Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater

SALLY BANES

T he Judson Dance Theater, the legendary amalga-

mation of avant-garde choreographers in Green-
wich Village in the early 1960s, represents a turning
lowed their message was clear: not only any movement
or any body, but also any method is permitted.

point in dance history for many reasons. Its cooperative

nature as an alternative-producing institution was a
Robert Dunn’s Choreography Class
conscious assault on the hierarchical nature not only of The open spirit that animated the group had its roots
academic ballet but also, more directly, of the American in the sensibilities of the composition class taught by
modern dance community as it had evolved by the late Robert Dunn out of which the Judson Dance Theater
1950s. The youthfulness of Judson’s original members blossomed. Dunn’s aspirations as a dance composition
signified a changing of the guard in terms of genera- teacher were informed by several sources (he himself
tions and, emblematic of the Kennedy era, a cultural was, of course, trained as a composer, not as a dancer
shift in authority from the wisdom and experience of or choreographer). Most crucially he translated ideas
age to the energy and creativity—the modernity—of from John Cage’s experimental music class, especially
youth. Aesthetic questions about the nature and meaning chance techniques, into the dance milieu; Cage’s class,
of dance and of movement were raised in the workshop in which Dunn had been a student, already originated
and in the concerts, among them—fundamentally— in an expanded view of music that encompassed the-
the identity of a dance work, the definition of dance, and ater and performance in a more general sense. Not
the nature of technique. The cooperative workshop was only Cage’s methods, but also his attitude that “any-
a training ground for most of the key choreographers of thing goes,” was an inspiration that carried over into
the next two decades.1 Dunn’s class. Certainly this permissive atmosphere was
But perhaps the most important legacy the Judson reinforced by the inclinations of the students, who
Dance Theater bequeathed to the history of dance was were all engaged in various ways and to various degrees
its intensive exploration and expansion of possibilities in the groundbreaking artistic scene in the Village,
for choreographic method. In their relentless search for from the Living Theater to pop art to happenings to
the new, coupled with an intelligently analytic ap- Fluxus, and some of whom studied as well with Ann
proach to the process of dancemaking, in repudiating Halprin, the West Coast experimentalist. But beyond
their elders’ cherished compositional formulae, the this generative urge toward license, Dunn and his stu-
members of the Judson Dance Theater experimented dents consciously disavowed the compositional ap-
with so many different kinds of choreographic struc- proaches taught in the modern dance “academy.”
tures and devices that for the generations that have fol- Dunn remembers that he had watched Louis Horst

350
and Doris Humphrey teach their choreography classes between three minutes and four minutes, how do
and was determined to find another pedagogical you stop something, why, what relation does time
method; he found them too rigid and the dances by have to movement, and on and on. Dick Levine
their students too theatrical. taught himself to cry and did so for the full time
The original class had started out with only five period while I held a stopwatch instructed by him
members—Paulus Berenson, Marni Mahaffay, Simone to shout just before the time elapsed, “Stop it! Stop
(Forti) Morris, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. By it! Cut it out!” both of us ending at exactly three
the end of the second year, the participants included minutes. (21)
Judith Dunn (whose status as student sometimes
seemed to blend with that of teacher), Trisha Brown, Other assignments involved collaborations in
Ruth Emerson, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, which autonomous personal control had to be relin-
Al Kurchin, Dick Levine, Gretchen MacLane, John quished within a “semi-independent” working situa-
Herbert McDowell, Joseph Schlichter, Carol Scothorn, tion. Others had to do with subject matter, for in-
and Elaine Summers. Valda Setterfield and David Gor- stance, “Make a dance about nothing special.” Still
don attended occasionally; Robert Rauschenberg, Jill others required the use of written scores or instruc-
Johnston, and Gene Friedman were “regular visitors,” tions. This had partly to do with Dunn’s convictions
and Remy Charlip, David Vaughan, Robert Morris, about “inscrib[ing] dances on the bodies of the
Ray Johnson, and Peter Schumann, among others, dancers . . . on the body of the theater,” and the no-
came from time to time to observe. The composition tion of choreography as a kind of physicalized writing.
of this population alone—it included visual artists, “By planning the dance in a written or drawn manner,
musicians, writers, a theater director, and filmmakers you have a very clear view of the dance and its possibil-
as well as dancers—made for an interdisciplinary brew. ities,” Dunn says. “Laban’s idea was very secondarily to
The basis of Dunn’s approach at first was to find make a Tanzschrift . . . a way to record. Laban’s idea
time structures, taken from musical compositions by was to make a Schrifttanz, to use graphic—written—
contemporary composers (Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez, inscriptions and then to generate activities. Graphic
and others), that dance could share. The principal notation is a way of inventing the dance” (7).
technique was chance scores, but others included more An interest in Labanotation and the theoretical is-
wide-ranging methods of indeterminacy and various sues of recording dance was on the rise in the dance
kinds of rules. Students were assigned to use a graphic community. Dunn’s use of scores was certainly also re-
chance score along the lines of that which Cage had lated to the influence of Cage and other contemporary
made for his Fontana Mix. Another assignment in- composers who were inventing new methods of scor-
volved using number sequences derived from Satie’s ing music in order to fit their new methods of compo-
Trois Gymnopédies. Several students remember dances sition and performance. But the dancers’ use of written
involving time constraints, for instance, “Make a five- scores had a practical basis as well. According to Ruth
minute dance in half an hour.” Trisha Brown recalls Emerson: “There was no rehearsal space, and Bob un-
distinctly the instruction to make a three-minute derstood that. It was well understood by everybody
dance: that most people didn’t have a studio of their own. But
in another week, you were expected to come in with
This assignment was totally nonspecific except for something. [Scores were] the only practical way of
duration, and the ambiguity provoked days of sort- conveying information. . . . [They were] expedient”
ing through possibilities trying to figure out what (25–26).
time meant, was sixty seconds the only difference Dunn recalls that his approach developed generally

Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater / 351

into supplying a “clearinghouse for structures derived putting movements together in ways that weren’t at all
from various sources of contemporary action: dance, obvious or expected” (8). According to Ruth Emerson,
music, painting, sculpture, Happenings, literature” (3). chance also seemed an escape route from the domina-
(However, because the previous generation of modern tion of hierarchical authority: “For me it was a total
choreographers had so tied the meaning of their change from controlling the process of how you made
dances to literary ideas, the verbal arts were the least movement, which was first of all that you were sup-
plumbed.) Beyond the freedom of method and the posed to suffer and . . . struggle with your interior,
inspiration by other art forms, a crucial element in which I couldn’t bear. I hated it. . . . It was such a relief
Dunn’s pedagogy was the discussion of choice patterns to take a piece of paper and work on it without some-
as part of the presentation. Through this “post- one telling me I was making things the wrong way”
mortem” verbal analysis, the importance of the dance- (25).
making process was underscored. Choreographic Once one accepted all kinds of previously unaccept-
method came to be seen as an arena for creativity prior able formal choices that chance engendered (for example,
to, sometimes even instead of, movement invention. stillness and repetition), all sorts of other choreo-
Before moving on to the Judson Dance Theater it- graphic devices became possible—repetition or stillness
self, let us examine some of the methods for student or arbitrariness by choice, rather than simply by
works presented either in Dunn’s class or at the first chance. Despite the calculated formality and fragmenta-
end-of-the-year showing for the class, since the stu- tion of these methods, the movements they organized
dents’ input, as well as Dunn’s, served as a catalyst in were not always abstract. Rainer wrote, about her
that situation, and not all of the students went on to movement choices of that period:
participate in the Concerts at Judson Church.
As I have noted, chance was a favored technique, I dance about things that affect me in a very imme-
not surprisingly in light of Merce Cunningham’s in- diate way. These things can be as diverse as the
fluence on the group (several danced in his company mannerisms of a friend, the facial expression of a
and several more studied with him, and the class itself woman hallucinating on the subway, the pleasure
was given in his studio). And John Cage’s influence was of an aging ballerina as she demonstrates a classical
even greater. For Marni Mahaffay, the marvel of chance movement, a pose from an Etruscan mural, a
was that it seemed to create limitless possibilities: “I hunchbacked man with cancer, images suggested
used the rotation of the moon to make one structure, by fairy tales, children’s play, and of course my own
but it could have been anything—for instance, the body impulses generated in different situations—a
routine of getting up in the morning and cooking an classroom, my own studio, being drunk at a party. I
egg. The path of the moon indicated where things am also deliberately involved in a search for the in-
could happen in space, in the dance” (8). congruous and in using a wide range of individual
Chance was compelling, not only for its generative human and animal actions—speak, shriek, grunt,
capabilities, but because it performed an important slump, bark, look, jump, dance. One or many
psychological function in forcing the choreographer to of these things may appear in a single dance—
give up certain features of control. Mahaffay recalls, depending on what I read, see, and hear during
“To give up your own clichés, to give up your own the period I am working on that dance. It follows,
movement that you were so attached to, was very excit- therefore, that no single dance is about any one
ing. You might only be given enough time to do the idea or story, but rather about a variety of things
beginning of your favorite movement, or to do it much that in performance fuse together and decide the
less than you would have preferred to. You ended up nature of the whole experience. (14)

352 \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures

Here Rainer is laying a groundwork for what would It was this marathon, hours-long evening, with twenty-
replace chance as the key choreographic structure for three dances by fourteen choreographers, that snow-
postmodern dance: radical juxtaposition. Collage— balled into what soon became known as the Judson
with roots in dada and Duchamp, but also reflecting Dance Theater. As with Dunn’s class, the choreographic
the crazy-quilt of the American urban landscape— devices represented on this roster of works were many;
was a preferred method for many visual artists of the since most of the dances had been composed as assign-
period; the Village Voice dance critic, Jill Johnston, ments for the course, the methods reiterate those dis-
likened a 1962 piece by Fred Herko to a Rauschenberg cussed above, with some additions.
combine. In Rainer’s The Bells and Satie for Two (also The connection between aleatory techniques and
of 1962), Johnston finds a precedent for the repetitive the automatism of surrealism emerged in the first event
choreographic strategy in Gertrude Stein’s circular, of the evening, which was not, strictly speaking, a
repetitive writing. dance, but a chance-edited film by Gene Friedman,
Another choreographic method used in Dunn’s John Herbert McDowell, and Elaine Summers. (It was
class, the stripping down of movement to “one thing,” not the last film to be billed as a dance event at a Jud-
which later would resurface as a stringent asceticism son concert.) Ruth Emerson’s Narrative, the first live
paralleling that of minimalist sculpture, characterized event on the program, used a score of interlocking di-
dances by Simone Forti and Steve Paxton. Forti’s rections involving walking patterns, focus, and tempo,
“dance constructions” from that period dealt in ongo- as well as cues for actions based on the other dancers’
ing activity, a continuum of motion rather than actions. The “drama” in this “narrative” was physically,
phrases or complex movement designs. Even her re- rather than psychologically motivated; a change in spa-
sponse to one of Dunn’s Satie assignments is telling: tial or temporal relationships between people, no mat-
rather than ordering her movements to the counts ter how abstractly based, seemed to carry psychologi-
given by the number structures, she used the numbers cal, interpersonal meaning. Emerson’s Timepiece, based
to cue certain singular actions: “If it was a five she put on chance (its very title was a tribute to the stopwatch,
her head down. If it was a three, she just put her two the renowned insignia of both John Cage and Robert
feet down. It was an exquisite dance,” Remy Charlip Dunn), was structured by making a chart that had
remembers. Paxton made a dance in which he carried columns for movement quality (percussive or sus-
furniture out of the school office a piece at a time, and tained), timing (on a scale of one to six, ranging from
another in which he sat on a bench and ate a sandwich. very slow to very fast), time limits (fifteen-second peri-
And at least three other devices that would be used ods, multiplied by factors ranging from one to six),
in future Judson dances or works by Judson members movement material (five possibilities: “red bag, unty-
arose in the Dunn class: rule games, interlocking in- ing; turn, jump, jump; hands, head, plie; walking for-
structions for a group, and using or “reading” a space ward side back side side; heron leg to floor”), space
(or some other structure not originally made as a score, time (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or stillness), space (five areas of
such as a child’s drawing or the activity of other peo- the stage plus offstage), front (direction for the facing
ple) as a score. of the body, with four square directions, four diago-
nals, and one wild choice), and levels in space (high,
low, or medium). The qualities having to do with
A Concert of Dance (1)
movement and timing were put together, along the
The second year of Dunn’s class culminated in a public graph of absolute time, separately from the qualities
showing of work in the sanctuary of the Judson Memo- dealing with space. Thus changes in area, facing, and
rial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. level in space might occur during a single movement

Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater / 353

phrase. Given the fact that there were usually six ele- before, it was not yet a favored method in the “break-
ments in a gamut of choices for a given feature, the away” years of the early sixties.
choices were probably selected by the roll of a die. Two dances that had been made for a class assignment
Emerson was a trained mathematician as well as a about “cut-ups” were Carol Scothorn’s Isolations and
dancer; chance choreography appealed to her, and her Ruth Emerson’s shoulder r. Scothorn’s involved cutting up
Timepiece serves as a paradigm for chance choreog- Labanotation scores and Emerson’s included Laban
raphy in its categorical exhaustiveness (for this reason, material, among other elements. The cut-up is a subcat-
I have described it in detail). Elaine Summers’s semi- egory of chance procedures that was favored by the
parodic approach to aleatory techniques in her Instant dadaists. Tristan Tzara gives instructions for how to
Chance signaled a growing impatience with a method make a dadaist poem based on cutting words out of an
that, for many, was becoming unfortunately fetishized. article, shaking them up in a bag, and reassembling
David Gordon complained that in Dunn’s class, “Judy them. Through Cage, the young New York avant-
and Bob were really very rigid about this chance proce- gardists were familiar with Robert Motherwell’s book
dure stuff they were teaching. And I had already been on The Dada Painters and Poets, published in 1951, in
through a lot of this chance stuff with Jimmy [Waring]. which these instructions appear. Perhaps the Tzara
I wasn’t very religious about it.” Rainer wrote, “The manifesto was even the source of this choreography as-
emphasis on aleatory composition reached ridiculous signment. But, in any case, many of the methods used
proportions sometimes. The element of chance didn’t en- by the dadaists and surrealists to undercut meaning or
sure that a work was good or interesting, yet I felt that the to release new meanings—from chance to collage—
tenor of the discussions [in the Dunn course] often were consciously explored in the dance arena. That is,
supported this notion.”2 In Summers’s Instant Chance, the through their knowledge of the historical avant-garde, the
“hidden operations” of the chance procedure were Judson dancers could find a methodological treasure
made part of the piece when the dancers threw large trove for their own, similar purposes.
numbered styrofoam blocks in the air and performed The use of instructions is related to chance in that it
whatever movement sequences were dictated by shape, foregrounds issues of control. Chance undermines the
color, and number of the block. choreographer’s control by subverting personal choices.
The use of “one thing” as structure surfaced in two (That, at least, is the theory; ultimately, however, the
dances that, despite their formal simplicity, were ex- choreographer’s choices are revealed in the original
tremely theatrical: David Gordon’s Mannequin Dance, gamuts out of which the chance-decisions are made.)
in which, wearing a blood-stained biology lab coat, he Instruction scores given to the dancer(s) by the chore-
slowly turned and lay down on the floor while singing ographer exaggerate control, making palpable and ob-
and wiggling his fingers; and Fred Herko’s Once or jective the normally implicit, hegemonic position of
Twice a Week I Put on Sneakers to Go Uptown, which Jill choreographer over dancer—at least, making it explicit in
Johnston described as “a barefoot Suzie-Q in a tassel- the choreographic process (since neither chance nor in-
veil head-dress, moving around the big performing struction as a generating device is necessarily evident to
area . . . only the barefoot Suzie-Q with sometimes a the spectator). However, depending on how strictly the
lazy arm snaking up and collapsing down. [And] with score codes instructions, such a method can also permit
no alteration of pace or accent” (43). Implicit in these a great deal of freedom of interpretation by the dancer, re-
works was the austere, formalist approach that would casting hegemony into partnership. Steve Paxton’s use of
become rampant in the period I have elsewhere called a score for Proxy grew directly out of thoughts about
“analytic postmodern dance” in the seventies,3 al- such issues. He was attempting through the score to
though it had been introduced by Forti at least a year make the learning and rehearsal process more objective

354 \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures

and impersonal, to get away from the cult of imitation used the photographs in it so that they progressed
that he felt surrounded modern dance, a cult that began on the surface of the page as if it were a map. If you
with the direct transmission of movements from start analyzing that way, you get deeper and deeper.
teacher to pupil and ended with a hierarchically struc- You get more clues for structure, like how many
tured dance company. At the same time, he attempted paragraphs are there? Beginning with The Daily
through the score to go beyond what Cunningham and Wake, I became very interested in using photos as
Cage had done in using chance techniques, for, as he puts resource material, and other structures as maps.
it, “My feeling . . . was that one further step was (53–54)
needed, which was to arrive at movement by chance.
That final choice, of making movement, always bothered Another way to distance movement from personal
my logic. . . . Why couldn’t it be chance all the way?” Pax- style or personal expression, anathema to this genera-
ton’s score was made by randomly dropping images and tion precisely because it had become so overblown in
then gluing them in place on a large piece of brown pa- the works of “historical” modern dance, was the com-
per: cut-out photographs of people walking and en- pletion of tasks or the handling of objects. Summers
gaged in sports, plus cartoon images (Mutt and Jeff, had this in mind in her Instant Chance. Robert Morris
and one from a travel advertisement). A moveable red dot programmatically developed this method in Arizona
marked the beginning the dancer had chosen. The (to be discussed below).
score, then, served to mediate between choreographer and Yet another term in the debates about choreo-
dancer, to distance the movements themselves from the graphic control and the boundaries of chance was the use
choreographer’s body and hence his personal style. Ac- of indeterminacy, that is, intervention by the performers
cording to Paxton: through limited use of improvisation. This exceeded
even Cunningham’s relinquishing of control through
That was a selection process but one removed chance (he was later, in Story [1963], perhaps inspired by
from actually deciding what to do with the pic- some of the Judson experiments, to try his hand at in-
tures, because I made the score and then handed it determinacy, but he was not pleased by the results).
over to the performers, and they could take a linear Rainer’s Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms, also performed at
or circular path through the score. You could start Concert 1, was a trio in which the dancers could choose
any place you wanted to, but then you went all the when to perform one of a series of predetermined
way through it. You did as many repeats as were in- movement options, most of which, as the title suggests,
dicated, and you went back and forth as indicated. were concerned with gestures and positions of the
But how long it took and what you did between arms. Rainer dubbed this method, which combined
postures was not set at all. It was one big area of chance and improvisation, “spontaneous determina-
choice not at all influenced by the choreographer. tion.” William Davis, one of the dancers, remembers of
The only thing I did in rehearsing the work was to the first performance (at the Maidman Playhouse in
go over it with them and talk about the details of March 1962):
the postures. (58)
I think it was the first time dancers were waiting for
Summers used a newspaper as a score in The Daily a curtain to go up without having any idea what-
Wake for similar reasons. She describes her procedure: soever of the shape the dance was going to take.
That kind of thing was being done musically [in
I took the front page and laid it out on the floor the work of Cage and his colleagues]. What it really
and used the words in it to structure the dance, and resembled was jazz musicianship, more than chance

Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater / 355

 operations, because we were all working for a time workshop was understood to be analytic and critical;
when we might, for example, do this, or seeing new dances were not rehearsed there, but performed
what someone else is doing, think “Oh yes, I can for peer scrutiny and feedback. Thus the emphasis in
connect this to that,” or “They’re doing fine, I’ll workshop discussions was on compositional method as
just let them go at it.” It’s a sense of shape taking well as such related issues as performance style.
place in three people’s minds as the dance is going By January 1963, the Judson weekly workshop had
on. (52) accumulated enough material to organize two con-
certs. The press release for Concerts 3 and 4 specifically
Without going into detail about the rest of the underscored the workshop’s emphasis on choreo-
dances on this historic program, I would like to note graphic method. And, importantly, it pointed out that
several other choreographic devices appearing in this even though the search was on for new devices, new
first Judson concert (some of which have already been structures, and new theories, even traditional methods
discussed in the section on Dunn’s class or will be dis- were permitted as but one more possibility in a wide,
cussed further below) that would remain rich lodes for unrestricted range. “These concerts,” it read,
the Judson choreographers to mine: children’s and
adult’s games (Gretchen MacLane’s Quibic); quoting are in the series initiated at the church . . . with the
other artworks, either dance or in other media aim of periodically presenting the work of dancers,
(Rainer’s Divertissement, Deborah Hay’s Rain Fur); the composers, and various non-dancers working with
use of popular music and social dancing (Herko’s Once ideas related to dance. The methods of composition
or Twice a Week . . . , Davis’s Crayon); collaboration of the works in this series range from the tradi-
(Like Most People by Fred Herko and Cecil Taylor; tional ones which predetermine all elements of a
Rafladan by Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, and Charles Rot- piece to those which establish a situation, environ-
mil); and the collage, assemblage, or list format (Pax- ment, or basic set of instructions governing one or
ton’s Transit, Gordon’s Helen’s Dance, Deborah Hay’s more aspects of a work—thus allowing details and
Five Things, Rainer’s Ordinary Dance, among others). continuity to become manifest in a spontaneous or
indeterminate manner.
It is hoped that the contents of this series will
The Judson Workshop
not so much reflect a single point of view as convey
Shortly after the momentous Concert of Dance in July a spirit of inquiry into the nature of new possibili-
1962, Elaine Summers had organized A Concert of ties. (82)
Dance 2 in Woodstock, New York, an artists’ summer
colony (before it became famous for the rock festival Some of the dances in these two concerts were
held there in 1969). Several dances from the Judson partly structured by the physical space of the venue:
Church concert were shown and some new works by the church gym (for instance a collaboration by Robert
additional choreographers were added. Huot and Robert Morris, War, which put La Monte
When in the fall of 1962 Robert Dunn did not con- Young playing the musical accompaniment in the
tinue his choreography class, Rainer and Paxton organ- cage). The constraints of the physical performance
ized meetings of the group, at first in the studio Rainer space would affect or directly shape the dances in sev-
shared with James Waring and Aileen Passloff on St. eral future Judson concerts, in fact becoming a hall-
Mark’s Place in the East Village, and then, after about a mark of the innovative spirit of the group. One long
month, at the Judson Church, where they met weekly thread leading from such works was the spate of “envi-
in the basement gymnasium. The purpose of this ronmental” dances in the late sixties and early seven-

356 \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures

ties. But even where such considerations were not ex-
Some Exemplary Pieces
plicit in the dances, the space still governed such ele-
ments of performance as the intimacy or distance be- Nearly two hundred dances were produced by the Jud-
tween spectator and performer and the shape and son Dance Theater between July 1962 and October
visibility of the “stage.” In Concert 5, held in a roller- 1964, the time of the last concert officially sponsored
skating rink in Washington, D.C., Robert Rauschen- by the workshop. After the workshop disbanded, dance
berg built his entire dance (Pelican) on place; in it, performances continued to be produced at the church
Carolyn Brown danced in pointe shoes partnered by on an individual basis—the “bus-stop situation,” as
two men on roller skates. As well, the enormity of the Judith Dunn later called it. A “second generation” of
space led the group to perform in various parts of the Judson dancers, including Meredith Monk, Kenneth
rink, making the audience mobile, and sometimes to King, and Phoebe Neville showed work at the church,
fill the space (and challenge audience attention) by per- as did members of James Waring’s company (such as
forming two dances simultaneously in different places. Toby Armour, Carol Marcy, and Deborah Lee), War-
Concerts 9–12, held in the Gramercy Arts Theater— ing himself, Aileen Passloff, and various original mem-
which had a proscenium stage so small one could bers of the Judson Dance Theater workshop. There
barely move without moving off it—gave rise to a was even a revival of Judson “hits,” presented at the
number of works in which motion was either minimal, church, as early as 1966.
very slow, or spilled into the house. These three radical As I have noted above, many of the seeds of the
approaches to movement, emerging here out of neces- methodology for the workshop were already planted in
sity, would also become approaches of choice, badges the Robert Dunn class; the first concert and those se-
of the Judson heritage. Steve Paxton’s Afternoon, spon- lected concerts discussed in the preceding section rep-
sored by the workshop, took place in a forest in New resent a sizeable cross-section of the techniques that
Jersey; for this dance, Paxton was directly concerned would continue to provide food for dancing over the
with how the natural ground surface and “scenery” next several years, and by the next several cohorts of
would change the movement, which had been con- choreographers. I am concentrating here on the pio-
structed in a studio. neering choreography by the members of the original
Many of the dances for Concert 13 were united workshop, but obviously space does not even permit a
both by spatial considerations and by the use of a discussion of every dance performed over the year and
physical structure (they all happened in, on, or around a half of the Judson Dance Theater workshop’s lifetime
a sculpture commissioned from Charles Ross) as well (and, of course, since not every dance was the result of
as by performance style (the sculpture, evoking a jun- an entirely new method, such a review would be te-
gle gym, sparked a common spirit of playfulness). dious). Therefore I would like to devote the next sec-
Once again, a Judson emblem—dance and art as tion of the paper to discussing selected dances that not
play—was strikingly condensed in a single event. Fi- only exemplify the choreographic concerns of the
nally, a single concert, 14 (one of the last given jointly group and of individuals in the group, but that also
by the workshop before it disbanded in 1964), was or- point in directions that have proved fruitful for the
ganized around a single choreographic method: im- succeeding generations of choreographers in the post-
provisation. Although improvisation was not, statisti- modern mode.
cally speaking, a common device for the Judson The first full-length evening dance by a single chore-
choreographers, this concert, too, seemed symbolically ographer sponsored by the Judson Dance Theater was
to lay claim to a new alternative method for making Yvonne Rainer’s Terrain. This dance, in four sections, in
and performing dances. retrospect seems a treasure trove of choreographic devices,

Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater / 357

structures, performance attitudes, and other aspects cues effectively blocked the dancer’s performing
of style; in it one sees the preoccupations that wend “set” and reduced him to frantically attempting to
their way in one form or another through the rest of respond to cues—reduced him from performance
Rainer’s oeuvre, reaching their fullest expression in her to action. (143)
The Mind Is a Muscle and Continuous Project—Altered
Daily. The title is prophetic, for this dance represents the For Morris, objects were superior to tasks as a
“terrain” of dance Rainer continued to map out in her means to solve problems and thus create a structure for
choreographic career and even in her film work. The the dance. The manipulation of an object generated
dance used methods culled from child’s play and rule movement without becoming more important than
games (the sections “Diagonal” and “Play”). It had an en- the performer or the performance. In Arizona, Morris
tire section based on parody through pastiche (“Duet,” threw a javelin, swung a small light while the stage
in which Rainer performed a ballet adagio and Trisha lights dimmed, and adjusted a T-form; all these ob-
Brown performed a balletic sequence in the upper jects, he wrote, “held no inherent interest for me but
body with burlesque bumps and grinds in the lower were means for dealing with specific problems,” such
torso, ending with both assuming “cheesecake” poses, as setting up relationships among movement, space,
all to a collage of music that included African drum- and duration, or shifting focus between the “egocentric
ming, American jazz, and fragments of Massenet’s and the exocentric” in the small light contrasting to the
opera Thaïs). The technique of “spontaneous determi- dimming stage lights.
nation” that had provided the armature for Dance for 3 Lucinda Childs in Carnation (and in several other
People and 6 Arms also surfaced here, as did elements of works) also built a dance around the cool manipula-
repetition and chance, the list as organizational tool, tion of everyday things. Yet here the deadpan attitude
and the generating of movement by turning to another itself and the kinds of objects used (things associated
art form—in this case, erotic Hindu temple sculpture. with women’s beauty care or domestic activities such as
Talking while dancing, a technique by which Rainer cleaning and cooking) add up to a seething “hot”
had electrified spectators in Ordinary Dance, surfaced significance. (Kenneth King’s cup/saucer/two dancers/
here in the two sequences from the “Solo” section that radio, a slightly later dance by a member of the “second
used texts by Spencer Holst. generation” of Judson choreographers, radically ex-
Rainer also used several objects for some of the so- tends the sense of alienation Childs hints at humor-
los in the “Solo” section of Terrain. For the Judson ously, partly by equating all the elements listed in the
choreographers, as for their contemporaries the pop title.) Undoubtedly the fascination with the object—
artists, the ordinary object was particularly resonant. the mute, ordinary, everyday object—reflects a grow-
Robert Morris wrote in The Drama Review that objects ing consumer society, the burgeoning cornucopia of
and task behavior were two preferred methods for rins- available goods of the United States during this period.
ing the dance of excess expressiveness and to find new Yvonne Rainer’s Some Thoughts on Improvisation
ways of moving the body: (part of Concert 14) is another paradigmatic piece for
several reasons: its use of improvisation as a structuring
From the beginning I wanted to avoid the pulled- device, its baring of the devices, its analytic reflexivity.
up, turned-out, anti-gravitational qualities that not This dance, too, like so many others by Rainer during
only gave a body definition and role as “dancer” this period, includes a spoken text, but in this case the
but qualify and delimit the movement available to words are taped, serving as the “musical accompani-
it. The challenge was to find alternative movement. ment” to the dance—or a sound track, to liken the
. . . A fair degree of complexity of . . . rules and event to Rainer’s later terrain, the cinema. As Rainer

358 \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures

improvised the dance, dressed in a black dress and to, for example, the Grand Union—one of the most
high-heeled shoes (a costume that not only stands for a brilliant projects of the postmodern dance.
certain image of femininity, but that also severely lim- Another key outgrowth of the Judson Dance The-
its movement possibilities), her voice described the im- ater was the use of multiple media, or intermedia, espe-
provisatory process, both in general and in this specific cially film, in the dance. This seems only fair, since, al-
case. Her monologue moves from an almost phenome- though many of the dance ideas of the group came
nological description of thoughts and experiences (“So from searching for the essence of dance per se, still oth-
I keep on sizing up the situation, see. And I keep on ers came from the inspiration or influence of other me-
walking. And I make decisions. He has left the room, I dia and other art forms, in particular the visual arts,
will run; she is standing stockstill, I will bring my head new music, and film. Of course, in the spirit of break-
close to hers; that man is moving his arms around, I ing down the boundaries between the art forms, artists
will do as he does; the wall looms close, I will walk un- in different fields were making events that so traded in
til I bump into it” [196]) to a dissection of the choice- mixing media that it was often difficult to categorize
making patterns in improvisation. She lists three as- them, except by the author’s label. An early mixed-
pects of choice: impulses, anti-impulses, ideas. The media event at the Judson Dance Theater was Beverly
action, she notes, can come from any of these, includ- Schmidt’s The Seasons. It was a vignette from a larger
ing the decision not to follow an impulse. It is, finally, “film-stage” performance, called Blossoms, conceived
the instinct of the performer, including the assertion of by the choreographer’s husband, Roberts Blossom. For
physical and mental control and the mastery of anxi- The Seasons, Schmidt memorized the dance she had
ety, that fuels the performance, she concludes. “When improvised for the film shown in the earlier perform-
it goes forward it moves with an inexorable thrust and ance, then choreographed a new live solo, which
exerts a very particular kind of tension: spare, un- was performed simultaneously with the film projec-
adorned, highly dramatic, loaded with expectancy—a tion, sometimes in counterpoint or opposition and
field for action. What more could one ask for” (197). sometimes in unison. The dance was in four sections,
Although improvisation is often remembered as one with live music by Philip Corner and Malcolm Gold-
of the most important legacies of the Judson Dance stein, and recorded music by Purcell. Each section had
Theater, this particular concert (14), with its eight a distinctive movement quality, costume, and color—a
dances all conjoined by the shared method of improvi- distinctive mood, which Schmidt made correspond to
sation, was not considered successful. Jill Johnston the four seasons.
wrote: The Seasons served as a model for future events in
both dance and film. The following year, two evening-
Ironically, one of the concerts on this last series . . .
length concerts by individual members of the work-
was a great improvisation, with minimal restric-
shop incorporating film into the dancing were spon-
tions on freedom, and the most impressive collec-
sored by the Judson Dance Theater—Elaine Summers’s
tion of vanguard dancers and artists . . . couldn’t
Fantastic Gardens and Judith Dunn’s Last Point. Mere-
get this tacitly accepted Open Sesame (free play)
dith Monk, who arrived on the Judson scene after the
off the ground. Everybody was very polite except
end of the workshop, made the fusion of dance and
for Yvonne Rainer . . . and the response to her
film central to her work from the beginning, in such
nerve should have been pandemonium if anybody
pieces as Sixteen Millimeter Earrings (1966). Reading
had faced the assertion squarely. (198)
Johnston’s review of Schmidt’s dance, one is even re-
Yet it was this improvisatory side of the Judson Dance minded of Lucinda Childs’s recent collaboration with
Theater, signaling freedom, that would later give rise Sol LeWitt, using film as décor, in Dance:

Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater / 359

 The interplay of images—the soft, majestic volume quantity and quality of the shards, their capacity
of the figure on the screen with the diminutive for transmitting various types of information—she
flesh and blood on stage—made a shifting mirror puts them together, with a glue partly consisting of
of the kind of dimension that reached far beyond, informed speculation, to form a picture of the thing
in the past and future, the moments of reckoning as it was. But this picture will almost always still be
on that small stage. Near the end I had the un- incomplete.
canny feeling of an ancient presence when her head Using the scores and the oral and written memoirs
loomed large in an instant of immobilized of the choreographers, on the one hand (which tells us
totemistic grandeur. (159) something about sources, intentions, and process), and
the descriptions, interpretations, and evaluations of
The list goes on and on: dances built on parodies of witnesses—colleagues, critics, and spectators—on the
other dances or of performance styles (such as David other hand (which tells us something about reception
Gordon’s Random Breakfast ); dances structured like and product), I have pieced together the preceding
sports events or based on sports movements (for exam- accounts—accounts that, as you have seen, vary in
ple, Judith Dunn’s Speedlimit), dances generated out of terms of fullness and even in terms of accuracy.
pure flashes of energy (Carolee Schneemann’s Newspa- The structures and methods of some Judson Dance
per Event, et al.), repetition, tasks, free association, “rit- Theater works are simply lost and will never be re-
ual,” unfinished work. As well, choreographers con- trieved. (Deborah Hay, for example, destroyed her
tinued to use all the methods and devices I have written records afterwards and does not remember
mentioned above: time structures taken from music, most of her dances of that period.) For other works,
chance, indeterminacy, “spontaneous determination,” we may know about the methods in a general way
rules, limits, collaboration, written scores, interlocking without gaining any sense of the way the dance
instructions for a group, and using or “reading” a space looked and felt—its movement details, its perform-
(or some other structure not originally made as a score, ance style. Yet other works are well documented and
such as a child’s drawing or the activity of other peo- well remembered enough to live on—some even in
ple) as a score, children’s and adult’s games, quoting live reconstructions (though it is important to realize
other artworks (both dance and other media), the use that reconstructed dances may not necessarily replicate
of popular music and social dancing, the collage, as- the original exactly).4
semblage, or list format, “a situation, environment, or
basic set of instructions governing one or more aspects A ground was cleared at the Judson that created new
of a work,” automatism, satire, cut-ups, handling ob- challenges for the following generation; in the 1970s,
jects, responding to physical space, improvisational an entire wing of analytic, formalist postmodern
verbal content, mixing media—and even traditional dancers extended and consolidated that passion for re-
methods of composition, such as classical musical vealing choreographic process, which sprang from the
structures, image construction, and aspiring to values freedom of method (and the concomitant articulation
of unity, complexity, and coherence. of method) of the 1960s. But, by the 1980s, choreo-
graphic process seemed less important than choreo-
I might say a word here about my methods. I have graphic product—for obvious cultural reasons, but
tried to get at choreographic structures or devices in a also perhaps because methodological innovation was a
number of ways, not all of which were available for frontier so thoroughly explored, to many it seemed no
each dance. The dance historian is like an archaeolo- new devices could be discovered. But the 1980s are an-
gist, digging up fragments and—depending on the other story.

360 \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures

Notes
1. The sources for the information in this paper not oth- A Handbook of Contemporary Innovation in the Arts, ed.
erwise footnoted will be found in the text and footnotes of Stanley Trachtenberg (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
my book Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 1985), 81–100.
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983). Page num- 4. A program of Judson reconstructions, curated by
bers from Democracy’s Body are in parentheses following the Wendy Perron and Cynthia Hedstrom, was produced at St.
quotations. Mark’s Church Danspace in April 1982, as part of the Ben-
2. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–73 (Halifax: Press of the nington College Judson Project. The reconstructions were
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New recorded on videotape by the Lincoln Center Library
York University Press, 1974), 7. Dance Research Collection and may be viewed there.
3. Sally Banes, “Dance,” in The Postmodern Moment:

Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater / 361