dining hall of Black Mountain in 1952 that he created Theater Piece No. 1, which later became known as the first “happening.” This storied event was so discombobulating that each of those who were present remembers it differently. David Tudor played the prepared piano48—but Katherine Litz remembers Cunningham also at the piano (!). Robert Rauschenberg suspended his white paintings like a canopy above the audience while he cranked up an old gramophone. Cage spoke at a lectern—or maybe a stepladder—delivering a lecture with timed silences. Charles Olson read poetry from another ladder and possibly handed out strips of paper with poetry fragments written on them. Either slides or films were projected. The audience was divided into quadrants; Cunningham danced in X-shaped aisles between them—chased by a dog that was either barking or not barking. Possibly gamelan instruments from composer Lou Harrison’s collection were played in a corner. There were two cohesive elements: Cage’s “time brackets,” meaning periods when the performers could or could not be active, and the fact that an empty cup placed near each audience seat in the beginning was filled with coffee at the end—if it hadn’t already been used as an ashtray.49
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which was formed at Black Mountain College the following year, continued to experiment, at least occasionally, with chance and spontaneity in an interdisciplinary setting. For Cunningham’s Story (1963), Rauschenberg decided to assemble a different set each time, depending on what materials he found in the neighborhood of the theater where they were appearing. He stuffed two duffel bags full of found clothing for the dancers to change into at will. According to longtime Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown, Rauschenberg “presented us with an endlessly inventive, deliciously unexpected succession of surprises. To add more spice to the indeterminate mix, we could select anything from the outlandish array of thrift-shop garments and other oddities, including football shoulder pads.”50 The order and choice of the eighteen possible sections were determined by chance and posted backstage a half-hour before curtain. On tour in Tokyo, Rauschenberg placed the clothing bags onstage instead of in the wings. While Cunningham, Brown, and Viola Farber performed a trio, Barbara Dilley changed costume and was momentarily nude upstage, causing a bit of a stir, presaging the chutzpah she brought to Grand Union.51
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Although the dances produced at Judson were usually short, they served as springboards for long-term explorations. It was partly because of this that Rainer has referred to Judson as “the crucible.” Paxton describes it this way: “You get this parade of formal explorations that were mind-boggling. Judson was that for me. It was an idea about questioning what the elements of dance were. So in my question, I started removing choreographic ploys. I wanted to work with an element of human beings that was not constructed, technical movement, and I began to look at walking.”52
If Paxton’s long-term interest was walking, then one could also point to Rainer’s interest in running, Brown’s in falling, and Gordon’s in talking while dancing. To give you an idea of how these preoccupations surfaced, I describe one of each of their Judson pieces, noting how these concerns followed them into Grand Union.
One of Paxton’s walking pieces was the solo Flat (1964). Wearing a suit, he walked in a circle or a straight line; occasionally struck an athletic pose, like being up at bat; and sometimes sat on a chair. He would periodically stop, then strip off one piece of clothing, revealing hooks affixed to his bare skin. He then hung his jacket, shirt, or trousers on one of those hooks. He also sometimes froze mid-dressing, for instance when sitting on a chair while peeling off a sock. You’d hold your breath because it really felt like he was interrupting himself. Paxton experienced an almost unbearable urge to leave the room: “The more I felt that I was exposed, I wanted to get out of there…. I knew I was transgressing that whole aesthetic of pacing and keeping things moving.” He called Flat “pedestrian and boring…. On the other hand, it delivers this gentle weirdness.” Like many Judson dances, Flat required a flat delivery, but there was a structural arc in that the cycle happened three times: first when he was fully clothed, then partially clothed, then again fully clothed. By the end, as Paxton later said, “You know something very intimate about someone’s body that doesn’t show through your clothes, covered up again. It’s like a secret has been revealed and concealed.”53 The shunning of theatrical pacing and the “gentle weirdness” of Flat were aspects that Paxton brought to Grand Union as well.
Rainer had loved the action of running ever since childhood. For We Shall Run, she asked twelve performers—both dancers and nondancers—simply to run, but in highly complex patterns. A recording of the powerful “Tuba Mirum” section of Berlioz’s Requiem provided a contrast to the familiarity of running, reflecting Rainer’s taste for Dadaist juxtapositions. This was “everyday” dance with a vengeance. Village Voice writer Jill Johnston, who championed Judson Dance Theater from the start, wrote that the dance “finally bloomed absolutely heroic. The heroism of the ordinary. No plots or pretensions. People running. Hooray for people.”54 The idea that the performers are people rather than dancerly figures was a key element of Grand Union.
Lightfall (1963), by Trisha Brown, Judson Memorial Church. With Brown and Steve Paxton. Photo: Al Giese © Hottelet (Giese).
In Brown’s Lightfall (1963), she and Paxton took turns perching on each other’s backs until the supporting person moved, eventually causing the sitter to fall off. Much of the dance was spent awkwardly sliding off the other person’s back or sprawled on the ground. This typified Brown’s interest in falling, and since Paxton was her partner, possibly contributed to the development of Contact Improvisation a decade later. According to Banes, Lightfall grew out of the improvisations she had been working on with Forti and Dick Levine outside of Dunn’s classes. The sound for Lightfall, a recording of Forti whistling, was a way to include Forti, who was not involved in Judson. (Forti had acquiesced to the request of her new husband, experimental theater director Robert Whitman, to participate only in his work and not to create her own.)55
David Gordon’s Random Breakfast (1962) consisted of six mostly improvised sections, each with its own characters and costumes. It appeared on Concerts #5 and #7 after premiering in Washington, D.C., at the America on Wheels Skating Rink in May 1963.56 His compulsion to make himself and his audience uncomfortable was fully aired. In the section called “Prefabricated Dance” he lectured off the cuff about how to make a dance, satirizing the methods of both Louis Horst and Robert Dunn—while Valda Setterfield, his wife and Cunningham company member, danced to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. It was intended as a comment on what he called “the Judson Church Dance Factory Gold Rush in which choreography ran rampant.”57 “I talked about timing, subject matter, content, and how to get the audience in the palm of your hands…. I conceived of it as a scathing dismissal of current values and methods. The audience thought it was very funny.”58 The performance earned Gordon and Setterfield the term “classic wits” in Jill Johnston’s review.59 In another section, Gordon spoofed a Spanish dance while wearing full Carmen Miranda regalia. “I’ll be made so uncomfortable by appearing in a strapless dress and a wig and a mantilla I’ll do anything!”60 Gordon’s talking while dancing, commitment to embarrassing himself, and penchant for exotic costumes all bloomed into full flower in Grand Union.
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Although the dance artists could follow their individual interests at Judson, there were also collaborative occasions. As Paxton has said, Judson was “a big barbecue, with all the neighbors dropping in.”61 The evening that most typifies that description was Concert #13, subtitled “A Collaborative Event, November 19–20, 1963” (ending only two days before the assassination of President Kennedy). The sculptor Charles Ross, who had worked with Halprin on the West Coast, proposed an evening wherein all the choreographers on the program would address, confront, or coexist with the environment he created. In
