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Uni>In iv ersi^ _ A/licixxilrims International 300 N ZEEB ROAD. ANN ARBOR. Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW. LONDON WC1R 4EJ. ENGLAND 1315395 'i BLUE. NOftà C E L U CHANGING THE DANCER'S INAGES RAINER» BROWN. AND PAXTON. 1 THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY. N.A.. I9B0

COPR. 1980 BLUE. NORA CELIA

nematiOrVll 300 m z e e b r o a d , a n n a r b o r , m i a b io b

© 1980

NORA CELIA BLUE

All Rights Reserved CHANGING THE DANCER'S IMAGE:

RAINER, BROWN, AND PAXTON

by

Nora Blue

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

The Requirements for the Degree

of

Master of Arts

in

Performing Arts

Signatures of Committee:

Chairman:

Dean of th e C ollege

Dat

1980

The American University Washington, D.C. 20016

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 5 7 ‘î f CHANGING THE DANCER'S IMAGE:

RAINER, BROWN, AND PAXTON

BY

Nora Blue

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the changes in the dancer's image that

occurred during a six year period, 1960-1966, as a result of new dance

forms and methods introduced at the Judson Dance Theatre. The

discussion centers on the work of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and

Steve Paxton as exemplars of these changes. A work by each choreo­

grapher is analyzed, respectively, they are: "Parts of Some Sextets"

(1965), "Rulegame 5" (1964), and "Satisfyin' Lover" (1967). Research

was based on the collection and analysis of critical reviews and

commentaries, written during the period and retrospectively. The

choreographers’ own accounts of their works and goals, both current and

retrospective were analyzed. Lastly, photographs of the dancer's image

pre-Judson era and of the Judson era were compared and analyzed as

evidence for these changes. For a working hypothesis, the author

posits that the Judson choreographers changed the dancer's image from

an Idealized image of the human form to an individualized image. The results of the study are that this hypothesis is correct. In the final

analysis the author concludes the changes were a consequence of the

choreographers' desire to Increase their creative options by extending the possible uses of the dancer's image as an aesthetic tool. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I . INTRODUCTION ...... 1

The Dancer's Image Defined ...... 2 The Dancer's Specialized Body ...... 3 Conditions for the Specialized B ody ...... 3 The Emergence of Modern Dance ...... 7 Merce Cunningham ...... 9 Anna H alprin ...... 10 Judson Dance Theatre ...... 11 The Purpose of the T h e sis...... 12 The Choreographers Chosen ...... 14 Yvonne Rainer ...... 15 T rish a Brown ...... 16 Steve Paxton...... 17 The Working Hypothesis ...... 18 Definition of Term s...... 19

I I . HALPRIN AND CUNNINGHAM...... 20

I I I . YVONNE R A IN E R ...... 28

IV. TRISHA BROWN...... 41

V. STEVE PAXTON...... 51

V I. CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY...... 63

The Conventional Dancer's Image ...... 64 "P.O.S.S." ...... 67 "Rulegame 5 " ...... 70 " P r o x y " ...... 72 Conclusions...... 73 Implications of the S tu d y ...... 76

SOURCES CONSULTED ...... 77

i i I . INTRODUCTION

The Judson Dance Theatre opened Its doors to the public, July 6,

1962. Thereafter, it became a center for wide open and far-reaching

explorations for new definitions of dance as a performing art form.

Most of the commonly accepted theatrical dance conventions were rejected

or transformed by choreographers of the Judson group; sometimes in a

spirit of rebellion (as critics with conventional views never tired of

pointing out). Often, however, the choreographers and dancers involved

simply lacked interest in the artistic problems posed by working in a

conventional frame of reference.

Much excitement and interest was generated by the new forms and materials being presented. Jill Johnston, dance critic for The Village

Voice, simply crowed: "... this was an important program in bringing

together a number of young talents who stand apart from the past and who could make the present of modern dance more exciting than it's been

for twenty years . . .

A1 Carmines, Associate M inister of Judson Memorial Church (where the Dance Theatre was located) and sponsor of the program, was more am bivalent :

The first concerts, more than anything else, created in me an immense anxiety. I did not understand what these dancers were doing. I had no way of relating it to Modern Dance history—

^Jill Johnston, "Democracy," The Village Voice, 23 August 1962, p. 9. because I knew none. My sensation from the first concerts was one of awe at the stinging vitality of the work, and fear and anxiety that the traditional ground rules of all art seemed to be obliterated by the work.l

The Dancer's Image Defined

Among those theatrical conventions being "obliterated" by the

choreographers of the Judson Dance Theatre was the dancer’s image.

Generally speaking, the dancer's image is the appearnce of the dancer's

body while performing. Many factors influence the appearance of the

dancer's body in motion, including some arising from social and cultural

conditions. In this paper, however, the focus w ill be on the use of

the dancer's image by the choreographer and dancer as a tool to

establish artistic intent. Specifically, then, the dancer's image is

the manner of presenting the movement in a dance.

Traditionally, the artistic intention of the choreographer and

dancer was to present an idealized view of the human form. The

idealized dancer's body was then used to: (1) further the content of

the ballet by delineating character in a narrative plot; (2) display

technical virtuosity; and, (3) distribute the energy appropriately in

the standard phrasing of movement sequences: preparation, climax, re c o v e ry .

The artistic intention is historically rooted in the origins of

Western concert dance in the courts of Europe. As the entertainment of royalty, the dance naturally reflected the status of its spectators.

The dances were, therefore, large and elaborate spectacles. The

^A1 Carmines, "In the Congregation of Art," Dance Scope 4 (Fall/ Winter 1967-68):25. 3

subject matter was adroitly chosen to depict the virtues of the reigning

monarch in the mythical and allegorical struggles of the gods and

goddesses of Ancient Greece. And the form of presentation in per­

formance was the erect, gracious, elegant bearing required by custom in

th e c o u rt.

The bearing was one of the social skills required in the behav­

ioral repertoire of courtiers as appropriate to the natural order of

things, but it was also demanded in fencing and the court dancing, from

which the ballet was derived. Thus, the entertainment of kings—the

ballet—inherited and retained the uplifted, erect posture and it

became codified as the elongated, stretched placement of the ballet

d an cer.

The Dancer's Specialized Body

Ballet, of course, is not unusual among the physical disciplines

for developing a special impression on the human body. Different sports

like running, swimming, or football, also result in a specialized body.

The same is true within the dance world, where a different technique w ill shape the body differently. About Cunningham technique, for

example, Constance Poster remarks, "... one can discern, while standing

in the lobby during the intermission of a dance concert, a past or present Cunningham dancer. Their backs, in particular, define an area of space far in excess of any physical measurement.

Dance training so often depends upon achieving certain neuro­ muscular habits it becomes difficult for a dancer trained in one

^Constance Poster, "Making It New—Meredith Monk and Kenneth King," Ballet Review 1, No. 6 (1967):17. technique to assume the style or manner of another. Karole Armitage

discusses her transition from ballet to Cunningham:

Q. [JANET SHARISTANIAN]: I s i t p o s s ib le [fo r] a b a l l e t - t r a i n e d dancer ^to] make the transition to Cunningham technique quite easily and gradually?

A. [KAROLE armitage ]: Actually, I think hardly anyone can. First of all, you have to want to very much, because one trains one's body to move in that ballet way for so many years, and then there are both drastic differences and subtle sim ilarities, so that to change from one to the other was very hard. I wish I could remember now how I d id i t , b u t I know th a t I had to th in k very hard about every simple little thing, like how one does relevé, in order to change my way of doing things. There's also a major difference in the use of the arms. They're always less arced than in ballet, with a wider, more stretched line. Generally, you have to learn a certain kind of looseness, more looseness in everything, as well as developing the use of the b a c k .1

The same difficulty arises when being introduced to a different

schooling within the same technique. European dancers of the New York

City Ballet attest to this;

A rtists coming to City Ballet from other companies have dis­ covered [there are] several contrasts between their training and Balanchine's. "All the beats are without preparation," Baryshnikov notes. ''Usually, in romantic ballets, the beats are not so small. He [Balanchine] took a lot of beats from Boumonville. They're not typical of the Russian School where you have bigger beats with greater preparation." "Technically I had to unlearn things, such as turning like mad, spotting sideways," admits Karin von AroIdingen. "His whole line is extended from the old style; he opened up the arabesque. European technique is very straight."

Dancers become identified with a certain training. Many dance institutions require a particular body type, but physical type and the technique work together to shape the body. New York City Ballet demands certain physical and conditioned attributes :

^Janet Sharistanian, "Karole Armitage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company," Helicon Nine 1 (Fall/W inter 1979):19. Certain fine points of technique and physical characteristics can be singled out in the Balanchine dancer. "Proportions are vital," [Suki] Schoror confirms. "There has to be flexibility in the feet and hips, a small head. Balanchine can see what a dancer has inside in terms of speed, flexibility and presence." Whether short or ta ll, Alexandra Danilova claims, "There's a certain silhouette. The girls can't be plump. . ." V illella feels "There's a very definite Balanchine body. He naturally wants his ladies long, which immediately dictates the kind of male dancer he requires. But I'm not over six feet. Proper proportions are absolutely essential and that's been a tremendous aid to me. After that, it's muscle tone. For the ladies, it's long and lyrical, and for the men there's that speed and attack. But what fascinates Balanchine is the way people move. [Jean-Pierre] Bonnefous concludes, "What builds the body of dancers is the repertory they dance onstage. The body actually changes.

V illella's statement reveals the exception to this system of

training when he points out that he does not meet the height requirement

for partnering tall ballerinas. But he is also quick to note that he

has the necessary physical proportions for Balanchine's company.

C onditions fo r th e S p e c ia liz e d Body

Many of the physical changes necessary to shape the body into the

ideal instrument of expression form the dancer's body, sometimes permanently. The ideal attributes can become permanent features of how the dancer appears to others. The dancer's body can thus be iden­

tified as a specialized instrument. The following terms are a list of physical conditions that contribute to the specialized appearance of

the dancer's body.

1. "Hyperextension of the Joints"—To extend is to increase the

angle of a joint. To hyperextend is to increase the angle

such that the bones extend beyond a neutral relationship at

^Linda Hirschmann, "What Makes a Balanchine Dancer?" Ballet News, May 1979, p. 30. the joint.^ Hyperextension in dance technique is valued at

the ankle joint, for the high flexible instep; at the knee

(particularly in the Russian School of ballet education)

for the long curved line it gives the legs. The sternum,

although not hyperextended, is w ell-lifted and emphasized.

A soft, expressive area of the body, the sternum is projected

as part of presentational style, to give the elegant, regal

appearance necessary for delineating character, or displaying

the body in motion.

2. "Stretched Muscles"—The muscle fiber is lengthened far beyond

the normal resting length to satisfy the high extension and

arbitrary positioning of limbs away from body center, demanded

by most techniques.

3. "Stretched Ligaments"—The ligamentous connective tissue is

stretched at the site of the femoral head in the acetabulum

to increase mobility in that joint ; and sometimes ligamentous

tissue in the foot is stretched to increase the ability to

point the foot.

4. "Static Contraction"—This is the ability to hold a muscle

group in a contracted state for a period of time, in order to

fu lfill notions of positioning of a limb in relation to other

body parts.

The general impression created by these features is one of marked vertical or upright carriage. Emphasis is on an extended or attentuated

^Lulu Sweigard, Human Movement Potential (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974), p. 14. 7

appearance of the body. This appearance is perhaps the single most

apparent attribute of many trained dancers and a source of the dancer's

specialized body. It is apparent, then, that inasmuch as the specialized

body contributes to the dancer's image, to that extent the physical

discipline of the technique used by a particular dancer contributes to

the image they w ill project in performance.

The Emergence of Modem Dance

When in the 1930s and 1940s, modern dance emerged as a concert

dance form, it was in part a rebellion against the sweet beauty and

gracious elegance of the ballet. The modern dancer, intent on making

dance more responsive to his/her own vision, searched for and developed

new movement vocabularies and idioms to widen the expressive range of

this new form. In so doing, the choreographic emphasis focused on the

expressive abilities of the individual and unique voice in the dance.

And as modern dance was partly a rebellion against ballet, so each

generation of modern dance artists, steeped in the modes of their

particular masters, (Denishawn for Graham/Humphrey/Weidman; Graham for

Cunningham/Hawkins/Taylor), then left to explore their own artistic

priorities and aesthetic values, eventually to institute these as a

distinct style. Such a developmental pattern creates a high turnover

in attitudes, ideas and goals:

The history of modern dance is rapidly cyclical; revolution and institution; revolution and Institution. The choices for each generation have been either to enter the new academy (but, inevitably, to dilute and trivialize it in doing so), or to create a new establishment.^

^Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers; Post-Modern Dance (Boston: Houghton M ifflin Co., 1980), p. 5. 8

From master to student, the changes always Involved content and

its resultant form. Denishawn produced dances based on exotic themes

from the Orient, ancient Egypt or the Aztecs. These dances were

panoramic, had storylines, and displayed their share of heroes,

heriones, mythical beings, and served as star vehicles. A list of

titles by St. Denis (assuming they are essentially descriptive) for

one year, 1918, may illustrate: "Dance of the Royal Ballet of Siam,"

"Greek Scene," "An Indian Temple Scene," and, "Nautch." A comparable

list for Shawn, in 1915, reveals a "Hawaiian Ballet," a "South Sea

Ballet," and, "Joseph's Legend."

When Graham departed the Denishawn company and founded her own

company (1926), she eventually abandoned the exotic dance techniques

she had been taught: the ballet. De Isarte, Indian and Japanese

vocabularies. Instead, she created her own vernacular based on the

breath cycle, contraction and release. The new vernacular was

necessary in order to satisfy the unique nature of Graham's expres­

sionism, the need to portray emotional content. Graham's dances were

representational, they were "about" something: mythic heriones,

ecstatic states of worship, feelings. Graham, however, was not inter­

ested in telling a story as much as delineating psychological states of mind, the landscape of the heart. The organizing principle motivating

and informing the movement was the need to represent these states. Her

technique is therefore embedded with emotional nuances and references.

Humphrey, in the late 1920s, also explored the breath cycle as it is released in the fall and recovery of the body in relation to gravity. The dances she created were largely thematic. "Water Study," 9

(1928) her first solo composition (she had previously collaborated with

St. Denis) is drawn from a nature theme. "Passacaglia and Fugue in

C Minor" (1938), is a study in form—in this case, dance in relation to musical form. "Day on Earth," (1947) abstracts the visions, passions,

and anxieties of a family, which by generalizing, extends to the human

condition. Both Humphrey's and Graham's works were theatre pieces, presented in the proscenium arch setting with appropriate props, music, and costumes. The dancer's image, despite the many changes in content, remained the same; an erect, noble bearing.

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin, as the teachers of many of the dancers in the Judson group, are largely responsible for creating both the climate and the structures which allowed changes in the dancer's image to occur.

When Cunningham le ft Graham's company in 1945, he had been com­ posing works for two years. These works, mostly solos, had shocked and puzzled the dance audience. His choreographic concerns, appalling to many c r i t i c s , a re summarized by Banes:

1) Any movement can be m aterial for dance; 2) any procedure can be a valid compositional method; 3) any part or parts of the body can be used (subject to nature's lim itations); 4) music, costume, decor, lighting, and dancing have their own separate logics and identities; 5) any dancer in the company might be a soloist; 6) any space might be danced in; 7) dancing can be about anything, but is fundamentally and primarily about the human body and its movements, beginning with walking.

Cunningham's principles, as defined by Banes, changed the use of the dancer's image. Cunningham's chance methods of composition, and

^Banes, p. 6. 10

emphasis on movement and its structure as the focus of a piece,

precluded narrative and plot, so there was no need to delineate

character. He introduced pedestrian movement and presented each move­

ment as unique with its own muscular truth and resonance, so the

display of technical virtuosity for its own sake was eliminated. The

dancers in Cunningham's company affected a cool, underplayed, off-hand

manner of presentation which tends to smooth out the differences in a

movement that could be attributed to skill or lack of it. Chance as a

compositional device prevented the development of thematic material

and the standard phrasing pattern of preparation, climax, and recovery

in a movement sequence. The dancer's image created by Cunningham did

not change in one respect. Cunningham fashioned a specific technical vocabulary, and, to the extent that the specialized body is related to

the dancer's image, this aspect remained the same.

Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin's compositions and teaching methods eliminated even

this last particular—the technical vocabulary. She taught technique by

structuring improvisâtional problems. The problems usually revolved

around a specific concern, or a group of related concerns, like the use of voice, or the accomplishment of tasks. The resolutions of such problems would eventually be pieced together to form an extended dance work.

The use of task structures and the introduction of pedestrian movement allowed Halprin to accomplish changes sim ilar in effect, but of different emphasis to Cunningham's. She avoided the display of virtuosity and the standard use of phrasing, but, in a sense, retained 11

the delineation of character. The characters in her dances were not

dramatis personnae as in a narrative thematic dance, however. The

materials of her dances were unique and personal expressions designed

and presented by her company members. They oculd not avoid self­

disclosure in the course of performing. In effect, they characterized

themselves.

Judson Dance Theatre

Cunningham and Halprin had begun the move from traditional

theatrical conventions to a type of theatrical performance where move­

ment was the main focus of artistic endeavor. They presented movement

as an objective event. Each separate movement unit, and the overall

design, are shown as complete entities valuable for their unique shape,

quality and rhythmic composition.

Members of the Judson Dance Theatre developed Cunningham's and

Halprin's aesthetics further. To the use of chance as a compositional

structure, they added structures modelled after children's games like

"Follow the Leader" and "Tag." They used movement scores, i.e ., any kind of general or specific directions, or system, which defines what actions or tasks will take place in a dance piece. The specific order of the actions, and/or the transitions between actions are decided by the individual performer in performance. These compositional structures changed the organization of a dance from a finished rehearsed product to one that incorporated the process of making the dance as part of the dance itself. 12

In addition, these choreographers rejected a standard technique

and presented instead, pedestrian movement: the walking, running,

lifting, and handling actions of everyday life.

Carmines describes how the resulting dance performances affected

him:

Here the primary movements of living and the primary sounds of life seemed to be used in all their "ordinariness" to create a powerful aesthetic experience but one which was not "arty" or "pretty" or "moving" in the usual sense. Suddenly the simple facts of moving, standing, kneeling, crouching, lying down, listening, seeing, smelling, touching, not touching, took on what I can only call a kind of classicism. Indeed, my most immediate memory of the early years of the Judson Dance Theatre is of a kind of classicism—a nobility of primary movement and sounds. There was none of the emotion-wrought myth-sense which I had experienced at my few forays into Martha Graham concerts and those of a few other Modern choreographers. Indeed, the one quality which seemed to pervade most of the early Judson dance pieces (though not all; one could never be absolute about such extraordinary diversity) was kind of serene, powerful attention to the movement—or lack of movement—happening at the exact tim e .^

This use of materials and structures demanded a different use of

the dancer’s image. With the rejection of technique the final step had been taken towards a dancer's image that was scaled-down and unheroic,

rather than the more specialized image designed to idealize the human

form. The body was presented as an object, but as one sufficiently artistically satisfying to merit attention in its own right.

The Purpose of the Thesis

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the historical changes the dancer's image underwent during the Judson period.

^Carmines, p. 26. 13

A discussion of the dancer's image has importance for other

reasons. The conventional dancer's image is related by technique and

training to the specialized dancer's body, so that the image a dancer

is taught to project depends on what the choreographer or teacher

values as being aesthetically expressive. Aesthetic values imply

choices have been made and alternatives discarded. This process often

happens without a full range of movement experiences being offered to

the dancer. The problem with such a process is that it narrows what

the dancer understands to be part of their art form, and prevents them

from drawing on movement resources excluded from their aesthetic e d u c a tio n .

Traditionally, concert dance (until Cunningham, Hawkins, and

Halprin) was couched in the art forms of music and theatre. For

concert dance to be an independent art form, it must be based on the organizing principles and logic of movement. Movement experiences cannot, therefore, be narrowed. Rather, they need to be broadened so that aesthetic choices appear as a spectrum of movement possibilities, based not on tradition, but on those principles that reflect the internal logic of movement. With the introduction of the radical structures and materials of Judson Dance Theatre, it became necessary to discover a different and more encompassing definition of dance.

Only continual reacquaintance with the full spectrum of movement ideas and forms possible in dance as an art form w ill provide the knowledge necessary to understanding the ever-widening definition of dance.

Aesthetic values embedded in the dancer's specialized body also force the dancer to conform to those conventional dance forms as the 14

path to expression, rather than learning the expressive possibilities

inherent in movement and the body:

I am only now, after fifteen years' involvement with dance, discovering how and from where I initiate, sustain and control my movements. During my early years of dance training I had a clear image of what the end product should look like, even what it should feel like, and I worked my body to achieve that image in a state of fearful external discipline. I never reached that much desired goal—like a mirage it always stayed a little further ahead—and during the learning process I developed permanent damage to my left foot in the form of arthritis. (From a past member of the National Ballet of Canada, who sub­ sequently studied with Martha Graham.)^

Thus, the projection of the dancer's image is related to the question

of how the dancer uses his/her body as an instrument.

The Choreographers Chosen

The creative ferment of Judson Dance Theatre opened many issues

for experimentation and inquiry. The question of the dancer's image

loomed large in the ongoing work, as the choreographers confronted

movement problems that forced new definitions of dance and of the

dancer. In fact, not all the performers and choreographers were people with dance backgrounds. There were artists, sculptors, and musicians

involved, experimenting with the nature of performance as an extension of their respective art forms. The first criterion for selection of

choreographers for study was that they must have been trained primarily in dance, rather than in other mediums.

The second criterion was that they had to have been actively producing and creating works during the years 1960-1966. These years are framed by two events that influenced the dancer's image. The first.

^Jan Murray, Dance Now (New York: Penguin Books, 1979) pp. 155, 158. 15

Robert Dunn's composition class of 1960-1962 resulted in the opening

of ..he Judson Dance Theatre. The second is the premiere of "Trio A"

from "The Mind is a Muscle," (Rainer, 1966). "Trio A" is, perhaps, the

apotheosis of the new performance conventions that changed the dancer's

im age.

The third criterion was that the choreographers must have parti­

cipated in Robert Dunn's composition class. The last criterion was that

in the process of investigating movement problems, they must have

focused on the dancer's image, especially in dance works, but also in

written form. The choreographers chosen, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown,

and Steve Paxton, were explicit about their concerns with the dancer's

image, both in movement and word.

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer became so well-known as the "high-priestess and boss-lady of Judson," that she deliberately choreographed "Parts of

Some Sextets," (1965) and "Trio A" (1966) to hinder her own star status

and her penchant for self-exhibitionism.^ She was early identified by

Jill Johnston as a powerful, original voice among the creative person­ alities working at Judson:

Aside from her extraordinary "presence" and technical command. Miss Rainer is the most independent choreographer of this particular scene. To be more general about it, I think she's the greatest thing since Isadora crossed the Atlantic, or St. Denis saw that Egyptian cigarette poster, or any other important moments you can think of in the lives of several astonishing ladies a few decades ago.^

H/ETA, "Dance in America," 28 May 1980, "Beyond the Mainstream."

^Jill Johnston, "Judson Concerts #3, iS*4," The Village Voice, 23 February 1963, p. 9. 16

Rainer wanted to explore new dance territory and was intent on

making radical changes in dance as an art form. Her famous statement

of aesthetic denial has become a byword:

NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved. ^

One of the conventions Rainer wished to change was the dancer's

image. She coined the phrase "dancer's specialized body," and was

explicit in her dance works and written statements about how and what

she would change in the projection of technique and style as an image 2 for the dancer.

T rish a Brown

Trisha Brown, although involved in Judson, is not listed as a 3 choreographer until Dance Concert #4 (January 30, 1963). Thereafter,

she appears as both a dancer in others' works and as a choreographer.

Brown's works, because of their structuralism , have been more admired by sculptors and artists than by the dance audience. Until recently

(within the last four or five years), she was regarded as an "also ran" with Lucinda Childs and Deborah Hay, both of whom, particularly in the

1960s, probably received more acknowledgment than Brown. Brown dismissed the conventional dancer's image:

Evonne Rainer, Work 1961-73 (Halifax; Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974) p. 51.

^ I b id ., p . 65. 3 Ballet Review 1, p. 55. 17

In the sixties, a trained dancer was a person with a puffed-out ribcage who was designed to project across the footlights in a proscenium arch stage. He or she couldn't necessarily do a natural kind of movement, even a simple one. So what I looked for was a person with a natural, well-coordinated, instinctive ability to move.^

Brown's aesthetic values and choreography have resulted in structures

that provide a view of concert dance rich in its variability while

remaining deeply concerned with movement in its pure (non­

represent ational) forms.

Steve Paxton

Steve Paxton was at the forefront of organizational and decision­

making activities affecting the Judson group. He auditioned a piece

for Carmines; he shared responsibility with Rainer for initiating the

Judson Workshop, the successor to Dunn's composition class. Paxton was

also responsible for organizing performance opportunities other than

at Judson—Surplus Dance Theatre (February and March 1964) and First

New York Theater Rally (May 1965).

As a choreographer, Paxton pushed at the lim itations of what was

considered dance. Of Paxton's works premiered at Judson, Dunn has

observed:

[ROBERT DUNN]: Steve Paxton was marvelous. In ways I think that he was the most anxiety-provoking of all the choreographers in the early Judson programs.

[DON McDONAGH]: What d id he do?

DUNN: I don't know. His pieces were just so wide open and so slow and they did not take any standard psychological form. I

^Trisha Brown and Douglas Dunn, "Dialogue: on Dance," in The Vision of Modern Dance, ed. Jean Morrison Brown (Princeton: Princeton Book Co., 1979), p. 169. 18

can just feel the effect on my nerves. They were wide open and unencompassable. Dances where Steve just very solidly and sturdily did a few things just the way they were. And there was a non-psychological or anti-psychological atmosphere surrounding these things, and I don't know whether it was so much their provocation or lack of provocation that made you feel anxious as much as the fact that they couldn't be encom­ passed by the recipe. You had to look at what was happening, the basic elements of dance, of theater, of light, of space, o f sound. There was n o th in g very much to grasp o n to . You just had to undergo them.

In pushing at the limitations of dance conventions, Paxton contributed

to changes in the dancer's image, not by direct confrontation with the

idea as Rainer had done, but by providing alternative performance

c r i t e r i a .

To properly illustrate the progression of Paxton's concern with

the dancer's image, it was necessary to analyze a dance made in 1967, a

year after those dates chosen as limitations for this thesis. Since

any division of historical trends is somewhat arbitrary, and the

projection of the correct impression of Paxton's concerns of paramount

importance, this deviation was deemed permissible.

The Working Hypothesis

The working hypothesis underlying research for this paper is

that: (1) prior to Judson, the dancer's image was an idealized image

dictated by convention and the thematic concerns of the particular dance; and, (2) it became, instead, a less idealized, more personalized image of the dancer doing a particular movement, or fulfilling a ta s k .

^Don McDonagh, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York: New American Library, 1970), p. 83. 19

Definition of Terms

The following are a list of terms designating factors the three

choreographers under discussion changed in the course of their search

for a different dancer's image :^

1. Characterization; This refers to the projection of a certain

character, and/or an artistic interpretation of a movement phrase

necessary for the delineation of a character part or mood in a

narrative, thematic, or representational dance.

2. Focus: Focus is the dancer's line of sight. It also refers to eye-

gaze, or the extent to which the dancer is aware and acknowledging

of his/her surroundings while dancing.

3. Phrasing: Phrasing is the various emphases and accents distributed

throughout a movement sequence. The amount of force applied to a

muscle group produces the necessary effort for the accent.

4. Musical time: The practice in dance of following the phrasing and

temporal groupings of a particular piece of music.

5. Stage time: The theatrical convention of compressing what would

happen in reality over a period of hours, months and years, into a

two or two and a half hours time span.

Actual time is in contrast to stage or musical time. It is the practice

of performing a movement or movement phrase, particularly a found movement, on-stage, spanning the same length of time it would take off-stage. The Judson choreographers instituted the use of actual time.

Please note that in the context of this paper, the use of the phrases "specialized dancer's image" or "conventional dancer's image" refer to the dancer's appearance pre-Judson era. I I . HALPRIN AND CUNNINGHAM

While Cunningham was exploring new methods and procedures of

choreography (chance and indeterminacy) and incorporating new materials

into those forms (pedestrian movement and task) in New York, Anna

Halprin, on a parallel course, was inventing new methods and content in

California, Their experiments have certain commonalities. For instance,

they both used chance methods as a choreographic procedure. Cunningham,

in composing "Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three" (1951),

set a number of movement sequences and then determined their order in

performance by tossing coins. For "Variation" (1951) he expanded the

use of this method.

. . . Movements ]themselves] were broken down into a gamut of possibilities and put together again by tossing coins. The procedure began to involve time, space and movement charts. Each chart contained a number of predetermined possibilities, and the coin then decided what the movement would be, at what time and in what space it would occur. The method became more^ elaborate when it was applied to each dancer in a group piece.

Halprin also used chance procedures, although her structures, contrary

to Cunningham's, were devised for use in improvisation. One system she developed used dance elements randomly chosen from charts :

. . . I took every possible anatomical combination of movement and put them all on sheets of paper and gave them numbers. One sheet had to do with flexion, different joints, another sheet had to do with extension. I would pick off these things and I'd make a pattern. These were movements I hadn't evolved myself. . .

^ Jill Johnston, "The New American Modern Dance," in The New American Arts, ed. by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 170. 20 21

In "Birds of American" [1957] I used a ple-shape and I made pies with a different interval for each one; I put different elements into each pie, and then I'd have another transparent wheel on top of that to mix them up so that each one could be rotated for a different combination.^

The purpose of these methods was to break down cause and effect

and dislodge the linear and logical progression of thematic material

inherent in narrative dance. The narrative and thematic progression

was replaced by juxtaposition of unrelated events, a three-dimensional

assemblage much like the flat two-dimensional collage. Another effect

gained by chance procedures was the de-centralization of the stage

space. In conventional dance the stage is divided into significant

and less significant areas. Figures gain and lose importance as they

move into these areas of focus and leave them. Neither Cunningham nor

Halprin provided a single, unvarying center of focus. Their dances have a diffuse appearance with activities emphasized equally and

simultaneously on the stage. Through such assemblage and the de­

centralization of the stage, the human figure loses its property as a vehicle of expressionism and becomes regarded instead as an object that is interesting in its own right and can be deployed through movement to reveal its various facets.

In addition, no contextual meaning need be inferred from a collection of such random events. This is not to say that certain events or movements do not spark associations within the viewer, or provide visual images. It is rather, that these associations and images arise because the human figure is emotionally charged. Such

Evonne Rainer, "Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin," Tulane Drama Review 10 (Winter 1965):145. 22

images and associations, are not, however, necessarily part of the

choreographer's intention.

Cunningham and Halprin also shared the use of tasks and pedestrian

movement as choreographic devices. In "Collage" (1953) Cunningham

composed movement for a group of Brandeis University students untrained

in dance. They performed movement with which they were already

fam iliar, ". . . washing the hands, combing the hair, powdering the

face, filing nails. They also skipped, walked, ran, turned somersaults

and stood on their hands." During part of "Antic Meet" (1958),

Cunningham's task was to dance with a chair strapped to his back.

Cunningham performed another task in this work. He exits from the

s ta g e and "... re-enters promptly with a small table (covered with

[a] white table cloth [sic]) which he sets in a polished fast manner

with napkins and silverware.

Whereas Cunningham incorporated these devices within the context

of his technique, Halprin, having rejected a formal technique, assigned

task structures to be completed as the performance. The process of

completing the task became the dance itself. Halprin first developed

this approach for "Five-Legged Stool" (1962). Her task in this piece was to stand on a stool and pass wine bottles through a hole in the

c e ilin g :

[HALPRIN]: . . . In Act I I , I w anted to keep b rin g in g o b je c ts out and putting them down and going back, taking objects out and putting them down. The painter we were working with, Jo Landor, kept watching this going cn and one day she came in with forty wine bottles and said, "Here, I want you to bring these

^Johnston, "The New American Modern Dance, p. 173, 184. 23

in." She almost set the kind of movement I did . . . The wine bottle task that she gave me was so challenging and so difficult that I was quite content to do it. I couldn't get up and down; I had to stay in a stooped-over position or I'd break my back. Then I had the task of taking these wine bottles, putting them overhead, getting them to disappear in the ceiling. I had to balance on a stool. The task was sufficiently compelling in itself that I was able to turn my full attention to it. It took me forty minutes.

RAINER: Did all the movements in "Five-Legged Stool" have to do with tasks?

HALPRIN: Yes, and all the tasks were chosen for different reasons. For example: John Graham had a plank that was on a diagonal resting on a ceiling beam. He crawled up to the ceiling and his task was to slide down that beam head first. It was a complete fantasy; it had nothing to do with anything functional; it wasn't the kind of task that had to do with something as recognizable as carrying out a bottle and placing i t .

RAINER: Did he do i t ?

HALPRIN: Yes. By achieving the impossible he arrived at an incredible bit of fantasy.

RAINER: In that particular piece did being yourselves, not having a character, carry through?

HALPRIN: Yes, quite automatically. Actually I was very pleased by it. In doing these tasks we were not playing roles or creating moods; we simply did something. By the choice of the objects and tasks we could determine the over-all quality. For example, in the first act of "Five-Legged Stool" each person had several gambits that could be done the same way. Things like pouring water. I had a big box of colorful material and tin cans, and other things that I had chosen, and just throwing them as high as I could would be another task. There would be a task like changing clothes. There would be another task that had to do with falling, a movement task.

Halprin found that task accomplishment (as part of the dance

itself) released special properties into the overall fabric of the d an ce:

Doing a task created an attitude that would bring the movement quality into another kind of reality. It was devoid of a cer­ tain kind of introspection. 24

RAINER: I remember that summer [1960] I was here with you and you assigned tasks. But as I understood it, the tasks were to make you become aware of your body. It wasn't necessary to retain the task but to do the movement or the kinesthetic thing that the task brought about.

HALPRIN: Afterwards we became much more concerned with doing the task itself. Then we set up tasks that would be so challenging that the choice of a task would be the idea of the movement.

RAINER: Rather than it being transformed?

HALPRIN: T h a t's r ig h t .^

The importance of task and pedestrian movement for the evolving

dancer's image lies in the attitude revealed. The attitude is unself­

conscious, self-absorbed, purposeful and easy. It is unemphatic and

non-committal: does not color the movement as characterization or

interpretation of mood, do.

Tasklike and pedestrian movement project a powerful visual image.

The muscular weight and mass of the body, and its impact on objects and

the surrounding space, the actual intensity of the force used, and the

rhythmic integrity of the movement, all have value in and of themselves.

These basic elements of dance can be observed and enjoyed as complete

structures, and not manipulated to serve the demands of dramatic nuance.

Cunningham innovated the use of musical accompaniment concurrently with performance (omitting the arrangement of the movement to the musical form or rhythms). Halprin even omitted its use as concurrent accompaniment or background. She wanted, instead, to dissolve categories between the different arts used in producing a dance. The advantage to disengaging the movement from the music in this way, was that the

^Rainer, pp. 147-148. 25

movement could than be phrased according to its own inner muscular

necessity and the innate logic of the movement sequence. In the case

of Cunningham, he presented a range of movement possibilities without

a comment on where a particular movement might fall on the continuum

of skilled to unskilled, or ordinary to stylized dance. Equal stress

and importance was placed on each movement unit. In allowing each

movement unit its own value, Cunningham could perform all movement with

the same air of detached simplicity and neutral emphasis. (Halprin

achieved this same attitude by performing task movement.)

A lthough th ey have some methods in common, Cunningham and H a lp rin

have significant differences in artistic intention and aesthetic

values. Cunningham clearly remained within the boundaries of main­

stream modern dance; he developed and choreographed dances using a

recognizable dance technique and style distinct from other techniques.

Halprin took another direction.

Beginning in 1955, after she returned from an ANTA festival in

New York, Halprin rejected current developments of mainstream modern dance. Traditionally trained, first by Margaret H'Doubler at the

University of Wisconsin (Madison), and then in New York by Graham, she opened a studio with Welland Lathrop in San Francisco. She began conventionally enough, composing pieces like "The Prophetess" (1955), based on the legend of Judith. She showed this piece at the festival but, disappointed in the kind of work presented there, and perhaps in her own direction, she returned to San Francisco and initiated a series of movement investigations with her company using improvisation as the basic method of exploration. 26

Defining and solving movement problems improvisâtionally became

Halprin's technique. In her view, the role of technique was not to

learn specific patterns, movements or shapes, but to learn "... what

our bodies could do , . ." The use of improvisation ensured there

was no special look, or image to which her dancers aspired or that they

exemplified. Halprin says, "even now in our company there is no

unified look; there's a unified approach but everybody is different in

movement. "^

Halprin's technique illustrates that development of a specialized

body is not the only way to obtain the expressive range or vocabulary

of movement necessary for dance.

Halprin and Cunningham provided a fund of movement resources that

continued to be investigated and explored by another generation of avant-gardistes. Their emphasis on the importance and integrity of the movement itself became a standard aesthetic value for the choreographers of the Judson Dance Theatre. The methods and processes developed by these two choreographers/teachers became signposts for recognizing the new concert dance. The compositional devices of

(1) chance, (2) improvisation, (3) incorporation of the problem­ solving process into the dance itself, eventually were well-accepted strategies for organizing and arranging dance elements.

Other aesthetic aims, such as (1) the de-centralization of stage space, (2) giving full rhythmic value and muscular weight to a movement, and, (3) the cool manner of execution were also absorbed. This last

^Rainer, p. 143. 27

Item was used to such a degree that Robert Morris described it as

. . the now familiar deadpan style . . ." in a review of a 1966 production of Paxton's "Proxy" (1961).^

After their introduction to these forms and materials, Rainer,

Brown and Paxton stood on a threshhold of movement invention that overturned nearly every principle of conventional concert dance.

^Robert Morris, "Dance," The Village Voice, 3 February 1966, p. 8. I I I . YVONNE RAINER

Yvonne Rainer, as one of the chief architects of revolutionary

formats of the Judson Dance Theatre, became significantly identified

with the primary aesthetic trends and goals of avant-garde dance. Her

dances encompassed many of the issues relating to content and form

that were explored by the Judson choreographers.

Two conventions Rainer worked with extensively involve the

dancer's image: phrasing and the dancer's specialized body. Phrasing

is defined by Rainer as the "manner of execution." Phrasing is the

interplay of the different dynamic qualities used in a movement

sequence, or the varying intensity distributed throughout a movement

sequence as energy is released. It is also a matter of the weight

given a gesture, or the degree and placement of an accent in a movement

sequence. It is just such uses of weight and accent that provide

artistic interpretation in dance. Representational or expressive meaning is attached to a movement by interpretation of character or mood.

Rainer made a powerful statement of repudiation of standard phrasing when she wrote;

One cannot "do" a grand jeté; one must "dance" it to get it done at all, i.e ., invest it with all the necessary nuances of energy distribution that w ill produce the look of climax together with a s till, suspended extension in the middle of the movement. Like a romantic, overblown plot this particular kind of display—with its emphasis on nuance and skilled accomplishment, its accessibility to comparison and inter­ pretation, its involvement with connoisseurship, its

28 29

introversion, narcissism, and self-congratulatoriness—has finally, in this decade exhausted itself, . . .1

Rainer replaced the interpretive use of phrasing and demanding

use of energy with a low-key, cool, understated, neutral mode of

phrasing that expended the exact amount of energy needed to accomplish

a particular action.

The second aspect of the dancer's image that Rainer worked to 2 change was the "dancer's specialized body," or the idealization of the

human form. The specialized body is a result of the dancer's training.

The image of such a body has a muscular "set" that looks stretched and

attentuated. It can be heavily loaded with emotional and connotative

overtones such as heroism, nobility, elegance and grandeur. As an

aesthetic statement, this dancer's image is a potent one. The human

figure on the stage becomes large, powerful, and impressive, as if

infused with an authority beyond the capabilities of most people.

Rainer was strongly opposed to the implications of the prevailing dancer's image. As a student at Graham's school, she says (apparently with some resentment and surprise) she was told that she "should become 3 more 'regal' and less athletic!" Rainer replaced the specialized body with an alert yet relaxed bearing, relative, of course, to the natural posture of the individual. She was not, however, interested in change for its own sake. Rainer had a larger vision that eventually led her to establish a new set of conventions in concert dance.

^Rainer, Work, pp. 65-66.

4bid., p. 65.

^Ibid., p. 5. 30

Nothing in Rainer's background points to her subsequent development

as an avant-garde dancer and choreographer. She began her dance training

as a young adult. Interested in an acting career, she came to New York

in 1956 to continue her studies, but she soon left acting, discouraged

by the orientation of the classes:

The schools were all involved with the Stanislavski method, and anything I did they usually said, "We don't believe you." Yet to me I was doing something. I was being watched, I was there, so what was I doing and why was it wrong? I could never understand this. I guess I just wasn't interested in the terms of professional acting.^

After a year of acting training, upon the recommendation of a friend,

she went to a dance class at Edith Stephen's studio. Soon after,

Rainer made the decision to study dance full-tim e. She began a training

schedule that included three classes a day, two in Graham and one in

b a l l e t .

In the summer of 1960 Rainer participated in Anna Halprin's workshop at Mt. Tamalpais, on the outskirts of San Francisco. At this

time Halprin was investigating movement that resulted from accomplishing

tasks. Rainer has commented that, "... [these] experiments with movement and holding things in the hand . . . were very meaningful to me." Of the summer, she says, ". . . what interested me were the people there who had been working with her. A. A. Leath was there, and I met 2 Trisha Brown that summer. Also Simone Forti."

Yvonne Rainer with Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, "The Performer as Persona: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer," Avalanche 5 (Summer 1 9 7 2 ):53.

^Ibid., p. 54. 31

Forti, a peripheral figure in the Judson Dance Theatre, had been

a student and performer with Halprin and was grounded in Halprin's

methods and processes for composition. Because of this orientation she

recommended Rainer attend Halprin's workshop. In the fall of 1960,

Forti choreographed "See Saw," in which Rainer debuted. The occasion

profoundly affected her work:

It was a piece that influenced me a lot. There's an actual seesaw, he [Bob Morris] was on one end and I was on the other, and it was just a sequence of events, in part using the seesaw for its physical properties, like one person sliding down, walking back up, tilting it, the other person slides down, walks back up, balancing very precariously so the thing is still. It also had some very expressionist things in it. At one point Bob Morris read Art News to himself, and I had my first screaming fit on the other end. That came about through Simone flinging a ragged jacked [sic] on the floor and saying, "Improvise that I" and I went to town on my end of the seesaw, screaming and yelling. I couldn't wait. What impressed me structurally about it was that she made no effort to connect the events thematically in any way. I mean the seesaw and the two people, that was the connecting tissue. And one thing followed another. Whenever I am in doubt I think of that. One thing follows another.1

Forti also indirectly provided Rainer with alternative images of

the dancer to those Rainer was learning in her studies at the Graham

school. Rainer describes one such incident:

. . . I saw Simone do an improvisation in our studio that affected me deeply. She scattered bits and pieces of rags and wood around the floor, lands cape-like. Then she simply sat in one place for awhile, occasionally changed her position or moved to another place. I don't know what her intent was, but for me what she did brought the god-like image of the 'dancer'^ down to human scale more effectively than anything I had seen.

Rainer, returning to New York in the fall of 1960, also commenced

classes at Cunningham's studio. More importantly, she began Robert

Dunn's composition class which started at this time.

4 b i d .

2 Rainer, Work, p. 5. 32

Robert Dunn was a musician and composer who had studied with John

Cage, Merce Cunningham's mentor. Cage was teaching composition at

Cunningham's studio, but he withdrew from this task and suggested Dunn

might assume it for the fall of 1960. The course was held at

Cunningham's studio and was offered four times consecutively between

1960 and 1962. Dunn's wife, Judith Dunn, also attended some of the

courses, and helped Dunn teach. Of the choreographers under discussion,

Rainer and Paxton attended all four of these sessions, while Brown

joined sometime in 1961.^

It was in Dunn's class that Rainer made her first pieces. Dunn managed to create an atmosphere designed to encourage exploration of

form and materials as opposed to learning the pre-classic dance forms

and music forms covered by Louis Horst's formulaic approach to compo­ sition. The atmosphere was a result of Dunn's approach to teaching.

He Incorporated two important elements as his method. First, he used problem-solving as his principal technique. Any solution that stayed within specific boundaries and lim itations set for the problem was acceptable. And second, no criticism ,was allowed. Comments were restricted to what could be observed. Analysis was based on the following set of definitions by John Cage:

Structure in music is its divisibility into successive parts from phrases to long sections. Form is content, the continuity. Method is the means of controlling the continuity from note to note. The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.^

4bid., p. 7.

2 John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 62. 33

Each workshop session ended in a presentation of the pieces composed as class exercises. In the summer of 1962, the group had enough material to present a full evening's concert. Yvonne Rainer,

Steve Paxton, Judith Dunn and Ruth Emerson auditioned works before

Rev. A1 Carmines to acquire permission to use space in the Judson

Memorial Church (Washington Square) for performances. This event marked the beginning of Judson Dance Theatre.

Rainer's first composition, entitled "Three Satie Spoons" (1960), was choreographed to solve a problem for Dunn's class based on Satie's

"Trois Gymnopedies." It was a solo and was expressionistic, as

Rainer admits all her work was before "Parts of Some Sextets" (1965):

Before that there had been a very marked dramatic content in my work and in my own performance. The early solos were just fraught with all kinds of female projections. Very neurotic— weird. Like I imitated women in the subway. I had screaming fits. I was sexy. I was always being someone else on the stage. And I remember coming under criticism for that among my peers at Judson. I was—in the scale from theatricality to its opposite—I was definitely toward the theatrical end of the spectrum. What I was doing was taking things from life, and transposing them in a dramatic form.^

When she began work on "Parts of Some Sextets," her thinking changed ;

It was necessary to find a different way to move. I felt I could no longer call on the energy and hard attack impulses that had characterized ny work previously, nor did I want to explore any further the "imitations-from-life" kind of eccentric movement that someone once described as "goofy glam our.

^Rainer, "Persona," p. 57. 2 Rainer, Work, p. 46. 34

Later, she expanded on this thought:

RAINER: It seemed very appropriate . . . to use a whole other point of view about the body—that it could even be handled like an object, picked up and carried, and that objects and bodies could be interchangeable. . .

W[ILLOUGHBY] S[HARP]: If you're pointing to Minimalism I'd lik e to know s p e c if ic a lly what you mean.

L[IZA] B [EAR]: You mean you were under the general cultural influence. . .

[RAINER]: Eeyeah, it was a movement, and it seemed very vital— phenomenology and objecthood . . . in terms of dancing and performing it took the form of, (and I wasn't alone in this), it took the form of non-theatricality. A refusal to project a persona, but thinking of oneself in dancing as simply a neutral purveyor of information. . . It was this trying to find an alternative to—I have consistently used these words—narcissism, virtuosity, and display. Coming to terms with my own exhibition- istic nature. I mean, people go into performing and dancing for this very reason. It has to do with the immediate confrontation with the adoring gaze of the spectator and living in that moment. And it was influenced by the minimal art thing in its anti- European, anti-decorative, anti-cultural, in some way, attitudes. It led me more toward making dance that was involved with task, work, rather than with exhibition.

[SHARP]: Why was ta s k an a lte r n a tiv e ?

[BEAR]: Because i t was a way o f o rg a n iz in g movement?

[RAINER]: No, it was an attitude about performance that seemed extremely important at the time. And it wasn't primarily about organization. The organizational battle had been fought for the most part by Cunningham and Cage . . . being, I guess, a kind of renegade, or wanting to define for myself the battles that still remained, the arena seemed very much to lie with revealing to the audience some kind of "work" rather than "preening." Not showing off my skills but revealing my involvement. And the idea of task and a more concrete, autonomous-looking life on stage that was not constantly projected out at the audience seemed the way to h an d le t h is

The piece that emerged from these early determinations was "Parts of Some Sextets." The dance was reworked at least four times, appearing

Gainer, "Persona," pp. 57, 52, 53. 35 as a duet in two different versions. Eventually it was revamped into a dance for six people, and finally appeared as a version for ten people and twelve mattresses.

The final version, premiered March 1965 in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City, consisted of thirty-one activities ranging from sitting, lying, and standing, to tasks involving the mattresses, to what Rainer calls "dancey" movement. (Given the boundaries Rainer set herself, it is unlikely that she meant lyrical or expressive movement.)

Johnston, in her review, describes the movement thus:

One action was to lie down for a spell on a mattress. Another was to bend over and put a piece of paper or other light object on the back. Another was to be shovelled along on the hands and forearms of several other performers who would line up, hands palm up at waist height, to facilitate this worm-like progress until a pile of mattresses terminated the journey. More strenuous, athletic activity included running and walk- racing and things with the mattresses that kids might think of if they were in a room with a pile of them: squirming through them, flying leaps onto them, surrounding them and pulling in different directions in a kind of tug of war, etc.^

Specifically, the thirty-one movements were called:

1. Duet: Corridor Solo 2. Duet : Bob's entrance thru Y's squeals 3. Duet : Leaning away thru 1st embraces 4. Duet: Diagonal run to end 5. Bird run 6. Running thru 7. Racing walk 8. Solo beginning with shifting of weight 9. Standing figure 10. Bent-over walk 11. Quartet 12. Rope duet (with rope) 13. Rope movements 1 thru 4 14. Rope movements 5 thru 8 15. Rope movements 9 thru 13

^Jill Johnston, "Waring-Rainer," The Village Voice, 6 May 1965, 26. 36

16. One vertical mattress moving back and forth on single layer 17. "Swedish werewolf" (always offstage) 18. Human flies on mattress pile 19. Formation no. 1 (fling) 20. Formation no. 2 (with "bug squash") 21. Move pile to other side 22. Peel one at a time 23. Crawl thru below top mattress 24. Standing figure on top of pile 25. House lights 26. One person running another into pile 27. Bob's diagonal 28. Sitting figure 29. Sleeping figure 30. Vague movement _ 31. Formation no. 3 (pile-up).

At the left edge of a sheet of graph paper, Rainer listed each

activity. Each vertical column which represented a thirty second

interval was then numbered across the top edge of the paper, consecu­

tively 1-84. The sequence of events was determined by randomly placing dots on the graph. Only those activities that were dotted in the column, reading vertically top to bottom, would be presented at each thirty second interval. Thus the piece unfolded inexorably through the numbered columns. To accompany the dance, there was a tape of Yvonne

Rainer reading exerpts from The Diary of William Bentley (a late eighteenth century m inister). The thirty second intervals were cued to sounds on the tape. The dance lasted forty-three minutes, the tape fifty-nine.

Reviews of the piece were mixed. Jacqueline Maskey of Dance

Magazine states the case of the conventional viewpoint:

The chief action of P.O.S.S. was the worrying of a p i l e of mattresses by ten sneaker-clad people, conducted to a taped reading from an 18th century diary. The mattresses were

^Rainer, Work, p. 48. 37

carted from floor left to floor right and everyone took turns flinging himself or someone else atop the pile. When not mattress-mauling, individuals performed fragments of dance movement, and very well, too. In conclusion, the group climbed one by one atop their mattress pile, looked the audience in the eye and smiled. The audience smiled back and broke into amiable a p p la u se .^

In a retrospective article on Rainer's work. Jack Anderson

describes his reaction:

I realized it ["Parts of Some Sextets"] was a sign of a struggle to exorcise overt expressionism, I did not in any way enjoy it. Ten dancers lugged piles of mattresses about and flung them­ selves upon them for what seemed like a long, long time. The accompaniment was a droning recitation from the eighteenth century Diary of William Bentley. Although the dancers moved, the composition never moved from its idee fixe. It was absolutely unbudgeable.^

Johnston, in her review, had this to say about the overall impact of

th e dance:

Dance and tape together, the work is a tour de force of factual information. The dance is tough and pure and unrelenting in its constant reiteration of material . . . "Parts of Some Sextettes" [sic] was an ambitious and impressive work with a structural flaw [the thirty second time frame] that might be construed as a daring assault on the tolerance-attention of any audience.^

It is clear that "Sextets" was not a success from the critics' point of view. It was, however, a success from an aesthetic viewpoint.

Robert Morris sympathetically describes a duet, a short section of

" S e x te ts " ;

^Jacqueline Maskey, review of "Parts of Some Sextets," by Yvonne Rainer, in Dance Magazine, May 1965, p. 64. 2 Jack Anderson, "Yvonne Rainer: The Puritan as Hedonist," Ballet Review 5, No. 2 (1964):32.

3 Johnston, "Waring-Rainer," p. 26. 38

Miss Rainer's "Parts of a Sextet Number Two" performed by herself and A1 Kurchen, was a low pressure, non-dancer work. Yet the focus was clearly one of movement and the use of objects was dry and non-pictorial. It is a work which seems to operate between skilled dance requirements for movement and the kind of non-dance movement generated by task situations or rules (such as Paxton's "Proxy"). The dancers entered connected by twenty- five or thirty feet of cord. There were occasional brief moments, now energetic, now extremely reduced, now repetitive. These were punctuated by pauses, walking to different areas, and a meandering slow run which was one of the two points in the work when the dancers took account of each other; the other instance of mutual recognition occurred when the cord was pulled taut between the two bodies as they signaled and belayed each other around pillars and through curtains maintaining the taut rope all the while. It was a very open non-dramatic work, which rather didactically demonstrated a new way of dealing with ^ movement but was at the same time airy and at points humorous.

"Sextets" was Rainer's first attempt to develop alternative conventions to those of the prevailing mode. She later went on to create a perhaps more refined expression, "The Mind is a Muscle"

(1966). But "Sextets" was still the first and most complete statement of the values and direction of the Judson choreographers.

Anderson, in analyzing Rainer's objectives, makes a perceptive comment :

She went about . . . stripping from her choreography most of the ingredients which usually make up dance productions: not only such obvious and easy to get rid of ones as plot, charac­ terization, musciality, and theme, but climax, tension, suspense, development, and even the beautifully effortless or artfully effortful look custom has made us associate with professional dance theater. Miss Rainer settles upon an open-ended form which prevents a dance from building to high points or getting anywhere logically . . . Miss Rainer is now associated with coolness at its most cool . . . This rejection of conventional theatricality suggests a Puritan temperament . . . [and] is a carefully considered choice. She did not have to be that way. Statuesque and blessed with a

^Robert Morris, "Dance," The Village Voice, 10 February 1966, 15. 39

compelling stage presence, she could have been, had she wanted, a fine expressionist dancer . . . Miss Rainer's Puritanism has been pushed to such an extreme that it has reversed itself to become a kind of hedonism. For once she has stripped away all spectacle from the dance, she is left with choreography's irreducible minimum, the dancer's body. She loves the body—with all its nerves, muscles, bones, and sinews—as a physical instrument which can accomplish a multitude of things. Her dances are tributes to the corporeal reality of man. This love, however, is inextricably bound up with her distrust of showiness. She says in a . . . program note, "I love the body— its actual weight, and unenhanced physicallty." Unenhanced physicality: these words, I think, identify the peculiar quality evident in Yvonne Rainer's recent choreography.^

As Anderson suggests, Rainer not only rejected conventional theatri­

cality, she established another conventionality that replaced the

rules she had discarded. Rainer's conventions, motivated by a

reductionism, included phrasing the movement to reinforce the presen­

tation of the human figure as an object engaged in pursuing work of some kind. As Rainer used actual time to permit the body-mass its own progression in time, so she used pedestrian movement to deny display and to show instead an absorption with the movement. For this reason, she also chose to use "actual costumes," such as the jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers the individual dancers wore in the context of non-dancing activities. Such costuming emphasized the pedestrian quality of the movement and obviated any possible display of the body. Instead of making the concert dance special by virtue of special accoutrements,

Rainer isolated the everyday, and presented it in a special context.

Eventually, just as ballet is identified with pointe shoes and tutus;

^Anderson, pp. 31, 32, 33. 40

modem dance with black leotards, tights, and barefeet; post-modern

dance became identified with jeans and sneakers.

Rainer was not alone in using these conventions. Many of her

contemporaries, including Brown and Paxton, shared her vision and

aesthetic values. All three wanted to deal realistically with the body;

to explore its actual mass, weight, relationship to gravity, the

quality of its movements. They therefore proceeded to divest the body,

as much as possible, from the trappings of concert dance in the grand

manner. Inasmuch as the prevalent dancer's image was dependent upon

the aesthetic values of conventional concert dance, it was antithetical

to their desire, and was consequently discarded. Paxton, Rainer, and

Brown proposed instead a concert dance presenting movement as an objective event—the exposition of movement as form—non-referential, non-representational, and non-conventional. IV. TRISHA BROWN

Yvonne Rainer energetically denied—one might even say, rebelled

against—the conventional dancer's image. Trisha Brown, however, never

directly confronted the dancer's image as a separate issue in dance.

Instead, she devised a method of making dances that made the conven­

tional image an extraneous and ineffective artistic instrument. Through

her method of constructing dances. Brown significantly influenced the

dancer's image. Her method is systematic and structural: "she

approaches choreography as an exercise in 'problem-solving' . . . The

goal is clarity, not necessarily beauty. The end result is often

'information' rather than sensory pleasure . . . Such a description may suggest that Brown's work is cold. She prefers movement that is

non-representational and without specific meaning. Each dance, however, has a logical structure around which the movement is organized:

Her major concern has always been to find the schemes and structures that organize movement, rather than the invention of movement per se . . . With her workmanlike attitude toward her m aterial—in terms of timing, arrangement of parts, and demeanor—Brown carefully investigates formal comparison and contrast, as well as 2 expectations and contradictions of performance behavior.

Brown's structures are not organized by using an established vocabulary or style. Her structures are arrived at by posing a movement

^Roger Copeland, "The 'Post-Modern' Choreography of Trisha Brown," New York Times, 4 January 1976, Sec. II, p. 1.

2 Banes, p. 86, 89.

41 42

problem which in the early part of her career (1961-1971) was usually

solved in performance. Later, (1971-on), the problems became more

complicated requiring rehearsal and the presentation of a finished

product. Brown uses problem-solving because she finds that in not using

technique she is faced with too many possibilities and therefore needs

a procedure to narrow and tighten the movement choices:

. . . Ify view on making and choreographing movement . . . [is that] there are a thousand choices. I mean why is this better than that? Every step of the way you have to make all the right decisions and I find that just awful. Having to make twenty minutes of arbitrary decisions. I'd like to make as few arbitrary decisions as possible.^

In response to this dilemma. Brown so constructs the movement problem

that many alternatives are eliminated by following the structural logic

of the limitations set in the problem. She calls the procedure

structured improvisation:

. . . You set a structure and decide to deal with X, Y and Z materials in a certain way, nail it down even further and say you can only walk forward, you cannot use your voice or you have to do 195 gestures before you hit the wall at the other end of the room, that is an improvisation within set boundaries.^

A by-product of structured improvisation as Brown practiced it, was a particular performance quality that supplied an alternative to

the traditional presentational style:

If you are improvising with a structure your senses are heightened; you are using your wits, thinking, everything is working at once to find the best solution to a given problem under pressure of a viewing audience.^

^Effie Stephano, "Moving Structures," Art and A rtists 8 (January 1974):17.

2 Trisha Brown, "Trisha Brown," in Contemporary Dance, ed. Anne Livet (New York: Abbeville Press, 1978), p. 44.

^Ibid., p. 48. 43

An advantage of the performance quality was that it counteracted a tendency on the part of modern dancers of affecting a glazed-over look while they performed. Brown felt that performers hid behind this

"look" placing all their attention on ". . . deliver[ing] their best performance . . . unfortunately resulting in the robot-look.

Structured improvisation requires a rich movement repertoire, and

Brown's dance education provided her with the necessary movement resources. Brown's first instructor, Marion Hageage of Aberdeen,

Washington, taught her acrobatics, tap, ballet, and jazz dance. But

Brown had an additional source and outlet for her physicality. She was a tomboy and enjoyed playing football, basketball, climbing trees, running, and pole vaulting. Brown attended Mills College and chose dance as her major by the end of her freshman year. She graduated from

Mills in 1958. The fall of the same year she assumed the job of teaching dance at Reed College. She was, in fact, responsible for starting the dance department at Reed. Brown says she "... exhausted conventional teaching methods after the first few months and then 2 became involved with improvisational teaching." She stayed at Reed two y e a rs .

During the summer of 1960, Brown attended H alprin's summer work­ shop. She met Rainer, Forti, and Ruth Emerson there, all of whom later joined Dunn's composition class. Brown was thus exposed to Halprin's investigation of task in composition and other alternative movement explorations:

4 b id .

4bid., p. 44. 44

There was also experimentation with sound verbalization and singing as a m aterial, and beyond that, defined or wide open improvisations night and day by very talented people . . . the workshop was invaluable because Anna Halprin has a rampant imagination and puts a high priority on originality and self­ exposition.

A year later, in 1961, it was Simone Forti who was instrumental in

persuading Brown to come to New York. Once there, she shared a studio

with Forti and Dick Levin. The three of them would design and solve

improvisational problems, or work on assignments from Bob Dunn's class.

Occasionally, Steve Paxton would join them. Brown found Dunn's class

invaluable;

The students were inventing forms rather than using the tradi­ tional theme and development or narrative, and the discussion that followed applied nonevaluative criticism to the movement itself and the choreographic structure as well as investigating the disparity between the two simultaneous experiences, what the artist was making and what the audience saw. This procedure illuminated the interworkings of the dance and minimized value judgments of the choreographer, which for me meant permission, permission to go ahead and do what I wanted to do or had to do . . .2

In 1962, Brown premiered her first piece, "Trillium," at the

Maidman Playhouse. (This was in March, a few months prior to the first concert at Judson.) "Trillium" was a structured improvisation which opens with a movement sequence based on the mechanical actions involved in sitting, lying down, and standing up. Brown broke each of these pedestrian gestures down to their most irreducible joint actions and

^ I b id ., p . 45.

^ Ib id . 45

and then scrambled the action, . . to the degree that lying down

was done in the air.

Her next piece, "Lightfall," (1963) was a duet performed with

Paxton at Judson. This composition had evolved from the structured

improvisation sessions with Forti and Levin. It was based on a rule

game called Violent Contact, that allowed "... blocking another

dancer, running at full force, or dashing away from another dancer's

intended collision." The dance contained "perchings and stillnesses" 2 that had developed from these rules.

The alert, aware and yet quiet performance presence of Brown and

Paxton in this piece is beautifully captured in four photographs taken

of this performance. One picture shows Brown meditatively crouched, perched on Paxton's back while he is stooped at a 45° angle, braced by his hands on his knees. Another shows Brown apparently slipping off

Paxton's back as he resumes a standing pose. The third reveals Brown

crouched again, watching Paxton as he lies front surface down parallel to the floor, placing weight on the crown of his head, his two hands, the knee and toes of one leg, and the toes of the other leg stretched out its full length. In the fourth both Paxton and Brown are crouched on their haunches facing different fronts, their eyegaze carefully 3 averted from each other.

4 b i d . , p. 46.

2 Banes, p. 78. O Peter Moore, Photographs of "Lightfall," choreographed by Trisha Brown, in the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Lincoln Center, 1963. 46

Brown continued to explore the informal and formal aspects of

structured improvisation, "Trillium" and "Lightfall" represent rehearsed

and finished dances. Another effort, "Rulegame 5" (1964) has a simple

premise that freed the dancer's image from convention. For "Rulegame

5," the performance area was divided by seven evenly placed strips of

masking tape that marked off a space about twenty-one feet by twenty-one

feet. Each performer was required to travel within these rows, starting

downstage right to downstage left, enter the next most upstage row and

travel back to stage right. They would continue zig-zagging back and

forth in this way until they had completed the course. As more

performers entered the marked off area, another element was added.

Performers, when forced to pass each other, were required to maintain progressively descending levels from high (erect stance), to low (lying

down). Middle level was a crouching stance. If the descending levels were not in the correct progressive order as dancers moved along the grid, the performers were instructed to stop and adjust their levels until the proper order was achieved. The dancers were allowed to talk

to each other to accomplish this order.

Johnston's review was brief and dry:

"Rule Game 5" is a rather academic demonstration of action and spatial effect to be derived from simple specifications for moving along a geometric layout. Five performers must progress on seven parallel lines of tape from upstage starting line to downstage finish line and on any line a performer must be lower than a performer passing on a line upstage of him.l

Banes, offering a retrospective comment, writes:

"Rulegame 5" (1964) set up very strict constraints within which movement and language appropriate to the prescribed

^Jill Johnston, "Hay-Brown," The Village Voice, 7 April 1966, p. 13. 47

goals were improvised. Five performers proceeded along a path marked by seven parallel rows of tape, with instructions to change level from highest to lowest (on their stomachs) at the end of the course. The performers had to adjust their levels and placements along the tracks in relation to otl.cr performers, by talking to each other and making necessary adjustments mutually.^

In "Rulegame 5" the central movement problem is spatial. The task

is to keep the correct spatial relationship between individual per­

formers while s till completing the grid course, which also entails the

use of space. The dance is indeterminate and open-ended. It permits

interactions between the performers that although task-centered, allows

the individual performer opportunities to become involved with each

other as themselves and not as characters.

For this dance Brown also employed non-dance trained performers.

The cast for the May 1965 performance included non-dancers Walter

de Maria, Alex Hay, Bob Rauschenberg, and dancers, Trisha Brown, Steve

Paxton and Joseph Schlichter. In a March 1966 production, the non­

dancer performers were Walter de Maria, Red Grooms, Tony Holder, Olga

Kluver. The sole dancer was Simone Whitman (Forti).

"Rulegame 5" contains additional aspects of form instituted by

the Judson group to circumvent the conventional dancer's image. The

dance uses actual time; the movement is phrased by the necessity of

following the task rules, and not to satisfy a musical or stage time

frame. The human figure was not idealized and does not project a theme other than the central organizing concepts on which the dance is based.

^Banes, p. 79. 48

Brown's perference, like Rainer's, is for a concert dance that uses a more human (rather than godlike) scale for the dancer:

At Judson, the performers looked at each other and the audience, they breathed audibly, ran out of breath, sweated, talked things over. They began behaving more like human beings, revealing what was thought of as deficiencies as well as their s k i l l s .1

Brown's choice of these aesthetic values made the conventional dancer's image an ineffective artistic tool. In the context of "Rulegame 5," for instance, the traditional dancer's image would be comic, if not actually ludicrous.

It is difficult to evaluate on what bases Brown chose to circum­ vent the dancer's image. Certain elements of her work can be traced to

Halprin and Cunningham. Her structures resemble Halprin's in that they are elaborately built tasks that must be accomplished. The dance then becomes the process of accomplishing that task. The demeanor and facial expression used to present the material is that of Cunningham: serene, uninflected, self-possessed, and objective. The question of her motivation, however, s till remains.

Part of an explanation lies in Brown's need to discover her own personal lim itations:

I definitely do want my audiences to understand my work although I have done my share of dances that were difficult for the general public . . . The result of choreography that goes beyond what the audience is familiar with is that you find out what you can do, what your own personal limitation edges are. In that arises the possibility of doing that which is not interesting to your audience, not up until now thought of as acceptable to an audience. There is also a question of tension in the relation­ ships between an audience and a performer. In dances of this

^Brown, in Contemporary Dance, p. 48. 49

sort it seems that you are stretching or pushing or rather raising the level of tension considerably.^

Although she wants the audience to understand her work, it is also apparent that Brown uses the tension created by being one step ahead of her audience's understanding of her work as a margin in which to test her own lim itations. The act of performing then involves a measure of risk-taking. Creating dances, as far as Brown is concerned, means constructing a physical arena in which performing and viewing the dance entail accepting a dare. Brown's desire to stretch her limitations as well as those of her audience is essentially playful, sometimes ironic or humorous, only occasionally didactic. Her work is as much an invitation (to follow the ins and outs of the choreo­ graphy) as it is a dare:

Pure movement is a movement that has no other connotations. It is not functional oi pantomimic. Mechanical body actions like bending, straightening or rotating would qualify as pure movement providing the context was neutral. I use pure move­ ments, a kind of breakdown of the body's capabilities. I also use quirky, personal gestures, things that have specific meaning to me but probably appear abstract to others. I may perform an everyday gesture so that the audience does not know whether I have stopped dancing or not and, carrying that irony further, I seek to disrupt their expectations by setting up an action to travel left and then cut right at the last moment unless I imagine they have caught on to me, in which case I might stand s till. I make plays on movement, like rhyming or echoing an earlier gesture in another part of the body at a later time and perhaps out of kilter. I turn phrases upside down, reverse them or suggest an action and then not complete it, or else overstate it altogether. I make radical changes in a mundane way. I use weight, balance, momentum and physical actions like falling, pushing, etc. I say things to my company like, "Toss your knees over there," or, "Start the phrase and then on the second count start it again," or "Do it and get off it." I put all these movements together without transitions. I do not promote the next movement with a preceding transition

^Ibid., pp. 45-46. 50

and, therefore, I do not build up to something. If I do build up, I might end it with another build-up. I often return to a neutral standing position between moves; it is for me a way of measuring where I have been and where I am going. An even pulse (without musical accompaniment) does the same thing with time. A pulse brackets a unit of time that can be measured, divided, filled up completely or partially. If I am beginning to sound like a bricklayer with a sense of humor, you are beginning to understand my work.l

Brown's adventurous attitude towards making dances, and her

careful elucidation of well-defined but often complex structures, is

apparent in this quote. There is a quality of directness in her

language that is also true of her dances. She appears to want the

dances to be immediately experienced, within each dance's own lim ita­

tions, without setting up elaborate dramatic or emotional situations.

Perhaps she believes that such conventional formats only obscure the movement itself. For Brown's primary concern has been to present movement in as pure a context as possible. To present movement, thus purely and simply, Brown discarded the specialized dancer's image as

too heavily weighted with connotational or representational uses for her purpose.

^Ibld., p. 54. V. STEVE PAXTON

Steve Paxton reserved a special tenderness for people's routine

activities. His dances included walking, eating, drinking, dressing, and undressing. His work, ". . . focused on personal incidents within pedestrian forms.He individualized and democratized the content of dance.

The presentation of individual expression (as in a non-dancer walking in their personal manner) on the stage had an effect on the dancer's image. Like Trisha Brown, Paxton used materials and forms which affected the conventional image of the dancer by preclusion.

Logically, to insert the ordinary movement into the extraordinary frame of the conventional dancer's image would be a contradiction. By isolating the movement as an artistic element and presenting it in an organized format, but without stylization, Paxton created a viable theatrical image. Johnston has said, "Paxton brings the street into 2 his theatre. Or puts the theatre back on the street."

Paxton's ability to make a theatrical situation out of the ordinary, without distorting the original source or image through stylization, provides insight into the "special thingness" of the

^Steve Paxton, "Contact Improvisation," The Drama Review 19 (March 1975):40.

2 J ill Johnston, Marmalade Me, (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1971), p. 136.

51 52

ordinary. He accomplished his ends by presenting multi-layered

visual images, e.g., hanging clothes from hooks taped to his body in

"Flat" (1964). He constructed familiar objects in unfamiliar materials, e.g., a "full-size overstuffed chair made of yellow frosted

cake"^ in Jag ville gorna telefonera" (1964). He has danced duets with chickens (Jag v ille), and included "measuring and recording measurements of rabbits" as a task in a dance ("title lost tokyo" 2 1964). Paxton has said, "I think theatre is like everything else. 3 Any time you want theatre you just turn it on in your head."

Individualizing convert dance allowed Paxton to design theatre experiences for audiences to show their own movement was worthy of investigation. His desire to make a theatre art that communicated the importance of Everyperson's movement was due to a concern to democratize dance. His experience in Cunningham's company, which he thought was too hierarchically organized, partly engendered this concern. But his desire was also rooted historically. Paxton felt that Isadora Duncan and later, Rudolf Laban had established dance forms that promoted values of freedom and equality in dance. Unfortunately, these forms never came to a broad fruition in the United States—a fact Paxton r e g r e tte d .

^Liza Béar, "Steve Paxton: Like the Famous Tree . . ." Avalanche (Summer 1975):27.

2 Johnston, p. 26.

^Ibld., p. 136. 53

An example of his democratic concern was Paxton's search for ways to eliminate, as much as possible, any inadvertent influence he had on dancers as he demonstrated movement. To avoid demonstration as the way of passing on choreography, Paxton used a score and verbal instructions. Eventually he chose to exclude himself from his dances as a performer and even as a demonstrator of movement, out of a reluctance to allow his technical ability and considerable resources as a performer to serve as examples, images, or standards for how a piece would be done.

Paxton is from Tucson, Arizona and he began dancing in high school to enhance his gymnastic training. His physical involvement, however, began at an early age:

I was pretty active as a kid. I lived on farms and in cities. On the farms I rode horses and threw myself around the outside environment, and in the cities I did the same thing basically, climbing trees, and running fences, and climbing on roofs and things like that . . . and listening to music and dancing. It was something that I enjoyed doing from a very early age.l

He began his training in Graham technique. He had two teachers: one,

Frances Cohen, was Director at the Jewish Community Center, and the other. Sister Jean, was an Episcopal nun:

LIZA: At that time in Tucson how were you thinking of yourself, as a performer, as a dancer, as an artist or what?

STEVE; I was a performer already. I had done quite a lot of performing and touring from that base, with a couple of small dance companies, run by Frances Cohen and this Episcopal nun who'd been a Graham dancer who was there getting her PhD so she could take over the order when the old Mother Abby finally kicked the bucket. Sister Jean was next in line, after she got her PhD. One of the things she was teaching at the order was dance, and when she got it together she made a company. And

^Béar, p. 30. 54

that toured also, so we toured around the Southwest a lot. So I sort of had had a hit of being a performer, and had had a strong sense of what dance was for, what modern dance was f o r . l

At nineteen, Paxton left Arizona to study at the Connecticut

College summer dance program. Cunningham's company was in residence for the first time that year (1958) and Paxton was drawn to his work.

Later that year he continued his studies at Cunningham's studio. In

1960 he joined Dunn's composition class, remaining active as a member through the two years of the course and the founding of the Judson

Dance Theatre. He joined Cunningham’s company in 1961, leaving in

1964 to pursue his own career as a choreographer/dancer.

The groundwork for Paxton's influence on the dancer's image was laid in his first piece, "Proxy" (1961). The dance was divided into four sections. The first and fourth sections included the performers entering and circling the performance area backdrop several times. One performer enters with a basin and puts it down, eventually standing In it. The two middle sections were organized around a solo, followed by a group rendition of movement drawn from a score based on pictures of sports activities. The final section included one performer eating a pear, another balancing in the basin containing ball bearings, a third drinking a glass of water.

Paxton regarded the concept and score of "Proxy" as synonymous:

STEVE: . . . the dance existed as a form for me, almost the idea existed as "the" dance. The idea of the score, the idea of the directions to walk, anybody could do, so it was Important for me to see different kinds of people In the dance.

^Béar, p. 30. 55

LIZA: What exactly was the movement score in "Proxy"?

STEVE: The solo score was on a large piece of brown paper and it had cut-out photographs with a direction indicated between the ah . . . a flow indicated from photographs . . . I think there was a Mutt and Jeff cartoon image in it also, a cartoon image from a travel ad, and some sports photos, and pictures of people walking—The idea was that you had to hit exactly that pose in transition between two other poses, so everything could be seen either as transition or goal depending on where you focussed on it. And there was a movable red dot on the score that indicated the beginning that you'd chosen. It was large enough for you to put on the wall to work off of, so you could work in the studio, put the score up on the wall and learn the continuity that you had chosen without having to stop. That score got burned in a fire, and I've never reconstructed it or even made any further movement scores, because to me just the idea of using that form is that dance. Although I did do a couple of [different ones], I was s till very much involved in "Proxy": with walking and having it stick around. I felt like having the concept was enough. ^

A 1966 performance of "Proxy" was reviewed by Robert Morris. He analyzed how Paxton's use of materials and form confronted theatrical

conventions :

"Proxy" by Steve Paxton was . . . an early work which has been seen before. Made in 1962, [sic] it seems at this point to be a classic work embodying many of the concerns which have come to be associated with the new movement in dance . . . The use of "ordinary" actions (e.g., eating and drinking) confined within a small rectangle taped to the floor somehow magnifies and formalizes these actions in much the same way the sculpture pedestal does, or at least once did, the readymade. The long walking sequence of entrances and exits by the three performers plays on this theatrical convention with an aggressive humor which finally annihilates one's sense of expectation for action as each performer appears only to cross the stage and exit. That is, one's expectation that something else is going to happen is after a point removed and the subtle spatial changes of each performer's relationship to the one behind or in front comes into focus together with the exquisite satisfaction that it is just this thing, very concrete and very much there, that is what is happening. There are, in fact, occurrences in this sequence besides walking. Miss Childs sets down a yellow wash

^Béar, pp. 29-30. 56

basin, picks it up, sets it down the next time around and finally stands in it in a particularly petrified way and is subsequent1_ irned around on some unseen substance which renders her frictionless as she is stiff. The same sequence of athletic-type positions is then registered by each per­ former. (The movement was derived from a "score" of a number of photographs of athletes in action; the performer was required to register the pose in the photograph but was free to choose the manner in which he moved in and out of this point of registration.) The work was low keyed, flat but i n te n s e .!

Paxton realized later that the walking in "Proxy" profoundly

affected his development as a choreographer. Walking was also a

contributory factor to Paxton's influence on the dancer's image:

It opened up a range of nondance movement, a variety of non- hierarchical structures, a performance presence that could be simultaneously relaxed and authoritative. It became the currency of Paxton's populist stance. Walking is something that everyone does, even dancers when they are not "on." Walking is a sympathetic link between performers and spectators, a shared experience that allows for personal idiosyncrasies, and Individual styles. There is no single correct way of walking. Anyone's method is appropriate for that person. Walking, like eating, drinking, telling stories, smiling, getting dressed and undressed . . . provided a wealth of material for Paxton's investigations over the next nearly two d ecad es. ^

However, Paxton's effect on the dancer's image achieved its most complete expression in "Satisfyin' Lover" (1967). This dance involved between twenty-two and forty-two people, walking across a performance area with occasional pauses. There were three chairs placed in the space facing the audience. A few performers were elected to leave the walking track every so often, and sit down in a chair, rise again, and then exit. A typical section of the score follows:

^Robert Morris, "Dance," The Village Voice, 3 February 1966, p. 8, 24.

2 Banes, p. 60. 57

Group A

1. walk 2/5. 10 second stop. exit. 2. cue 10 steps, walk across. 3. cue 20 s te p s , walk across. 4. cue #1 pauses, walk across. 5. cue #1 p au se s. walk 1/5. stop 20 seconds, exit. 6 ,7 ,8 . cue 5 s te p s . enter together. #6 falling gradually behind (at exit be 15 s te p s behind ^ 7 & 8 walk across.

There are six such groups in all. The dance lasts an indeterminate

length of time, depending on the number of performers. There were no background sounds, special props, or scenic design.

"Satisfyin' Lover" crystallized several concerns Paxton had been

considering during the second half of the sixties:

[STEVE]: Well, so at the end of the '60s, I did "Satisfyin' Lover" which is walking, standing, and sitting without realizing how strongly it related to "Proxy." "Proxy" wasn't in my mind at that moment; it was just: the next dance would be a flow of people going across the stage only once and then disappear— that would be the dance. That form had been in my mind for a long time and I finally got it out as a walking dance. When I originally conceived of it, it was a dancing dance. The basic form was people entering from stage right, and eventually going across to the left, and after a solo or duet or whatever, dis­ appearing for good, and new people entering and exiting constantly. So it would be an hour dance with a cast of 50 people in which all these moments would happen but never . . .

LIZA; . . . reoccur. Did that epitomize performance for you?

STEVE: . . . I got involved with a phrase at the end of the '60s which was "performance as medium."

LIZA: Performance as medium for what?

4 b i d ., p. 71. 58

STEVE; For people, I guess, I dunno . . . performance qua medium.

LIZA: Oh, you mean with the nature of performance itself.

STEVE: Yeah, yeah, as opposed to dance as a medium. What qualities performance has irrespective of the mode, whether it's acting or dancing or just standing on the stage, whatever . . .

LIZA: At a certain point you didn't characterize your work in terms of awarenesses, but in that piece you must have.

STEVE: Yes, in that piece it was coming very much to the fore. I was saying, OK, attitude is where it's at in terms of performance.

LIZA: Rather than material.

STEVE: Right. Material was seeming more extraneous to me at that point.

LIZA: You said the elements of "Proxy" determined what was going to happen in the next ten years. What were those elements?

STEVE: The walking, ordinary walking . . .

LIZA: Was it flat walking or springy walking? [In "Satisfying Lover"]

STEVE: It was what it took you to get across the stage . . .

LIZA: Directional walking between two points.

STEVE: It wasn't ambling, and it wasn't striding, or strolling; it was what they conceived of as their walk, with the idea behind it that everybody has a technique that they've evolved over their years.

LIZA: To get from A to B.

STEVE: Right. I was interested in working with that material as opposed to the aesthetisized movement techniques that I had been trained in, through Cunningham and other people.

LIZA: It's hard for me to conceive of a walk that doesn't have a built-in quality.

STEVE: Expecially when you're looking at it as performance, it does have that quality. I think "Satisfyin' Lover" is 59

42 people walking across the stage, but it's 42 presences and 42 styles of walking also.!

In this discussion of "Satisfyin' Lover," Paxton raises a point

that relates to the dancer's image: the concept of "performance as

medium." Paxton implies that the nature of performance without

respect to a specific format like a play or concert, is an attitude of

awareness, a concept implied in Halprin's remark that "doing a task

created an attitude that [brought] the movement into another kind of

reality." (See page 23.) Rainer and Brown expressed similar thoughts.

Rainer has mentioned that task was an alternative to display and

virtuosity because "it had an attitude about performance . . . a more

concrete, autonomous-looking life on stage that was not constantly

projected out at the audience." (See page 34.) Brown's thoughts on

the performance quality released by improvisation are similar to what

Halprin, Paxton and Rainer call attitude. (See page 42.) These

choreographers indicate that the attitude of the performer affects the manner of executing the movement. Without explicitly defining what

the attitude entails, they imply that whatever attitude the performer has w ill affect the behavior in performance. Attitude certainly

affects the movement in conventional dance performances. In this

instance, strong projection of content through display of technical

skill and style, produces an effect, not of an alert awareness of the movement, but of a prideful nobility.

To change the dancer's attitude would therefore change his or her image. Thus Paxton's influence on the dancer's image was a result

^Bear, p. 29. 60

of his developing a different kind of awareness in his dancers, and

consequently, a different performance behavior that affected their

image. By using walking as the central organizing form in "Satisfyin'

Lover," Paxton presented each individual performer as a personality,

but not as a character. By placing the individual personality in a

theatrical context, each performers' manner of walking and standing

became one among many, a collection of objective facts illustrating

not an idealization, but a range of possibilities. The entire piece

is also conducted in actual time, allowing individual rhythmic

differences and progressions their full weight. Costumes were the

individual performers' pedestrian clothing.

Over the course of his career, Paxton's methods changed, but particular concerns continually resurfaced in different forms. His

concern about performance as medium was part of a larger one relating

to performance behavior. Paxton was interested in performance behavior

as it was presented, distilled, and manipulated in concert dance, not in and of itself, but because it is a form of communication. Paxton's wish to discover new ways to transfer movement from choreographer to performer was a way of examining and changing communication patterns as they arise in dance rehearsals. It was also an expression of his desire to reduce his influence as an authority figure.

For this reason, and because of his interest to include all manner of dancers and non-dancers alike, Paxton is regarded as a political figure. Paxton is political, at least in the broader sense of the term; being interested in the distribution of power in human relationships in general, and the manner in which power is manifested in these relationships (how it is communicated), in particular. 61

"Contact Improvisation," (1972- ) Paxton's latest formulation, is

probably the clearest distillation of his democratic and individualistic

orientation.

In this, the epitome of pedestrian forms, Contactera need not be

trained dancers, but do learn movement improvisation, body awareness and

warm-ups. Exercises concentrate on developing peripheral vision, the

a b i l i t y to tak e w eight on d i f f e r e n t body s u r f a c e s , how to g iv e up body weight to gravity (how to fall without injury), different centering

procedures, and how to sense the center of gravity as it shifts between one, two, or three person groupings. Contact can be established by any body part except the hands. Contacters explore the possibilities

of a movement relationship between each other. Paxton asserts that

Contact Improvisation is basically a form of—hopefully effective—

communication. Consequently, emphasis is placed upon presenting one's self honestly, that is, as free from ulterior motives as possible.^

H istorically, Contact Improvisation was rooted in Paxton's experience with improvisation. His first exposure was the sessions in Forti's studio with Trisha Brown, Dick Levin, and Simone Forti.

Paxton remembers :

[STEVE]; I was a very difficult person to work with in those days because I was not interested in what,I thought of as inconsistencies in the form, those little arabesques that occur in your thoughts, which are an important part of your personal element reaching through the form.

LIZA: It's also sometimes the most productive part.

STEVE: Yeah, or the most beautiful part. At this point I can see that, but at that point I was interested in hard

^Eleanor Rachel Luger, "A Contact Improvisation Primer," Dance Scope 12 (Fall/W inter 1977-78):55. 62

finished forms. So if somebody suggested a piece, a lot of leeway was always given, like come over here and if you feel like starting, start. And what w e'll do is so and so , . . if I saw inconsistencies in the form, especially at first, I would immediately say, well what about so and so, and what about so and so. If you get too many ideas going the whole thing dissolves. It's a very fragile moment when something is being made physical. At the time I wasn't aware of that fragility and I tended to be a form buster. So I was difficult to work with but I got a lot out of it.

Later, Paxton was involved in Rainer’s "Continuous Project-

Altered Daily" (1970), a dance that was structured leaving certain sections open to improvisation during performance. Eventually Rainer dissolved CP-AD and the dancers involved regrouped to form Grand Union, an improvisatory dance collective that operated from 1970-1976. Contact

Improvisation was created from Grand Union male solo studies. Paxton, in choreographing "Magnesium," during a 1972 residency at Oberlin

College, amplified the material into a nine member all male dance.

Contact improvisation is thus the latest fulfillment of Paxton's desire to individualize and democratize concert dance forms—a desire that was evident in his choreography from his first piece, "Proxy."

^Béar, p. 27, VI. CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY

The conclusion of this history on changes in the dancer's image

will be the analysis of four dance photographs. Criteria for choosing

the photographs are the following: (1) all the photographs are from

the period under study; (2) they contain resemblances in movement

and/or pose and allow for comparison; (3) one photograph represents the

conventional dancer's image, one each of the other three represent

dances by Rainer, Brown, and Paxton. The four photographs chosen to

illustrate the changes are: (1) for the conventional dancer's image:

a picture of Sara Leland, Melissa Hayden, Suki Schorer, and two

unidentified men in "Allegro Brilliante;"^ (2) for Rainer's dance:

Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Tony Holder, Lucinda Childs,

Sally Gross, Judith Dunn, Bob Rauschenberg, and Joseph Schlichter in

"Parts of Some Sextets," (hereafter referred to by the initials 2 "P.O.S.S."); (3) for Brown's dance: Olga Kluver, Tony Holder, Walter

de Maria, and Simone Forti (Whitman), in "Rulegame 5;" (4) for

Martha Swope, Photograph of "Allegro B rilliante," by Balanchine (1956) , in The New York City Ballet by Lincoln K irstein, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 74, bottom.

2 Peter Moore, Photograph of "P.o.S.S.," by Yvonne Rainer, in Work, p. 44, 1965. 3 Peter Moore, Photograph of "Rulegame 5," by Trisha Brown, in Contemporary Dance, p. 49, #43, 1966.

63 64

Paxton: Bob Rauschenberg, Lucinda Childs, and Trisha Brown in

"P roxy."^

2 The Conventional Dancer's Image

Sara Leland

Standing on her left foot, knee slightly bent, Leland performs

dégagé derrière with her right foot, legs well outwardly rotated, en 3 efface. The arms are in first arabesque. Although the shoulders and

hips are square, the line of the body is very expansive because of the

angle of the photographer's sightline, and because the right arm, while

extending back, is also held slightly to the side. The diaphragm and

sternum are projected forward prominently; the chin is raised; the eyes seem to gaze directly upwards to an imaginary balcony. Leland seems to be gradually lifting her body to punctuate the end of a movement phrase. Her diaphanous skirt swirls gently about her knees. There is a sense of quiet repose and completion to her pose. She seems ready to mobilize herself into movement quite readily.

M elissa Hayden

Weight on her right foot en fondu, left foot dégagé derrière and slightly à la seconde with right leg in parallel position, Hayden's diaphragm is relaxed while her chest projects forward by the force of

^Peter Moore, Photograph of "Proxy," by Steve Paxton, in ib id ., p. 159, #174, 1966.

2 All the photographs w ill be described reading from left to right. 3 See Gail Grant, Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967) p. 2. 65

her head being tossed backwards. Her.eyes are open but unseeing.

The right arm is held so the fingertips are directly above the head.

The palm is turned upwards. The left arm is â la seconde, the palm

turned downwards. Hayden seems caught at the climax of executing her

step. Unlike Leland*s quiet repose, Hayden suggests a voluptuous

abandon. Her skirt, rather than swirling, foams around her knees.

Suki Schorer

Weight on her right foot en fondue, left foot is in dégagé

derrière with both legs well outwardly rotated. Her arms are à la

seconde, but appear stretched behind the line of the shoulders. Her

diaphragm is relaxed but her chest is extended forward by the backward

pulling action of the arms. The right arm is higher than the left, bent

awkwardly at the elbow, palm facing downward. The right arm is

apparently in the process of being raised to first arabesque. Head is

turned towards left shoulder, eyes nearly closed and gaze cast down­ wards. Schorer looks as if she abruptly arrested her motion and is beginning to straighten her posture to mirror Leland.

There are two male figures that are unidentified in the caption.

They stand behind the women, the one on stage right with the weight on his left foot, the right leg slightly bent with the foot tucked behind the ankle of the left leg. The man on stage left, mirroring this pose, with his weight on the right leg, and the left leg bent. Arms are relaxed at their side and gaze directly at the observer. They seem poised to begin dancing, and although relaxed, their years of training, as with the women, leave a very lifted, stretched impression on the v ie w e r. 66

D iscu ssio n

The overwhelming impression the dancers give is an attentuation

of the body. Even the facial expressions appear not only composed, but also elongated. The women deploy their limbs around the central axis of the upper torso which remains rigidly vertical and expanded.

The men stand quietly in the background, bodies well pulled up and extended on the vertical axes. The dancer's appearance is extroverted and presentational. The dancer's attitude (evidence for attitude is based on the use of eyes and head) differs from one performer to another. Hayden projects ecstasy as if in response to an internally created fantasy. Schorer, also inwardly focused, does not, however, abandon herself to the movement in the same way. Rather she appears to be gathering the scattered force of her movement to assume a particular pose. Leland is directly confronting the observer with her eyes, and appears to be inviting the audience to look at her.

There is no sense of characterization in the picture, although there is a prevailing mood. The mood is suggested by the clothing.

For the women, the costumes are: leotards, tights, knee-length chiffon skirts, and pointe shoes; for the men, tights, stylized peasant blouses, and ballet slippers. These costumes suggest an informal insouciance.

The informality is by comparison to the standard and highly formal frou-frou. The women also wear false eyelashes and make-up to present an appearance consistent with Ideals of beauty. Special lighting effects further enhance the sense that this stage is a place of make- believe. The single most apparent fact revealed by the picture is the adherence to the pre-set standard form and the presentation of the

Western idealization of the body. 67

"P.o.S.S."^

S e c tio n I

Starting at stage right, there are three dancers performing the

same movement, although not identically. The dancers are: Deborah

Hay standing in front; Yvonne Rainer behind and slightly to stage left ;

Steve Paxton behind Rainer and slightly to stage right. These dancers

are performing activity #5, "Bird Run." (See p. 35.) Feet are parallel,

planted firmly on the ground. Hips face diagonlly to stage right,

torso is in opposition to the hips, facing stage front. The right arm

is raised side high, the left arm is a little lower than shoulder height. Deborah Hay achieves the most extended line with the arms,

looking remarkably sim ilar to Sara Leland. Her face, however, is directed to the front, and her eyegaze seems to be outwardly focused.

Rainer almost parallels Hay's pose. Her arms are not as extended.

The right turns softly at the elbow, the left elbow is more decidely bent and turned upward, including the palm. The left arm seems to be slightly behind the line of the shoulder and the torso bends to the left, emphasized by the diagonal folds in her T-shirt, running from the left shoulder to the right rib section.

Steve Paxton uses the right arm in two parts, with the upper arm continuing the line of the shoulder (hereafter referred to as side neutral), and the lower arm side high, palm facing the front, the thumb prominently displayed. The left arm is not visible, obscured by

For ease of description, this photograph w ill be discussed as three sections. From the left, the first section is a trio danced by Hay, Rainer, and Paxton. The second section, is a duet danced by Childs and Holder. The third section covers activity #22, "Feel One at a Time." 68

Rainer's torso, but the hand appears, palm facing front, beyond

Rainer's left shoulder, so it can be conjectured that the arm is fully

extended at side neutral. Rainer and Paxton conform ‘"o the neutral

expression of the others, their eyes gazing directly out to the

o b se rv e r.

S e c tio n I I

In center front of the stage there are two dancers, Tony Holder

and Lucinda Childs, performing activity #3 or "Leaning thru First

Embraces." Holder is standing completely in profile, weight dis­

tributed between both feet, with more on the right foot than the left.

The right foot is a footlength in front of the left foot, in parallel

fourth position. His left arm is around Childs' waist, left arm

extended to his left, but bent at right angles at the elbow, palm

facing stage front with the fingers curled softly. His alignment s vertical upright, his gaze is directly toward Childs. She is standing on her left foot, her right leg bent at the knee as if at the height of a walking step. Her legs are in profile, hips are turned slightly to the right around the body's axis and the upper torso faces stage front.

Her head is turned towards the right shoulder and she is gazing at

Holder. Her right arm is curled around his neck, the left dangles at her side. Both Holder and Childs maintain a relaxed face devoid of expression. There are no overt emotional overtones to their pose.

Their touching seems factual rather than passionate.

Section III

This section depicts activity #22, "Peel One at a Time." The peeling refers to a task with the mattresses. One pile to the extreme 69

stage right, has four mattresses. Bob Rauschenberg sits atop and is

rolling a fifth mattress into a cylindrical shape, with the curl away

from him. His arms are curled underneath the bulk of the mattress, his upper body leaning into the gesture of rolling, his head remaining

erect. Rauschenberg's lower torso, has the weight placed in the left buttock, the left leg folded underneath, so that the buttock rests on

the left foot. The right thigh is extended slightly to the side and back, the lower leg bent at the knee.

Directly in front of Rauschenberg is the second pile of mattresses, presumably there as a result of the peeling off instruction, which Rauschenberg and others had been fulfilling. Behind this pile

(deeper into the stage) stands Sally Gross, her weight on her left foot and slightly into her left hip. Her legs are parallel, but the right knee is slightly bent, as if she were about to take a step. Her left arm is relaxed at her side, the right extended at side neutral. Her head is erect, but slightly turned to her left shoulder, suggesting she is directing her gaze to the left front corner of the stage. The shirt she is wearing has a fold from right rib to left hip, suggesting a diagonal pull from shoulder to hip. Gross does not express feeling with her face, similarly to the other dancers.

Behind Gross and to her left, is Judith Dunn. Standing in profile, Dunn is walking to stage right. Partly blocked by the pile of mattresses, a section of her heel and the hem of her pants is visible, suggesting this leg is at the backward position of the weight-bearing phase in a walking step. The right arm is relaxed at her side, the left, in opposition to the forward step of the right foot, is extended 70

slightly from the elbow. Her alignment is vertical erect. Dunn's

gaze is directly forward.

To the extreme left of the stage is Joseph Schlichter, facing stage front. Weight is on the left foot, the right arm swings in opposition. Right foot is at the backward position of the weight­ bearing phase. The left arm is not visible. Shoulders are evenly placed over hips. Posture is erect, but Schlichter appears to emble rather than stride briskly forward. Although all the dancers appear self-contained and involved with their tasks, Schlichter appears the most self-possessed.

D iscu ssio n

Instead of the w ell-lifted bodies that suggest an airy lightness, these dancers exhibit a low-key, businesslike manner of executing the movement. Their use of the bended knee and their use of the whole foot on the floor grounds the body in relation to gravity. Rather than deploying the limbs far from the body, these dancers employ the space immediately surrounding them. The dancers do not present an emotional quality or mood through facial expression or make-up. The stage is lit with overhead lights in a utilitarian manner. Even the costumes, which look like the dancers' personal clothing are workmanlike and utilitarian.

However, the cast of "P.o.S.S." do maintain the vertical erect posture that is so identified with the specialized body of the dancer.

"Rulegame 5"

Olga Kluver is standing at the first grid, weight on her left foot, which is in parallel position. The right foot is lifted off the 71

ground. Klûver is deeply flexed at both the knee and hip joints. She

is leaning forward so that her shoulders are over her knees. The left arm is slightly curved, dropping from the shoulder towards the ground, but it seems in the process of being raised. The fingertips are held together and curved so the hand resembles a scoop. The right arm is bent at a 45° angle at the elbow, hand is curved and is directly in line from the shoulder. Kluver's head is raised and slightly turned toward the right shoulder as she gazes intently at the other performers, as if waiting for a signal to engage in action.

Tony Holder is a trained dancer. In this photograph his head is obscured. However, he is kneeling on the outer surface of his left thigh, with some weight on his left hand. His left leg is folded at the knee with the foot touching the inner thigh of the right leg, which is also folded at the knee with the lower leg and foot obscured from view. The pose approximates a Graham fourth position. The right arm hangs from the shoulder slightly curved at the elbow, but the hand is obscured from view. In accordance with the rules of this dance, he is either about to lie down or raise his body. (See p. 46.)

Walter de Maria is not a trained dancer. He is facing Holder, and thus partly blocks him from view. Apparently they are talking to establish what positions they will take in relation to each other, as specified in the dance's rules. De Maria is on all fours, weight on hands and knees. His hands are placed under his shoulders, and his knees are directly under the hip joint. De Maria's head is raised, turned over his right shoulder, and inclined slightly to the left shoulder, as he talks with Holder. His back is to the camera, so his expression is unknown. 72

Simone Forti is caught in mid-stride, her left foot a blur as it

completes the swing phase of the run. Her right foot makes contact with

the floor on the ball of the foot. She shows a strong oppositional pull

in her right shoulder as she takes the step, her right arm folded at

the elbow so the lower arm is parallel to the line of her shoulders across her waist. Her left arm is in mid-cycle, coming from the back extension of the swing and nearing the lowest point of the arc. The left hand is flicked gently upward, palm facing down. Forti's head is lifted and pushed forward. She seems intent on getting to her destination, and her whole body is engaged in flight.

D iscu ssio n

The performers seem very intent on their task. Klliver and Forti especially are concentrating on getting to specific destinations. By contrast, even if Leland, Hayden, or Schorer were equally involved in arriving at specific destinations, they would not reveal this by their performance behavior. Rainer, et al., do so by their body facing, by the sense of purpose and direction the walking gives. Even though the dancers are clustered in groups, they appear to be a collection of individuals, each with a separate mission, than a planned formal grouping. This effect is a result of juxtaposing the different tasks.

"Proxy"

Bob Rauschenberg sits calmly at the feet of Lucinda Childs and gazes directly out at the observer. His knees are drawn up to his chest and his arms are clasped around his knees, the right hand grasping the left. 73

Lucinda Childs, in three-quarter profile, stands behind

Rauschenberg, her arms relaxed at her sides. She gazes seriously at

the observer, her head slightly inclined forward.

Trisha Brown is caught at the height of a jump, her legs are

drawn underne^th her (she is deeply flexed at the knee and hip joint)

her arms clasped around her knees in mid-air. Her head is turned

toward her left shoulder, her eyes open and aware. She is grimacing

slightly, perhaps from the effort of her jump.

D iscu ssio n

Rauschenberg and Childs seem not only low-key, but very serious

as they gaze imperturbably at the observer. They appear capable of

sustaining this level of concentration indefinitely. Trisha Brown,

caught like Melissa Hayden at the climax of a movement, does not project

the same involvement with a fantasy. Rather, she seems aware of her

environment and has focused her attention outside of herself, even while at the height of her jump.

Conclusions

Drawing from these descriptions, the most startling difference between the first photograph, as opposed to the other three, is the contrast of the idealized view of the body with the individualized view of the body. Clearly, Rainer, Brown, Paxton, and others at Judson did present a more individualized, less idealized image of the dancer. The image projected was one on a more human, universal scale than before, more like the imperfect creatures we are, than the perfect godlike ones we hope to b e . 74

The individualized image entailed a new use of performance

behavior, in the off-hand, businesslike manner of executing the move­

ment, which created a different attitude towards performing the movement

itself. Hard to describe, this attitude is evident, for example, in the

fact that Leland, et a l., would not purposely reveal where they intended

to end a phrase, even if they had a required destination on the stage.

To do so would make the choreography appear stilted and strained. An

important element in creating the behavior and attitude of Rainer's,

Brown's, and Paxton's use of the dancer's image, was the task-related

and pedestrian movement. This movement focused the audience's attention

on specific short-term outcomes and destinations. For example, the

individual off-stage walks from A to B. At B she/he picks up a hair­

brush. When done on-stage the movement reveals the same intention.

Virtuosic and technical movement also has intention, but it is not to

show the accomplishment of a particular step, like a pirouette. The

purpose is the opposite, to disguise the accomplishment of the step in

and of itself, and focus the attention of the viewer on the intention

to fill the stage with line, shape, and pattern. The performer in

conventional concert dance intends to show the human form as a shape

carving the stage space to create these patterns.

Of the three choreographers under discussion, Rainer was perhaps the most experimental. She progressed through three different stages of use of the dancer's image. In the first part of her career, with

"Three Satie Spoons" (1961), "The Bells" (1961), and "Three Seascapes"

(1961) she created works that required, if not characterization, then the expression of emotion. Then, with such works as "Ordinary Dance"

(1963), she became involved in presenting the individual self. 75

"P.O.S.S." and "The Mind is a Muscle" (1966) begin the third period,

that involved the presentation of the dancer as a "neutral purveyor of

information." (See p. 35.)^ For Rainer, the dancer's image was another

aesthetic element to be used in the manner most appropriate to her

artistic concerns of the moment.

Brown and Paxton have continued to investigate issues relating to performance behavior. Brown, for instance, examines the nature of the performer-audience relationship, while Paxton regards the relationship between performers while moving as an important aspect of Contact

Improvisation, his latest endeavor. Both, however, have consistently chosen the individualized image developed by Cunningham, and used by the choreographers at Judson.

The contribution of Judson was the expansion of the aesthetic elements at hand for the choreographer's use. The dancer's image was only one such element that emerged from these diverse experiments that included new choreographic methods, the introduction of utilitarian clothing, set designs, and props with no symbolic value, performing spaces outside of the proscenium arch stage, including parks, plazas, gymnasiums, and churches. The dancer's image, however, emerged as an important change, for the presentation of the individual self implies a new awareness of the dancer as person, not only in relation to themselves, but also in relation to the audience. A new awareness of the individual dancer as person involves the body as the agent of

All of these works, with the exception of "P.o.S.S.," are not discussed in the text of this thesis. Therefore, this conclusion should be regarded as tentative, until further documentation and research on Rainer's use of the dancer's image can be done. 76

the person, and, of course, the body is the instrument of dance. The

awareness of the dancer as a person thus affects the use of the body as

the instrument of dance.

Implications of the Study

Investing the human figure with an idealized form has tradi­

tionally been the only route to expression in concert dance. With the

introduction of the methods and forms of Judson Dance Theatre the

definition of dance and of expression in dance expanded to include a

new range of aesthetic elements and also a new set of beliefs.

Until Judson, dance had been defined by traditional standards in

theatre and music. Concert dance was structured to portray theatrical

situations similar to a play except the movement replaced speech; or

dances were arranged according to the timing and phrasing of a piece of m usic.

Movement, however, has its own structure and organizational

imperatives. The expansion of aesthetic possibilities by Judson, freed dance from being largely constructed in accordance with theatrical or musical rules.

This study has focused on the change in the dancer's image as a way of understanding the new directions developed by the choreographers working at the Judson Dance Theatre, as exemplified by Yvonne Rainer,

Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton. Their interest in presenting themselves in a non-idealized manner led to new possibilities, both for dancers and for their audiences. SOURCES CONSULTED

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Barnes, Clive. "Dance: Village Disaster." New York Times, 11 January

1966, p. 20.

Brubach, Holly. "Cunningham Now." Ballet Review 6, No. 2 (1977-78):

79-85.

Carmines, Al. "In the Congregation of Art." Dance Scope 4 (Fall/

Winter 1967-68):25-31.

Erdman, Jean, et al. "Conversations in Manhattan." Impulse: An Annual

of Contemporary Dance (1967):57-64.

Forti, Simone [Simone Whitman]. "Theater and Engineering: Notes By a

Participant." Artforum 5 (February 1967):26-30.

Hartman, Rose. "Talking with Anna Halprin." Dance Scope 12 (Fall/

Winter 1977-78):57-66.

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"Dance; An Avant-Garde Series Begins." New York Times,

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p . 9.

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______. "I've Just Got a Running Start." The Village Voice,

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______. "Post-Judson Dance." Art in America 59 (September-October

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