teaching me/us lessons that reflected the slogan of the day, “Go with the flow,” in the deepest, most complex ways. They responded to any impulse with bristling readiness and to any overture with a fearless range of options.
Watching the tapes, I got that same sense of awe that I had had more than forty years earlier. I felt I could learn a lot from studying the videos—not only about dance, or performance, or improvisation, but about life. I didn’t want to dance with them (anachronistically speaking) or to attain their mastery at improvisation. What I wanted was to be able to navigate through my life the way they were navigating through unforeseen circumstances.
What they had found together was, in Douglas Dunn’s words, a “possible ideal world.”1 They could give voice to their innermost selves and at the same time weave an intricate tapestry of the whole group. Barbara Dilley’s explanation is that there was a “group mind” at work.2 In David Gordon’s words, Grand Union was “a miracle.”3
The videos spurred questions: What was happening in the culture to produce such an egalitarian world, however flawed and temporary? How did these dancers ride the ebb and flow so organically? To what extent were they a utopian society, and to what extent did they reveal/conceal antisocial behaviors? How could they be such a strong performing unit while refusing to rehearse together? What other improvisation collectives were around at the time? What made the seventies audience so ready for GU’s brand of anarchy? What pulled the group apart after six years?
After watching a few hours of this material4 I started talking to my husband Jim about it. He was about to go out, but when he saw my excitement—and that I couldn’t stop talking about it—he sat down, still wearing his jacket, to listen. I was raving about how natural the dancers were, how their bodies erupted with the kind of impulsiveness that children have, yet they also had a disarming sophistication. After the first wave of my gushing, he said, “I think this is your next book.”
A quick Internet search showed that not much had been written about Grand Union in the burgeoning “dance studies” field. Fortunately, a dissertation from the eighties had been published in 1991 as part of a theatrical series. I am indebted to Margaret Hupp Ramsay for her book The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group, which has interviews as well as listings of performance dates and reviews. She supplied good interview material, but the book is thin on historical and artistic context. I have the advantages of first, knowing the Grand Union members and their work as individual choreographers; second, having danced with some of them; and third, having access to archival videos that were not available in the eighties.
Nothing that’s been written on Grand Union comes close to Sally Banes’s last chapter at the end of her landmark book Terpsichore in Sneakers. Banes divided this section into two parts: her scholarly analysis and the dancers’ written responses to her questions. Her loving attention to them was clear. She didn’t have to say, as she did in a later essay, that Grand Union was “one of the most brilliant projects of the postmodern dance.”5 Sally and I were close friends, sharing similar tastes and curiosities since the mid-seventies. In the early eighties we worked together on separate but overlapping projects for Judson Dance Theater, involving some of the same dance artists who were in Grand Union.6 We remained close until her tragic stroke in 2002. I sometimes feel, as I embark on this book, that we’re doing this together, that she is looking over my shoulder, checking in with me.
There are many approaches to dance improvisation today. Melinda Buckwalter has described twenty-five of them, from Simone Forti to Min Tanaka to Lisa Nelson, in her book Composing While Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion. The Wesleyan anthology Taken by Surprise is another excellent source. And Contact Quarterly regularly publishes ideas and reports on many approaches to both improvisation and somatic practices. These publications provide an array of starting points, methods, and discussion topics for those who may have had only conventional dance training. I was one such student in the sixties, when my solid training in ballet and modern dance didn’t put a dent in my stomach-churning dread of improvising.7
But the book in your hands now is not a manual for learning improvisation; it will not coax anyone into improvising or give advice on how to form a collaborative improvisation group. Perhaps Grand Union was a fluke, never to be repeated. I feel the stars aligned briefly to create something as rare as a total solar eclipse. As Claire Barliant has written about 112 Greene Street (more about that commune-like artists’ space in chapter 3), “[T]he reason these projects and venues are so fantastic is precisely that they’re not meant to last forever.”8 As my improvising colleague Stephanie Skura pointed out, very often a particularly vital period of creativity has a finite life span.9 In the case of Grand Union, between six and nine artistically fertile, eccentric, and delightfully subversive dance artists came together to create a potent mix of elements, a union of grandeur. Their process required a kind of psychic nakedness—and once or twice, the other kind too.
I am writing this book as a witness to a slice of dance history that could disappear. In some ways, it’s a continuation of my research on Judson Dance Theater10 and Anna Halprin and Simone Forti.11 As opposed to Judson Dance Theater, which I did not witness firsthand, I saw and heard Grand Union and never forgot it.
While watching the videos, I found myself transfixed by every entwinement and interaction, not to mention the dancing, so vivid and so unique to each person. I was hungry to speak with all the living GU members and find people who had seen them more often than I had. Three of my dance colleagues confessed to having been “groupies.” Grand Union was kind of like a rock band but on a smaller economic scale: a leaderless group (not that rock bands don’t have their power struggles) with a special synergy that excited fans. Sometimes people would declare their favorites, as in, “Who is your favorite Beatle?” As with the Beatles, each member was essential to the whole. The interactions could be brazen, bristly, odd, unpolished, combative, or unexpectedly tender.
The audience in the downtown milieu was ready for Grand Union. I was ready for it. Many young, post-Judson dance artists were ready for it. As Marcel Duchamp pointed out, a work of art is not complete without the audience. “The onlooker is as important as the artist,” he has said. “In spite of what the artist thinks he’s doing, something stays on that is completely independent of what he intended, and that something is grabbed by society…. [I]t’s the onlooker who has the last word.”12 Each new art has to find its audience, and in the case of Grand Union, it was the other artists of SoHo. It was also the audiences in places like Oberlin College in Ohio and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the group had time to cultivate familiarity.
An extra poignancy comes with this project for me: I joined the Trisha Brown Dance Company in November 1975, just a few weeks before her last appearance with Grand Union in Tokyo. Trisha’s desire to start a more full-time company was her second reason for dropping out (the first being her ambivalence from the start). I danced with her until 1978, and we remained friends until her death in 2017. Her departure from Grand Union prompted David and Steve to also call it quits. So in some circuitous, time-machine way, having participated in the group that ferried Trisha away from Grand Union, to the current moment when I am writing about this, I am making a full circle.
Much has been written about Trisha Brown’s choreography, but no scholar has discussed her performances in GU as part of her work. Watching the tapes is a way for me to fit her improvisational work into her oeuvre as a whole. The same could be said for David, Steve, Barbara, and Douglas: though reams have been written about each of them, very little focuses on their remarkable contributions to Grand Union. I try to remedy this in chapter 22, on GU as a laboratory for their individual work.
I embark on this book, too, as a challenge to what I’ve
