words mesh with my own experience of watching Grand Union.) When Rainer described the specific actions that excited her, they seem quite ordinary. (By then, with the help of past teachers Halprin and Dunn, she had mastered “ordinary.”) That was the point: what is ordinary can be art. The following is from a letter she wrote to her dancers after Kansas City:
Steve’s concentration and presence during the lifting lesson; his lying on the floor at the end; his observation of me doing the pillow-head routine. Doug sitting across the room looking at our shenanigans with a baleful eye…. David seriously working on the new stuff by himself; his interrupting me at the microphone to ask for help. As you see, I am talking mostly about behavior rather than execution of movement. It is not because I value one over the other, but because the behavior aspects of this enterprise are so new and startling and miraculous to me.10
Rainer was delighted to see good ole human behavior in an art context. It aligned with her larger project of putting life onstage, breaking the barriers between art and life.
Although the UMKC audience, having no context for Rainer’s work, could not have perceived the nature of the breakthrough, the student newspaper did report a warm response. “Not knowing what to expect,” wrote Tresa Hall, “yet not expecting what they got, the audience reacted in a very pure and delightful way.”11
After the breakthrough in Missouri, Paxton may have been the only one who saw the possibility of improvisation on the horizon. “While we were in Kansas City having a late-night talk about the performance we had just done, I said, ‘It is very obvious that we are heading for improvisation of material,’ and thereafter came a long series of responses on how impossible that was.”12
∎
As much as the “behavior” was welcome, the aspect of dance as labor was also central to CP-AD. Rainer was influenced—not for the first time—by the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, her lover and fellow Judson choreographer. Rainer took the title Continuous Project—Altered Daily from an installation he devised at the Castelli Warehouse in Harlem and later performed at the Whitney Museum. For this “installation,” Morris went into the gallery every day and changed the arrangement of a myriad of objects.13 Rainer was impressed that he had created a fluid experience rather than a finished exhibition. (Let’s not forget that, back in the late fifties and early sixties, when Morris was married to Forti, he had tagged along to workshops given by Halprin and Robert Dunn.) Art critic Annette Michelson described how Morris’s Whitney installation involved various craftspeople and museum staff who “worked at the transport of the huge cement, wood, and steel components, converting the elevator into the giant pulley which hoisted them to the level of the exhibition floor.”14 Morris himself describes the installation as “[n]o product, just the heaving and throwing and shoving and stuffing.”15
It is this type of labor that Rainer wanted to get at. She wanted to show dancers as workers. I believe she felt this would demystify dance, move toward a more egalitarian attitude toward women, and scrape away the narcissism that she felt comes with the territory of performing.16
Continuous Project—Altered Daily (1970), Whitney Museum. With Rainer and Dunn. Photo: James Klosty.
Rainer’s love of work, especially women working together, goes back to her participation during Judson Concert #13, “A Collaborative Event in 1963,” mentioned in chapter 1. In her autobiography, she describes the teamwork necessary to accomplish Carla Blank’s piece Turnover, in which eight or nine women literally turn over Charles Ross’s huge trapezoid-like metal frame: “As half the group lifted a lower bar of the contraption from the floor, the other half reached for the top bar on the other side and in the process of bringing it to the ground raised the first four or five performers high in the air. The second group then moved to the other side to lift another part of the structure, thus lowering the dangling ones to the ground. In this fashion the whole configuration rolled crazily around the space. I found it breathtaking to engage in this heavy and slightly dangerous work with a team of women.”17
The audiences of CP-AD also had to work. In order to make sense of the radical juxtapositions (a term coined by Susan Sontag when describing happenings in 1962),18 they had to encompass two contradictory ideas at the same time (F. Scott Fitzgerald, anyone?). Rainer was fond of butting two opposite actions or moods up against each other. She wasn’t interested in snap judgments, in audiences being able to grasp an idea instantly. She wanted to engage them long enough to provoke serious thought. In a 2001 interview, when she had reentered the dance field after making independent films for twenty-five years, she was discussing the relatively new genre of video installation as performance. “I’m still interested in making things that require a certain amount of time to comprehend,” she said. “With the standard video installation, you go in, stand there for two minutes, say ‘I get it,’ and walk out. I don’t think of images in that way.”19 She preferred a complexity of images or actions, not with an obvious center or point. Like Cunningham, who scattered actions all over the stage, she liked to have several tasks going on at once. She wanted the audience to grapple with what they were seeing (the way she grappled with life), rather than to just passively receive it.
Another way that Rainer explored the complexity of images was her insight into the relationship between the body and objects. About the Whitney performance of Continuous Project (which was not only the premiere in 1970 but also its last performance before the group mutated into the Grand Union), Rainer wrote:
I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also, the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision- and action-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like. Active-passive, despairing-motivated, autonomous-dependent. Analogously, the object can only symbolize these polarities: it cannot be motivated, only activated. Yet oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.20
The idea that a woman could be like an object in performance (not, I hasten to add, a sex object) fit nicely with Rainer’s budding feminism. It offered a solution to the “problem” of a woman’s body in performance, which was often exploited as an object of sexual pleasure for men. In the ballet world, a woman was either seducer or sylph; in modern dance, she was often either a matriarch or a woman in various states of desire. In CP-AD, a woman could either lift a box, be lifted like a box, toss a pillow, or help a mate fall or get up. So could a man. In this way, CP-AD was as ungendered as her previous works, like We Shall Run and The Mind Is a Muscle (1966). Rainer’s device of never looking at the audience in Trio A, which was initially part of Muscle, was an attempt to escape the usual tyranny of what was later called the “male gaze.” (Ironically, Rainer has often admitted that she likes being looked at as a performer.) Scholar Peggy Phelan has pointed out that “Trio A in particular anticipates” the concept of the male gaze as coined in Laura Mulvey’s landmark 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”21
The active/passive duality she set up was not keyed to gender. This concept was foundational to CP-AD and continued through Grand Union. It seems to me there were two types of passivity in CP-AD: one was for the body to assume an inanimate state, as object or sculpture, and the other was for the body to go soft, almost liquid, like water. The latter was embodied most expertly by Steve Paxton. In one section, with three limbs being pulled by Gordon, Dilley, and Douglas Dunn, he went limp, trusting them as they pulled him in different directions.22 The necessity of trust became a theme, a challenge, a shared understanding
