pipes, a kind of swing set without the swings. The second was a huge wooden platform about ten feet above the floor that served as a kind of diving board for Rainer and the other performers to jump into a pile of tires.62 Toward the end of the evening, Ross started piling folding chairs on top of that platform, so that Ross in action and the growing mountain of chairs were part of the set. In between the nine pieces were interludes of “free play” that made it hard to distinguish when one choreographer’s work ended and another’s began. The choreographers included Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Alex Hay, and Carla Blank.
Rainer remembers Concert #13 as a highlight. She felt her escapade for that concert, Room Service (1963), was her only real collaboration with a visual artist. But the whole collaborative event registered on her even more strongly than her single piece. “I think that was one of the most amazing evenings. Everyone’s thinking was so radically changed by these enormous structures. We had to deal with them … and everyone came up with quite different pieces.”63
In Concert #13, the “neighbors who dropped in” were not necessarily from the same discipline. But they could all partake of the same meal, as it were. The sharing process at Judson, which began in Robert Dunn’s classes and continued through the leaderless workshops held in the basement, reflected a growing interest in a democratic process in the wider art world. Other performing arts groups, like Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Living Theatre, The Performance Group (later the Wooster Group), Mabou Mines, Pilobolus, the Negro Ensemble Company, Sonic Arts Union, and Videofreex, were also at least partly collaborative. In the visual arts, artist-run galleries like Hansa, Tanager, and Brata Galleries of the Tenth Street Gallery scene were cooperatively run. Most of these galleries, like SoHo spaces later on, were places where artists could, according to gallery director Lynn Gumpert, “experiment with new art forms in unexpected and blatantly noncommercial venues.”64
Judson Dance Theater did not produce masterworks, nor was that its goal. The whole idea of a masterpiece had already been thrown into question by happenings and Fluxus. The literary counterpart, The Floating Bear, produced poetry, drawings, and art reviews that were about new forms—the Beats, the Black Mountain writers—without regard for existing masterworks. This homemade newsletter was delivered free to subscribers. Like Judson Dance Theater, it was a collaborative effort among artists of different disciplines: poets Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) edited, James Waring typed, jazz pianist Cecil Taylor ran the mimeograph machine, and dancer Fred Herko collated. Other writers who contributed were Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg. This newsletter was inextricably interlaced with Judson Dance Theater. Taylor played for Fred Herko’s Like Most People in the first Judson dance concert, and The Floating Bear carried the only review of that concert, written by di Prima.65
INTERLUDE
SIMONE FORTI’S LIFE IN COMMUNES
Simone Forti, who was an active member of the Robert Dunn class, was also part of the art world. In 1960 Claes Oldenburg, who had cofounded Judson Gallery,1 and Jim Dine, who had visited Cage’s class at the New School,2 invited her to contribute to an evening at the Reuben Gallery. This was a short-lived, unheated space that Kaprow had helped establish as a place for performances and happenings.3 “At that time there weren’t any firm boundaries between different artistic practices,” said Forti in an interview, echoing Halprin’s sense of the ferment on the West Coast. “We were all more or less concerned with an art of process rather than with producing stable, marketable aesthetic objects.”4
In the Cage-influenced tradition of happenings by Kaprow and theater pieces by her then husband, Robert Whitman, Forti did not feel the need to classify her pieces. In 1961, when La Monte Young invited her to create an evening at Yoko Ono’s studio on Chambers Street, she came up with several events she called “dance constructions.” Both Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton performed on this evening—Rainer in See-Saw (1960)5 and Paxton in Huddle, Slant Board, and Herding.6 In each of these pieces the object and movement are essential to each other. Many years later, in 2015, the dance constructions were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art as part of its recognition of performance as art.
In 1969, after Forti’s marriage to Whitman broke up, she attended the Woodstock Festival. When the festival was over, she roamed from one commune to another for about a year. Here she speaks about what one might call the dreamy side of communality:
It was an extraordinary moment in my life. Like everyone else I took a lot of drugs—hash, marijuana, acid, mescaline. But the most important thing had something to do with a way of being together—which was not at all theoretical, on the contrary. There was at one and the same time an incredible freedom and a mutual respect that was unheard of until then. It took me a year to come down. I lived communally—in a situation where the only tacit rule was to value silence. You could develop a practice of listening, of attention: to others, to space, to time, and to action. In this way I never stopped dancing—in a thousand different ways. I remember one morning I got up at dawn and while two friends prepared breakfast I was outside in the landscape, perched on a large rock, another small rock balanced on my head. I was experimenting with the degree of flexibility of my dorsal spine that such an arrangement permitted. You see, these were often very simple experiments and experiences. And there was an intensely pleasurable but unspoken connection and understanding between this activity and that of my friends who were cooking their porridge.7
Freedom. Respect. Silence. Listening. Dancing. Experimenting. Connection. Was it absolutely necessary to ingest drugs to attain these states of mind? Forti has speculated that “drugs had a lot to do with it, everybody tripping together so much.”8 Perhaps so. As Richard Foreman recently reminded me, Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out” was useful when it came to breaking habits and opening one’s eyes to other ways of living.9
But qualities like silence and listening are aspects of creativity that both Cage and Halprin valued—with or without substances. And they fed into Forti’s improvisational abilities, which she passed on to Rainer, Paxton, and Brown. She listened to her own impulses when she danced; she could stick with something for a long time, and she could just as easily spring away from it. If she was banking in circles, she could get so caught up in the momentum that she would keep it up for a long time. But if another image or thought suddenly occurred to her, she would go for it. There was no conflict between mind and body—like a cat that is tired of scratching the sofa and suddenly pounces on a ball. Forti’s close observations of animal behavior contributed to that kind of impulsive break.
Simone Forti in her Fan Dance (1975). Photo: Babette Mangolte. Courtesy of the artist and The Box, LA.
In Forti’s world, even objects—or perhaps especially objects, considering her dance constructions—were part of it. As she has written, again about living on a commune, “Objects, though moved by people, seemed to follow their own paths, to be part of the flow.”10 This sense that both living and inanimate things were part of one big process was bedrock to Grand Union.
CHAPTER 2
ONLY IN SOHO
The scattered community of artists in Lower Manhattan continued to experiment into the seventies across disciplines, fervor undimmed. But finding affordable living and working space was an uphill battle. A solution was masterminded by Lithuanian immigrant and madcap visionary George Maciunas. Informed by ideas from Bauhaus and European agriculture collectives, he jumpstarted an artists’ colony in SoHo (the area from Houston Street to Canal Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Crosby
