Drawing with Bodies
For Kaprow, a painter and (for a year) a student of John Cage, doing Happenings since 1957 has replaced painting; Happenings are, as he puts it, what his painting has become. - Susan Sontag, Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition, 1962.
Performance art is unlike any other artistic practise in that after-the-fact it exists only in the memory. A dance performance, for instance, can be captured by the lens, its choreography written on the page, but the original work is ephemeral. Ephemerality has been the fascination of artists since time immemorial, not least for the participants of the Judson Dance Theater. In 1962 in Manhatten, New York a group of visual artists, dancers, choreographers, musicians and writers assembled at the the Judson Memorial Hall to collaborate and produce work that would transform the trajectory of performance art.
This essay will explore how the Judson Dance Theater redefined what we understand as dance and forged a new relationship between dance and visual art. It will attempt to address why art and dance were radically reimagined at this time by looking at Judson’s shared aesthetic politics; the instrumental role of composer John Cage and the broader cultural context. It will consider how the a democratic workshop model meant members could experiment in art forms outside their artistic specialty which they would continue to hone post-Judson. It will focus on the work of two Judson members, seminal choreographer Yvonne Rainer and pop-art pioneer Robert Rauschenberg, as examples of a cross-pollination between art forms.
When 1960s Manhattan was a pressure cooker in creativity and experimentation, a group of choreographers, dancers, writers, musicians and painters came together under the roof of the Judson Memorial Hall on a weekly basis and reinvented their art forms. The large Baptist church was administered by the liberal priest Howard Moody who invited local artists to exhibit, rehearse and perform in the space. The church also had an art gallery where the work of Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg was being displayed.
In the summer of 1962, Merce Cunningham dancer Yvonne Rainer approached Moody about the possibility of performing at the church with an ensemble who had been training with Robert and Judith Dunn. Moody welcomed the group to workshop and present their expanding material, and on 6 July that year, their first collaborative performance took place - A Concert of Dance (1962). The title was crucial; the ‘happenings’ that were performed in the space that evening, from the everyday to the absurd, would come under the name of ‘dance’. And so it was the first of a series of works that would redefine dance by dismantling conventional understanding of what qualifies as such, incorporating pedestrian movement, film, everyday objects, indeterminacy music and singing. The show was comprised of twenty three solo and group dances, consisting of simple and complex choreographic phrases, at variable tempos, performed by men and women, wearing plain and elaborate costume.
The boundaries of dance were defied from the get-go as the opening item on the bill was in fact the short film Overture which segued into a group piece. ‘Chance procedures’ were embraced to produce the ephemeral and bridge the gap between art and life. The ‘everyday’ as absurd, and worthy of being art. Choreographed by fourteen people with seventeen performers, in essence, A Concert of Dance was democratic. This model stood in great contrast with the previous choreographic confinements of the dance world. From the onset Judson was committed to inclusivity through co-operative workshop and a no-audition policy. The impetus to create their own company, after all, followed their rejection from the annual Young Choreographers Concert that year. The Judson group decided create their own situation which, as dance critic Jill Johnston declared, was the most exciting developments in a generation (Johnson, 1962). Referring to Judson, Al Carmines, artistic director at the church, said, “I didn’t quite know what I was looking at, but I sensed that it was important.” (Velasco, 2012) Carmines’ uncertainty illustrates just how radically different the work was; absent from comparison, it existed outside the dominant cultural narrative. Judson was launched and from that time on their benchmark set high.
Modern dance, whilst it might not have known it then, was in need of a shake-up from the Judson Dance Theater. It had become institutionalised as dance academies were pressured to meet the demands of reign holding matriarchs. Since the 20s, modern dance had rebelled against the rules of classical ballet and advocated a more freestyle form of movement. Despite this, claiming everyday gesture was dance was to resist the codes that still defined what that was. The institution would immediately reject participants of the Merce Cunningham workshop who had been under the influence of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg since the 50s.
In 1952 Rauschenberg collaborated in what is now considered the first ‘Happening’ - Theatre Piece No.1. Orchestrated by Cage and underscored by his music, the work incorporated dance, visual art, music and spoken word, with Rauschenberg on an old fashioned phonograph. The performance took place at Black Mountain College, where Rauschenberg was a student and Cage a tutor. According to Cage, the work would explore “purposeful purposelessness” (Cage, 1965) as dancers would perform a range of actions of their choosing at set times. Cunningham and other dancers moved across and beyond the stage, which was in-the-round, blurring the boundary of performance space with audience. Cage also read aloud poems and lectures which were unrelated to one another. Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) were suspended at various angles above the audience, their monochrome surfaces reflecting light and shadow in the performance space. (Cage, 1965) Cage composed his silent work for piano 4’33 that summer, inspired by Rauschenberg’s white paintings (Jacobson, 2004).
Robert Rauschenberg at an exhibition of his work at the Stable Gallery, in New York, in 1953. Image: Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty.
In visual art, an explosion of abstract expressionism changed our visual perception. The mid-fifties had seen modern art move away from sincerity to a postmodern irony, responsive in its production and hyper-self aware. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were using humour and irony to turn out Pop-Art, drawing inspiration from commercial culture. Robert Rauschenberg was also bringing the everyday into his ‘Combines’, actually incorporating radios in Broadcast (1962) which viewers were encouraged to alter. In the Cunningham studio, dancers were moving to John Cage’s indeterminacy musical score. By which time, Rauschenberg had created many sets and costumes for the choreographer - which immediately fed back into his painting (Jacobson, 2004). It was, according to MoMA curator Stuart Corner, a “watershed moment when the relationship between bodies and objects, movement and sculptures, was being fundamentally rethought” (Janevski, et al, 2018).
By the sixties, the Fluxus movement was in full flow and artists had adopted a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude toward creative production. As the fundamental ideas of Cage were transmitting through dance workshops at the Cunningham studio, sound began to play an instrumental role in explorations of movement. Compositional techniques, such as chance, were transferred from music and visual art, into dance. Chance-based composition released performers from the confinements of artistic intent and encouraged spontaneous collaboration. Cage’s musical score, or notations on performance, asked participants to perform tasks open to variability of interpretation. In the Dunn’s workshops, works were also created with an ’indeterminacy’ approach. Dancers were asked to score a phrase of movement, pass it on to a partner to interpret, along with their own, which would produce four district sequences (Zendora, 1996). When abstract expressionists embraced chance creating ‘action paintings’, the authorship was no longer purely credited to the artist, but to chance itself. Similarly, in the Dunn’s workshops, dancers became choreographers in their own right.
The narrow space between art and life can be captured no better than by performance art. Robert Rauschenberg had long been preoccupied with bridging the two, but it was not until the Judson Dance Theater that he began choreographing works himself. During the previous decade, Rauschenberg had contributed to a huge output of Merce Cunningham Dance productions as the costume, set and lighting designer. He toured internationally with the company and made long-term friendships with the dancers who, according to Rainer, he “loved being around” (Guardian, 2010). For Rauschenberg, Judson was a canvas to extend visual art into performance. In his debut work, Pelican (1963), he and Alex Hay precariously roller-skated around the serene dancer Carolyn Brown. Set to a Rauschenberg score, himself and Hay wore large cargo parachutes extended on steel rods as backpacks and circled around Brown who performed a sequence of movement. As Rauschenberg’s choreography became known as drawing with bodies, a new focus on the materiality of a performance brought dance into visual art.
Robert Rauschenberg’s Pelican, 1963. Image: MoMA.
It is with photography and film that we are able to look back on Pelican and other Judson works. Despite many written accounts of the Judson era, had it not been for photographic technology, these new ‘happenings’ would have ran the risk of disappearing from art history. Film allowed artists to transpose the ephemeral into something tangible; it extended dance into visual art. Judson members used video material as a tool in the rehearsal process and as part of the performance. For dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, this would be elemental to her career in film. Fortunately, it was acting that first brought Rainer to New York; she had not learnt the rules of traditional dance to concern herself with the extent of which she was breaking ground at Judson. For Rainer, the Judson Dance Theatre was the most vibrant situation dancers of her generation could have got themselves involved in (Walker Art Center (2011). Amongst her dance works made during that period and performed in conjunction with short, minimalist films was Trio A (1966) and The Mind Is a Muscle (1968). She choreographed Trio A for a solo dancer which would perform a seamless flow of everyday movements including walking, kneeling, rolling and toe tapping to no music. In a performance to camera in 1978, Rainer can be seen moving in the sequence plain black attire, without any staging and or backdrop. Stripped down to its bare essentials, the dance rejects the spectacle and glamour accredited to modern dance of the period.
In the staging of The Mind Is a Muscle a screen, situated downstage centre, projects Volleyball (1968). Running at ten minutes, the film captures Rainer’s legs repeatedly walking into the frame to meet a volleyball that is continuously rolled into the frame from various off-screen angles (Rainer, 2006). The dancers on stage would occasionally assemble behind the screen which created a dramatic contrast between the human scale body, and that in the larger projection. This “radical juxtaposition” (Sontag, 1962) between dance and film produced a distinct exploration of space and time that would characterise Rainer’s work.
Yvonne Rainer, The Mind Is a Muscle, 1968.
The Judson Dance Theatre has come to epitomise the unification between dance, visual arts and music. Whilst its active period was brief (the collective dissipated in 1965 when members began making work elsewhere) the transformational relationships they had developed, both personal and professional, would last a lifetime. What is more, the footprint Judson left on the arts fundamentally changed the way we think about the stage and the gallery forever. Rainer boiled it down to luck when she was asked why such a diverse group of skilled and openminded artists decided to work together in that particular cultural moment (Walker Art Center, 2011). As Bernard Jacobson noted on Rauschenberg’s career - these people were in the right city at the right time (Jacobson, 2004). That is not to take away their agency; the Judson members pushed the boundaries of their art forms, recognised they could not operate within system and knew they needed to create an entirely new context in which to create work. Dancing a classical ballet to Cage’s experimental score would have not aligned with the politics of his music. The Judson group felt the pulse of the city, forced by rejection from the institution and motivated by a sheer determination to move, create, experiment, fought for space to reclaim their art forms in unforeseen ways.
References
Zendora, N. (1997) ‘A Magician in the Classroom’, Movement Research Performance Journal 14, p. 3
Cage, J. (1961) ‘Silence: Lectures and Writings’, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.
Jacobson, B. (2004) Robert Rauschenberg 2K+. New York: Bernard Jacobson Gallery. ISBN: 1872784291.
Cage, J. Kirby, M. Schechner, R. (1965) ‘An Interview with John Cage’, The Tulane Drama Review, The MIT Press. Vol. 10, No. 2
Sontag, S. (1966) ‘Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition’. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Rainer, Y. (2006) Feelings are facts: a life. MIT Press.
Janevski, A. Lax, T. J. (2018) ‘Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done.’ New York: MoMA.
Johnston, Jill. (1962) ‘Democracy’, The Village Voice.
Velasco, D. (2012) ‘Yvonne Rainer’, Judson at 50. Artforum Online. Available at:
https://www.artforum.com/interviews/judson-at-50-yvonne-rainer-31348 [Accessed: 17/04/19]
Walker Art Center (2011) ‘Talking Dance: Yvonne Rainer and Sally Banes’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn6HtsbThKc [Accessed: 17/04/19]
