leader of us all.”25 Forti had a luscious movement quality, which, coupled with her clear intention while improvising, attracted Brown and Rainer as well as Paxton. Forti could seem like an oracle at times, so elemental were her movement desires. She had ideas that were not Ideas, but poetic musings and wonderings (or wanderings off to the zoo to watch the bears). Her connection to nature, nurtured by Halprin, was a strong foundational aesthetic for her. She only needed to find a conceptual framework.
And that happened in Robert Dunn’s composition class.
Now we get to the central part of the oft-told creation myth of Judson Dance Theater and postmodern dance.26 For our purposes, I tell this story slightly differently, emphasizing its bearing on what ultimately became the Grand Union.
In the fall of 1960, John Cage was tired of teaching dance composition in the Merce Cunningham Studio, which was on the top floor of the Living Theatre’s building on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street. He asked Robert Dunn, who had taken his course at the New School, to teach the class. Dunn had been an accompanist at several dance studios and had seen, firsthand, how formulaic the composition classes of Louis Horst and Doris Humphrey had become. (Interestingly, he felt that Martha Graham’s composition classes were OK—more intuitive, less didactic.)27 He was determined to teach differently, to give the students multiple avenues into their movement imaginations.
The class started with five students, including Paxton, Forti, and Rainer,28 the last two of whom were fresh from Halprin’s deck. Forti soon persuaded Brown to come to New York and study with Dunn. The class grew to include not only Brown but also Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Elaine Summers, Rudy Perez, Sally Gross, Ruth Emerson, and David Gordon. Visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris (who, as Forti’s then husband, had participated in Halprin’s workshops in the late fifties), as well as musicians like Philip Corner and John Herbert McDowell, attended the class less regularly.
Like Cage at the New School, Dunn gave assignments in indeterminacy,29 which enabled performers to make choices on the spot. He discussed Satie’s attention to durational lengths and turned the composer’s mathematics into physical problems to solve. Students could create their own scores (structures), using chance methods to generate movement. For instance, one student decided to let the rotation of the moon provide a timeline.30 Sometimes the assignment was a simple time limit: make a three-minute dance in three minutes. Other assignments involved game structures or the minimalist idea of a unifying “one thing.”31 The students responded unabashedly with an anything-goes fervor—even those students who, like David Gordon32 and Trisha Brown,33 considered Dunn more of a catalyst than a prime mover.
Forti, who missed the California landscape, found an artistic home, or laboratory, in Dunn’s class: “There was an atmosphere of intense freedom, coupled with a very analytical approach to each person’s compositional solutions. It was incredibly stimulating.”34
Improvisation, however, was not part of Dunn’s classes. Nor did Cage condone improvisation as an element in performance. (In fact, he was offended when Leonard Bernstein interpreted his idea of indeterminacy—giving performers certain choices—as improvisation.)35 Whatever the stylistic differences between Halprin and Dunn’s workshops were, they were both focused on process. The discussions were never about whether a student’s piece was good or not. As Brown recalled, Dunn always asked, “How did you make that dance?”36 Sometimes the dancers were taken aback by his mode of curiosity rather than evaluation. Rainer remembers that one of the students “did a kind of quasi burlesque strip tease which embarrassed me, but Dunn was only interested in how she made it!”37
Dunn’s class was remarkably productive. After about a year and a half, the students showed some of their works at the Living Theatre, on the first floor in the same building. (James Waring, who was a major pre-Judson influence, had already presented a program of work there by his students, including David Gordon.) They started looking for a larger venue. First stop: the 92nd Street Y, the stronghold of American modern dance, where one could see choreography by Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Pearl Primus, José Limón, and the young Alvin Ailey.38 Rainer, Paxton, Gordon, and Ruth Emerson auditioned before a panel of modern dance mavens to be considered for its Young Choreographers series. The jury consisted of Marion Scott, who taught Humphry-Weidman technique;39 Jack Moore, an Anna Sokolow dancer who had gotten attention for his own choreography;40 and Lucas Hoving, already a luminary within the Limón circle.41 This jury watched each of the pieces, one by one, and turned them down. (Considering that the Y presented dance on a proscenium stage, I now think they made the right decision—for the Y and for the future of dance. But their rejection does speak of a certain obliviousness toward the artistic potential of these young dancers.) Undaunted, the students kept looking. Rainer knew that Judson Poets’ Theater and Judson Gallery were already thriving at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. So Rainer, Paxton, and Emerson “auditioned” for senior minister Al Carmines, and he accepted them with open arms (i.e., an offer of rehearsal space as well as performance space). Their first concert, on July 6, 1962, comprised twenty-three dances by fourteen choreographers. The group soon called themselves Judson Dance Theater.
The students worked so well together—no doubt a result of Dunn’s avoidance of competitiveness—that when Dunn stopped teaching the course after that first concert, they continued to meet. This came about because Rainer suggested that they create their own leaderless workshop, and Paxton spread the word.42 After the first month in Rainer’s studio, these weekly workshops moved to the basement gymnasium of Judson Church. For each new concert, a three-person committee was organized to make decisions on program order, publicity, and technical needs.43 The numbered concerts (some of them at venues other than the church) continued up to number 16, in April 1964.
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I’d like to take you on a brief detour to the Bauhaus movement. The Bauhaus artists who migrated from Europe to the United States in the thirties and forties provided an underpinning for both the Cage/Cunningham approach and the Halprin approach. In fact, art historian Susan Rosenberg, author of Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, calls both Halprin’s and Dunn’s workshops “post-Bauhausian interdisciplinary experimental workshops.”44 The Bauhaus center in Dessau, Germany, which had cultivated the mixing of disciplines, was shut down by the Nazis in the thirties, and many of the artists fled to the United States. Lázló Moholy-Nagy landed in Chicago, where he established the School of Design; Walter Gropius led an arts program at Harvard; and Josef and Anni Albers came to Black Mountain College.
Five Bauhaus concepts were instrumental in the development of the new dance on both coasts. First, choose materials that are close at hand. (Anni Albers made necklaces out of paper clips.) Second, pay attention to the uniqueness of the materials. (What does wood do, what does copper do, what does the human body do?) Third, think of art as functional in society, not merely decorative. Fourth, experiment with collage, combining radically different elements. (Robert Rauschenberg, who had been a student at Black Mountain, created Monogram [1955–1959], for which he hung a car tire around the middle of a stuffed goat. This was one of his early “combines”—and it made Yvonne Rainer almost fall down laughing when she first saw it.)45 And last, a corollary of the fourth: cross different disciplines, creating new forms.
Halprin, whose husband Lawrence was pursuing a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Harvard in the forties, would tag along to lectures by Bauhaus figures Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. The Bauhaus ideas of the functionality of art—that art serves society rather than exists merely as a passive object of beauty—as well as the Bauhausian crossing of disciplines, made a lasting impact on both Halprins.46
During the same period, John Cage found the teachings of Josef Albers at Black Mountain stimulating. The Bauhaus approach reinforced his idea that the line between art and life
