TRANS-SSS-MISSION

Sixties Dance Moves On

Nancy G. Moore

BOOKS REVIEWED: Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–

2001, edited by Hendel Teicher. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of
American Art, Phillips Academy, distributed by MIT Press, 2002; Reinventing
Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible, edited by Sally Banes, with the
assistance of Andrea Harris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003;
Kenneth King, Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

T
he title of Sally Banes’s latest
book, Reinventing Dance in the
1960s: Everything was Possible,
suggests that “everything” is no longer
possible, at least in relation to experi-
mental dance. For those of us who
attended the millennial PASTForward
performances by the White Oak Dance
Project, wondering if we would recog-
nize anything (or anyone), the recon-
struction of sixties dance did expose a
loss. But it was more a loss of identity,
of who we were as individuals and as a
country at that time, than a loss of
artistic vision. In fact, the Forward sec-
tions of these performances, where “six-
ties” choreographers such as Lucinda
Childs showed more recent work, actu-
ally made the twenty-first century look
promising. Such is the effect of the
three books reviewed here, all by or
about performers associated with the
Judson Dance Theater. They should be
read not just for the history they con-
serve but as inspiration for future per-
formances.
Reinventing Dance in the 1960s is a
valuable, all-too-brief collection of es-
says by dance scholars, choreographers,
and critics about how the idea of dance
was reconceived in the 1960s to include
ordinary movement. As is often the case
with writings by Sally Banes, there are
secondary and tertiary meanings to her
title, for she is one of the engineers of
this “invention,” beginning with Terpsi-
chore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance
(1980). In Reinventing Dance, Banes
invites other writers to recast the history
that she helped create, where a “top-
ten” list of white, American performers
make a clean break with modern dance
and ballet conventions. Now, we hear
from Gus Solomons, Jr., an African-
American modern dancer with an MIT
degree in architecture, who briefly stud-
ied choreography alongside the “official”

146 䊏 PAJ 81 (2005), pp. 146–151. © 2005 Nancy G. Moore

Judson dancers. We also hear from
Stephanie Jordan, Research Professor in
Dance at Roehampton University of
Surrey, about how in London modern
and postmodern dance developed al-
most simultaneously as alternatives to
what had been exclusively a ballet cul-
ture. Banes then places this new, collec-
tive history within a third framework—
artists’ statements about the PAST
Forward project, itself a reinvention of
dance in the 1960s. She gives Mikhail
Baryshnikov the Foreword and Yvonne
Rainer the last word.
While Reinventing Dance adjusts the
focus of Banes’ youthful research on
post-modern performance, it also pro-
vides new information on what hap-
pened before and after the Judson pro-
grams (1962–1964) in a playful variety
of literary styles. Banes, who is now an
emeritus professor at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, has obviously
thought about the kinds of books she
liked to teach and created one that
avoids the monotonous tone and tenu-
ous link between chapters often found
in essay collections. Along with Noël
Carroll, she provides a theoretical con-
text for the book in scholarly writings
on defamiliarization and the ordinary
in the 1960s avant-garde. In a quite
different mode is a “freewheeling” inter-
view that Banes and Joan Acocella con-
duct with Arlene Croce about the early
days of Ballet Review, founded in 1965.
Intended to imitate the format of an
interview in Croce’s “Judson issue” (I,
No. 6, 1967), this one occurs over
dinner and relies loosely on back issues
of Ballet Review for coherence. Among
sticking points in the three-way conver-
sation is Banes’ attempt to identify Bal-
let Review as a site for “experimental”
dance criticism. Croce refuses the at-
tribute altogether, explaining that in the
sixties, criticism was “a little more theat-
rical,” meaning that it was not unusual
for critics to pose in print as other
personalities for the sake of argument.
Theatricality, in Reinventing Dance, in-
filtrates the postmodern scene to an
unexpected degree. Looking back to-
wards the fifties, Janice Ross and Leslie
Satin contribute fascinating, biographi-
cal accounts of Anna Halprin and James
Waring—members of older avant-garde
communities whose progeny included
but was not limited to the Judson danc-
ers. Waring, writes Satin, was “very
fond of florid and dramatic gestures
that recalled earlier performance styles,”
but was also opposed to anything that
looked like acting. In another piece,
written as a letter to Banes, Jill Johnston
relives her history as a “para-Judson
performer” dressed in tall black boots
and toting a rifle. Showing how every-
thing is still possible, she takes a shot at
John Cage. Wendy Perron, who helped
reconstruct dances for the Bennington
College Judson Project, remembers re-
jecting the “chiseled angst of Martha
Graham” for the drama of Grand Union
performances. These were like “family
reunions where you wondered who was
going to misbehave,” she writes, “and
we’d watch them get on each other’s
nerves—brilliantly.”
The nature of role-playing in post-mod-
ern dance remains a provocative and
unresolved issue in Reinventing Dance.
Baryshnikov opens the book by describ-
ing how he admires the Judson chore-
ographers for not assuming roles in
performance. Deborah Jowitt, in “Monk
and King: The Sixties Kids,” skillfully
teases out the subtleties involved in
pegging dancers as belonging to one
MOORE / Trans-SSS-Mission 䊏 147
faction of the avant-garde or another on
the basis of their theatricality. Kenneth
King, for example, chose to enact vari-
ous personae in his dances, but without
reference to the “baggage of motivation
and background.” Meredith Monk in-
cluded elements of storytelling and role-
playing in her work, but the overall
effect, according to Jowitt, was of “fan-
tastic visions, of the mundane dislo-
cated and charged with elusive drama.”
Interestingly, Jowitt recalls that for some
Judson dancers, Monk’s performances
were too “personal,” like autobiography,
as if it was all right to be yourself on
stage as long as you did not disclose
your past. What we learn from this is
that the practice of appearing as your-
self, highlighted by Baryshnikov, may
be subject to the same conventions, the
same discriminating gaze, as a studied
role.
Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dia-
logue, 1961–2001 is a visually spectacu-
lar if not unwieldy collection of essays
and illustrations assembled by curator
Hendel Teicher as part of a touring
exhibition. In over 300 pages, this 9 x
11 paperback attempts to trace the rela-
tion between the performative and vi-
sual arts in Brown’s dance productions,
but the binding is not quite up to the
task. Occasionally, design interferes with
legibility, as in the case of “Trisha Brown:
Profiles,” a series of testimonials printed
in white ink on sand-colored paper.
Nevertheless, there is much to admire—
especially astute dance photography that
catches the play of light on limbs in
mid-flight, displayed on pages edged
crisply in magenta to offset the dark-
ened stage. Other pages offer examples
of Brown’s drawings, choreographic
notes, and performance texts, supple-
148 䊏 PAJ 81
mented by richly colored set designs by
artists like Nancy Graves and Robert
Rauschenberg. Ten essayists, including
Brown, reconsider phases in her artistic
development before and after 1979,
when she began choreographing for the
proscenium stage. While much of the
book has been aimed at a non-specialist
audience, documentation in the form
of notes and appendices is not only
extensive, but also interesting, as it goes
beyond the factual to brief, sometimes
poetic commentaries on specific dances.
Trisha Brown has given her essay, “How
to Make a Modern Dance When the
Sky’s the Limit,” a title that bears a
notable resemblance to Reinventing
Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Pos-
sible by Sally Banes. Both titles reverber-
ate with the same idea of an explosive
and unfettered time of artistic creativity,
although Brown adroitly avoids the past
tense. For her, everything was only a
choreographic “apprenticeship” until
1998, when she directed the Monteverdi
opera, L’Orfeo. During a rehearsal in
which she improvised the part of Orfeo,
she found that she was also “the words
he sang,” as well as the faithful shep-
herd, Guarini. Moreover, she had be-
come two entities in one, able to
“arpeggiate” her body in “the clear place
of a compositional mind” that operates
on its own when “Trisha is busy” with
directorial concerns. Here, the body
assumes a mind of its own and the
unexpected result is an arpeggio rather
than a tantrum. With respect to sixties
dance, expressions such as “everything
was possible,” or “the sky’s the limit,”
refer partly to the exhilaration produced
by new concepts of the body at this
time. For Brown, choreographic mas-
tery arrived after years of improvisation.
She came to trust in a body that “solves
problems before the mind knows you
had one.”
Although the essayists of Trisha Brown
seem to have been given free reign in
their choice of issues to address, a num-
ber of them take up the topic of the
body as “the place and space of identity”
in Brown’s work. Often, the dances that
provoke this discussion are part of the
Accumulation series, first shown in 1971
at NYU, to “Uncle John’s Band” by The
Grateful Dead. The dance was origi-
nally a 4-minute solo in which Brown
repetitively performed a list of minimal,
abstract gestures (rotation of the fist
with the thumb extended) lacking a
discernible emotive cause. With each
repetition, she added a new gesture
until she was dancing with her entire
body. In 1973, during a lecture at the
American Center in Paris, Brown spon-
taneously began performing movements
from the Accumulation series. As she
danced, not quite keeping track of what
she was saying, she was startled to dis-
cover that a particular sequence of ges-
tures prompted a memory. She later
recalled this moment in her perform-
ance text for Accumulation with Talking
plus Watermotor (1979): “[I]n that first
lecture in Paris I said that my father
died in between the making of this
move and that move . . . I was amazed
that my body had stored a memory in a
movement pattern.” (All of this history
is taken from various sections in Trisha
Brown.)
Part of what made the Paris lecture so
striking for Brown was that the gestures
from Accumulation led her to speak
about her father in a way that later
“devastated” her. In other words, if she
had not been trying to lecture and
dance at the same time, she would not
have said what she did nor understood
that the movements somehow contained
her father’s memory. The dancing pro-
voked her to say the unthinkable.
Yvonne Rainer, in her “Fond Memoir
with Sundry Reflections on a Friend
and her Art,” points out that Brown’s
discovery is not an example of the
“kinetic memory” used by dancers to
remember steps but rather a muscular
memory of emotion. “This is a very
different idea,” writes Rainer, “from
‘expressing’ emotion through gesture,”
as in modern dance. Instead, the move-
ments themselves are inlaid with memo-
ries. Such an approach to choreography
renders dance non-mimetic, although
as this book repeatedly demonstrates,
the dances do not consequently become
meaningless. We see “the great inten-
tion” that Brown “presses into each
gesture” (Marianne Goldberg), the mod-
eling of the dancer’s body “into a unit
of interdependent movements . . . mir-
roring and permuting” those of the
other dancers in a “stunning ripple like
a molecular chain reaction” (Klaus
Kertess). We see not memory but its
light effects.
Readers who stumble across Kenneth
King’s first book, Writing in Motion:
Body—Language—Technology, may de-
cide to pay more attention to their feet,
if not their language. Poets, in particu-
lar, may find themselves unexpectedly
captivated by this dancer’s idea of how
to get around in a line of type. Students
of dance and theatre, on the other
hand, may wish ardently for an accom-
panying CD so that they can hear the
body that produced the sentences. What
King has collected here is a battery of
MOORE / Trans-SSS-Mission 䊏 149
texts he wrote between 1972 and 2002,
including performance scripts, a few
previously published essays, and note-
book entries that allude to topics in
literary criticism, philosophy, art, dance,
and technology. In many of these pieces,
King adopts a playful prose style that
does not refer to ideas so much as
impersonate the syntax and vocabulary
of exposition. His burgeoning sentences,
marked by sibilant lists of “technical”
terms, produce a high-frequency chatter
that tends to slip between channels just
as he is making sense. King is some-
times described as a “second-generation”
Judson dancer and so it is not surprising
that when the static clears, we often
find him on the topic of how dancing is
an alternative means of perception.
Where Trisha Brown dances and memo-
ries occur, King dances and words come
to mind.
Deborah Jowitt, who has observed King’s
artistic development for over forty years,
introduces his book by describing how
he taught her to “sense dance as lan-
guage—not in the sense of bearing a
narrative, but as a language with formal
correlations to spoken and written word
structures.” For readers who have never
seen King perform, Jowitt’s recollec-
tions will provide an important frame-
work for grasping the spirit of his danc-
ing and his writing. The experience of
watching him dance, she says, went
beyond watching “George Balanchine’s
storyless ballets and attributing human
feelings to patterned interactions; it
made you sense a system operating at
full steam—or the design of a system.”
King’s “linguistic processes,” she adds,
are similarly “exhilarating, not to say
occasionally hilarious.” The comic ef-
fect derives partly from his sensitivity to
150 䊏 PAJ 81
the moment when exposition interferes
with spontaneity, obstructing the natu-
ral tendency of words (and movements)
to shoot off in unexpected directions.
But since comedy itself can become
predictable, he does not indulge in it for
long.
The character of King’s “writing in mo-
tion” pays tribute to the “highly kinetic,
self-reflexive syntax” of Gertrude Stein.
In a 1997 essay entitled, “The Body
Reflexive,” he credits her for a reflexive
prose style that is “corporeal,” rather
than merely mental. King wants reflex-
ivity, or “the mind’s movement to mir-
ror its own complex functions,” to be
understood as a bodily process. His
description of Stein’s syntax is itself an
effort to show his own body reflexively
engaged in the act of writing:
Stein’s animated, mantra-like
modes of rhythmicized repetition
continuously accelerate and ad-
vance while circuitously circling
back to reengage and reweave their
permuting, fissionating cadencings
with concatenative ontolexic
branchings. [Here, the Microsoft
Word “editor” begins scribbling
furiously in red.] Her steady-state
cascade of smooth, syntactically
reiterative chains and her prose’s
adept semiotropic spiral phrasings
weaving back upon and through
their conceptual pivots create a
complex virtual ontology that re-
iterates and reignites its permu-
tating paraliterary extensions
through dense, hypnotic accretions
that uncoil with fluid digital
finesse, like a relentlessly unwind-
ing spool or pneumatic motor,
auto(re)producing itself.
Those who have seen King dance will
recognize his moving body in these
lines. As Jowitt notes in her Foreword,
“Stillness was never a feature of his
style.” What she saw instead was “ex-
treme buoyancy—how he was often on
tiptoe, or skimming the floor with seem-
ingly unpunctuated chains of small,
light hops, skips, and leaps,” in other
words, with “concatenative ontolexic
branchings.”
Figuring out how to read King’s linguis-
tic acrobatics is at times an exasperating
task, especially without benefit of the
audio recording often provided by pub-
lishers of experimental poetry. This is to
say that his purpose is not always as
discernible in his prose as it is in per-
formance. His book provokes as many
questions about reading as it does about
writing: Do we read for information,
wisdom, good company in our solitude?
Will we achieve enlightenment if we
meditate on the author’s “hypnotic ac-
cretions”? In notes to his 1972 perform-
ance text, “Metagexis (Joseph’s Song),”
King addresses this problem of interpre-
tation when art is self-reflexive: “The
reader should not be deterred by the
tricky play of conundrums and twisty
syntax but move through this text rhyth-
mically, which will deliver up its mo-
dalities and meanings as much as would
trying to puzzle them out literally and
conceptually.” This is an excellent sug-
gestion for those who are “rhythmi-
cally” prepared to make King’s enig-
matic writings “deliver up” their meaning
as if they were ancient tablets of stone.
His successors have their work cut out
for them.

NANCY G. MOORE, a dance and literary scholar, has published most

recently in the Encyclopedia of Chicago. She wrote her doctoral dissertation
on the Parisian writer Valentine de St.-Point, who in 1913 separated dance
from its dependence on music.

MOORE / Trans-SSS-Mission 䊏 151