crossovers.”6 Halprin participated in the trippy Trips festival, provided dancers for the Grateful Dead’s light shows, and led the audience in a dance at a Janis Joplin concert.7 John Cage sent his protégé, La Monte Young, to work with her,8 knowing she would be fine with whatever ear-abusing noises or cross-genre actions he came up with. Halprin was delighted to be part of this vibrant arts community, occasionally working with Beat poets like Michael McClure and Richard Brautigan.9 “What was popular art, what was fine art, what was experimental art all got kind of moved together.”10 In addition to the communal, feel-good aspect of these exchanges, Halprin’s embrace of collaborations also yielded artistic breakthroughs. In talking about her best-known work, Parades and Changes (1965), for which she had collaborated with composer Morton Subotnick (known as “the father of electronic music”) and visual artist Charles Ross, she said, “The results are often new forms that not one of us alone would have found.”11
The New York environment also produced new forms during this era. In his famous course in experimental music composition at The New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1960, John Cage challenged the class to break barriers between genres. He wanted to expand the definition of music to include the sounds of everyday life and to expand the definition of theater to include any art event that spanned time. The course unleashed a band of rule-breakers, including Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Richard Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was married to Yoko Ono at the time.12 They created happenings, assemblages, and early performance art before these forms had a label. Like Halprin’s community events, their performances sometimes required the audience to be active. Life was crashing into art and vice versa.
The group that emerged from Cage’s course overlapped with the Fluxus artists. Influenced by Duchamp, Fluxus was a loose group of obstreperous, neo-Dadaist artists that included Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and George Maciunas (more about him in the next chapter). Fluxus events, as well as the happenings by Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and others, were meant to be temporary, not preserved or sold. Not everyone took Fluxus seriously. Experimental theater director Richard Foreman described its events as “an attempt to believe that everyday things could be art.”13 But the Fluxus performers were capable of activities that were both beautiful and daring. One of the rare documented Fluxus events was Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964). As seen in the film (accessible on YouTube), Ono sat demurely on the floor with a pair of scissors next to her. One at a time, audience members approached, cut away one piece of clothing, and walked away with the swath of cloth in their hands.14 As each person wielded the scissors close to her body, the expression on Ono’s face maintained a serenity flecked by the tiniest hint of anxiety behind the eyes. This was a typical Fluxus act, fraught with contradiction and not repeatable. According to Ono’s longtime associate Jon Hendricks, Cut Piece reflected her “desire to free herself from cultural straightjackets.”15
Halprin, Cage, and Merce Cunningham were also trying to free themselves from various cultural confines. For Cunningham, it had to do with space. During a lecture he gave on Halprin’s deck in 1957, he said that what he liked about the wooden platform amid the madrone trees was the freedom it gave the dancer. “There is no necessity to face ‘front,’ to limit the focus to one side.”16 In his remarks, he included the fluidity of time as well as space: “My feeling about dance continuity came from the view that life is constantly changing and shifting, that we live in a democratic society, and that people and things in nature are mutually independent of, and related to each other.”17
Cunningham’s idea of fluidity in space and time, Cage’s idea of creativity through chance procedures, and Halprin’s blurring of performers and audience are all part of the larger shift from modernism to postmodernism. All three tried to strip down to essentials, which is a hallmark of modernism. But they went further. While modernism presented a monolithic statement, postmodernism is pluralistic. Dance artist Mary Overlie has characterized that change in a nutshell: “Modernists were looking for the truth, the answer, and they were sure that these were possible to find…. Postmodernism, by adopting a pluralistic Both/And approach, challenges the very basis of Modernism.”18
One cannot overestimate Cage’s influence on the arts. Deborah Jowitt called Cage the “godfather to many works produced during the sixties by composers, choreographers, artists, dancers, playwrights, and directors. His book, Silence, came out in 1961, disseminating a wealth of unsettling ideas.”19 One of those ideas was the permeability of art and life, another was that there is no need for the music to “match” the dance, and a third is that choreography can be structured in ways other than the conventional theme-and-variations or A-B-A format.
As a precursor to postmodernism, the Dadaists in Europe, with their cut-ups and collage techniques, had embraced a pluralistic view of reality in the early twentieth century. Viewers could not count on a cohesiveness ready and waiting for them; they had to choose where to focus. Cage’s use of chance was another method of disrupting the cogency of modernism. He felt, as the Dadaists did, that methods that tapped into a certain level of randomness were more like life. For him, deploying chance methods like tossing dice or consulting the I Ching (The Chinese book of changes) reflected the belief that, quoting philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.”20
Jill Johnston wrote about the gradual, if limited, acceptance of Cage’s subversive ideas: “The heresy of Dada and Cage is the abdication of the will. In a culture brought up on the pride of accomplishment in subduing the brute forces of nature, the admission of chaos seemed like madness from the beginning. But the philosophy has persisted and Cage has had an enormous influence on contemporary artists. The madness has become a new kind of order, and the possibilities extend in every conceivable direction.”21
Although the Cage/Cunningham revolution and the Halprin revolution both fueled the transformation from modern to postmodern dance, their styles differed markedly. Cunningham held the body upright, with limbs extending away from the center (as in ballet). He was a master choreographer, creating brilliant movement sequences while keeping the separation between performer and audience intact. Halprin was less formal and less formalist, more connected to the natural environment, and determined to merge performer and audience. She was more affected by—and part of—the sexual revolution. Nudity was commonplace for her. One could point to a Dionysian aspect of her work, while Cunningham and Cage were primarily Apollonian. Rockwell writes, “Cage remained esthetically distant from the California scene. His and Cunningham’s chance procedures were ultimately too controlling for the looser, more improvisatory, more natural and nature-oriented Halprin and her musical cohorts.”22
Halprin would send students into the surrounding landscape on the side of Mount Tamalpais, asking them, for example, to walk on various textures underfoot: the wood of the deck, the soft earth, dead leaves, prickly plants. They would then convene to share the sensations and movement impulses they had experienced.
Cunningham scattered spatial patterns across the stage and made the dynamics appear random, but he never accepted quotidian movement into his palette. Cage’s philosophy that all sounds can be music did not extend, in Cunningham’s studio, to all movement being accepted as dance. That particular aspect of Cage’s teachings was left to the Judson dancers to realize; they yoked the exploratory wishes of Halprin to Cage’s expanding definition of performance. “Cunningham used to say that we were John’s children and not his,”23 Rainer recalled.
The person who stood at the intersection of Halprin and Cage/Cunningham was Simone Forti. A bridge between West and East Coasts, Forti carried the improvisational urge in her body across the country after four years of working with Halprin. It was Forti who persuaded Yvonne Rainer to come study with Halprin in August 1960, and that is where they both met Trisha Brown.24
Brown, who was from Washington State, shared with Halprin a love of the outdoors, but for her,
