, the West Coast and East Coast had different styles of rebelling against the conventions of modern dance. Judson Dance Theater, the collective breakthrough of experimentation that ushered in postmodern dance, was a child of both. It was, at least partially, the encounter between Anna Halprin’s nature-loving, task-dance approach from California and the rigorous, John Cage–inspired chance methods of New York that ignited the Judson revolution.1
Living and working in Marin County, Halprin took dance out of the theater and into natural and urban spaces. She infiltrated streets, airports, plazas, and the side of a mountain. She shed her modern dance training in order to honor the natural, unadorned (and sometimes unclothed) body. She deflated the high drama of modern dance with human-scale task improvisations. She wanted to dance where trees were swaying in the wind and birds were chirping. So in 1955 her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, along with designer Arch Lauterer,2 built an expansive outdoor deck as a gift to her. Here she could commune with nature as she developed her own approach to dance. Rather than romanticize the glory of the theater, she romanticized dancing outdoors, harking back to Isadora Duncan.
In her resistance to concert dance, Halprin was reacting to what she had seen at the Bennington School of the Dance, which relocated to Mills College for the summer of 1939. She felt that the officially sanctioned giants of modern dance—Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm—were training dancers to be imitative rather than creative. Dance historian Ninotchka Bennahum writes that Halprin became “disenchanted with modernism’s codified disciplining of the human body.”3 She recoiled from their highly stylized theatricality, reverting instead to the teachings of Margaret H’Doubler, her mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the thirties. Inspired by John Dewey’s idea of the mind and body working together, H’Doubler did not demonstrate steps but taught about kinesthetics with the help of a human skeleton. She was all about exploring rotation and flexion to expand range of motion. Continuing in that vein but, as described by dance scholar Janice Ross, “progressing from raw, improvised action into dance with an emotional resonance,”4 Halprin forsook technique per se and committed herself to wide-ranging exploration. The deck became a place to gather, observe, experiment, and respond to the rustling of nature rather than to prepare choreography for the stage.
Also in the mid-fifties, another gift was bestowed on Halprin: Simone Forti. A budding visual artist with a sensuous movement quality and a poetic imagination, Forti had none of the mannerisms associated with either ballet or modern dance training. She was a sensitive, fearless explorer who, encouraged by her then husband, Robert Morris (later to become a major minimalist sculptor), had been physically active while painting large canvases. Forti’s grounded simplicity, her love of nature, and her mercurial sense of play made her the ideal collaborator for Halprin’s new approach.5 Along with Forti and her other dancers, Halprin developed “scores” (written or drawn instructions to be interpreted by the performers) for the interplay of dance and sound, for paying attention to the environment, and for ritualizing the everyday.
The Bay Area was a hub of artistic collaboration in the sixties, and Halprin got caught up in the swirl of the local music scene. According to critic John Rockwell, who performed in some
