Beyond the Frame: Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Judson Dance Theater

Unlike other members of the Judson during the 1970s and 1990s, Brown and Childs decided to establish their own dance companies and choreograph pieces specifically for the proscenium. Without aiming for completeness, the following text investigates what similarities can be identified between Brown’s and Childs’ approaches and what remains of Judson’s initial critique of the dance canon.

In 1961 pedagogue Robert Ellis Dunn gathered a group of dancers, seeking to experiment with the indeterminate and chance methods that John Cage and Merce Cunningham had been developing since the mid-1950s. Cage and Cunningham had dissociated music and dance by proposing a radically new concept of space, with neither a centre nor a periphery, leading a new generation to perform in churches, lofts, gymnasiums, rooftops and streets. Initially composed of a core formation including dancers Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti, Judson gradually expanded to include Judith Dunn, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, David Gordon, Valda Setterfield and multimedia artist Elaine Summers. On 6 July 1962, they organised an event at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village, New York City, titled “A Concert of Dance” (afterward also referred to as “Concert of Dance #1”). The nearly four-hour-long programme, hosted in this iconic space, which had been a venue for numerous artistic and political activities since the 1940s, was immediately regarded as a turning point, a rupture with the canon of American Modern Dance. It gave the group its name: Judson Dance Theater. The following year, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, along with visual artists Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann and composer Philip Corner, joined the group.

But what were the reasons “Concert of Dance #1” became recognised as a milestone in New York’s dance scene at that time? The members of Judson developed new choreographic methods to participate in each other’s pieces rather than working within the modernist frame of the dance company under the authority of a choreographer. For this very reason, it attracted dancers, performers, visual artists and composers who wanted to experiment in an open-ended form of artistic production. At the time, Cage defined an “experimental action” as “one the outcome of which is not foreseen.”[1] This collaborative spirit as a sense of an artistic community at work is exemplified in “We Shall Run” (1963) by Yvonne Rainer, one of the seminal pieces of the early days of Judson. The choreographer staged a group of twelve “dancers” and “non-dancers” [2] who, after lining up in front of the audience, simply ran for four minutes to Hector Berlioz’s composition “Grande messe des morts”. The reduction of the piece to this ordinary movement was considered a radical departure from virtuosity, whether it be modern or neoclassical. Rainer explained that “certainly no previous formal choreography had relied solely on running, as in my dance [...]. After seeing the first performance of ‘We Shall Run’ [...], Jasper Johns remarked that this dance had gone to the outer limits on a scale of possibilities. I was quite flattered, since going out on a limb was a prized aspiration for those of us circling around the ideas of Duchamp and Cage, who themselves were still revamping earlier 20th century aesthetic rebellions [by dadaists and futurists].” [3]

Among the methods the members of Judson shared for creating was the manipulation of objects. In “Carnation” (1963), Childs meticulously placed a colander, curlers and sponges on her head and in her mouth. This “object-event” evoked the worlds of housekeeping, cooking and cosmetics in “a fanciful absurdity of slight horror”, [4] capturing with camp poetic [5] the contradiction faced by women before second-wave and lesbian feminism in pre-Stonewall America. [6] In “Homemade” (1966), Brown performed ordinary movements (holding, cradling), sometimes linked to her own childhood (pulling a fishing line, digging for clams, drawing in the sand, throwing a football). She wore a projector on her back playing a film, directed by Robert Whitman, in which the dancer performed the same actions as she did live. The prop revealed the imaginative and somatic process through which the choreographer assembles a dance from disparate motor experiences. By contrast, in “Site” (1964) Robert Morris appeared masked. Dressed as a construction worker, he manipulated plywood boards, behind which Carolee Schneemann posed, imitating Victorine Meurent in Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863). In this piece, Morris explored the distinct forms of alienation associated with productive and reproductive labour, conventionally depicted as active and masculine, or passive and feminine. A final example of Judson placing emphasis on props is the work of Rainer, “Parts of Some Sextets” (1965), featuring ten people and twelve mattresses. The furniture, conceived as “body surrogate”, [7] allowed her to connect the affective and intimate dimension of bodily contact with the mattresses to objective tasks (carrying, dragging, throwing). In these pieces of Brown, Childs, Morris and Rainer, dancers appeared both as manipulators and manipulated, objects and subjects of the performance. They staged a gestural landscape, often described as “pedestrian” or “ordinary,” that had been marginalised since the Second World War in the mythological pieces of Martha Graham, such as “​​​​​​​Clytemnestra” (1958), and such abstract works as “Tensile Involvement” (1953) by Alwin Nikolais or “​​​​​​​Agon”​​​​​​​ (1957) by George Balanchine. The members of Judson depicted the common brutality of labour, the precarity of life, the assignment of stereotyped identities, and the struggle to emancipate, however imperfectly.

In the 1970s Brown’s and Childs’ approaches reached a turning point. They started to create pieces that required new skills as well as professional dancers trained in their technique or working method. In order to enable this, they chose a path that other Judson group members hadn’t taken until that time: they founded their own companies. One of her first works developed within this new framework was “Calico Mingling” (1973). Childs described it as “slightly athletic”, [8] a low virtuosity that invites the audience to focus on the spatial and temporal arrangement of choreographic patterns rather than the technicality of movement itself. Although this minimal work only relied on walking – pedestrian activity that can be executed without any dance skills – the phrase of 240 counts and its complex structure made it particularly difficult to remember and perform at a steady pulse. In “Locus” (1975), Brown choreographed each gesture separate from one other: “they are not tied together, [they] do not build up something.” [9] This structural approach was to play a decisive role when, from 1979, they moved away from alternative spaces to engage with the proscenium within an emerging network of theatres and international festivals in Europe and the United States.

By moving from the margins of the dance world to its centre, Brown and Childs did not abandon Judson’s criticism of the canon; they rather transformed it. “Dance” (1979) and “Glacial Decoy” (1979) questioned the visibility that theatre grants to certain movements, dances and bodies but not to others. Using films created by Sol LeWitt and Robert Rauschenberg, these pieces were choreographed in such a way that the dancing seems to extend beyond the proscenium arch. By approaching theatre as a framing device, Brown and Childs challenged the way in which theatre tends to present dance. [10]  Delving deeper into this concern, they developed their own approaches, combining different art forms: Childs collaborated with the architect Frank Gehry for “Available Light” (1983), while Trisha Brown joined forces with visual artist Fujiko Nakaya in “Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #72503” (1980). Like with Judson, but through different means, these pieces highlight that the institution delimitates, restricts and confines and may also obscure or distort. At a time when American postmodern dance itself has become hegemonic in Europe, this criticism, taking place at the core of the performance, is fundamental to consider. These works, as fascinating as they may be on their own terms, stand out by challenging institutions in their ability to curate dance, they invite the audience to reflect upon the proscenium, and eventually to look beyond.

Endnotes

1 John Cage, “Composition as Process”, in Silence: Lectures and Writings, 1961 ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1958), p. 39.
2 Jill Johnston, “Judson Collaboration”, in The Village Voice, November 28, 1963, p. 9.
3 Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 243.
4 Jill Johnston, “The Object”, in The Village Voice, 21 May 1964, p. 14.
5 “Camp” refers to something or someone mannered and theatrical. The term was reappropriated in the 1950s and 1960s by gay and lesbian downtowners to characterise an aesthetic sensibility and a counterculture. It was an important aspect of Andy Warhol's pop art, the films of Jack Smith and Ron Rice, the dance pieces of James Waring and Aileen Passloff and the poetry of Frank O'Hara. With Judson, it infused the work of Fred Herko, David Gordon, Steve Paxton and Childs.
6 The Stonewall riots refer to the spontaneous protests against a police raid that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, on 28 June 1969. They are described as an historic rupture or transition point in the LGBTIQ* movement in the United States. Marginalised within both the feminist and gay liberation movements, the participation of lesbians in the Stonewall riots were crucial in shaping the direction of LGBTIQ* activism. A branch of lesbian feminism originated directly from Judson after the critic and performer Jill Johnston, who was part of New York's downtown dance scene in the 1960s, became one of the most prominent figures of the movement with her book, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973). 
7 Robert Morris, “Dance”, in The Village Voice, 3 February 1966, p. 25.
8 Interview by the author with Lucinda Childs, National Center for Dance, 1 and 2 February 2016.
9 Trisha Brown notebook entry, October 5, 1975, quoted by Susan Rosenberg in Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), p. 163.
10 On this point, see Craig Owens, “The Pro-Scenic Event”, in Art in America, December 1981, p. 128 – 133.