Judson Dance Theater Research Articles

The Trace Dance Leaves Is Air: On Steve Paxton (1939–2024)

Abstract Artist, writer, and choreographer Ralph Lemon tangentially marks his life in dance through an account of the times he witnessed the work of an important artistic guide, Steve Paxton, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater (1962–64) and Grand Union (1970–76), two collectives that indelibly redefined dance for the following decades. In addition to composing major works, while involved with Grand Union Paxton first formulated the dance form known as contact improvisation, which has become influential worldwide. “The Trace Dance Leaves Is Air” is a personal reflection and tribute, honoring a major artist, while also questioning how much one can trust creative inspiration.

Transmission Mysteries: Art and Technophilia

Transmission Mysteries: Art and Technophilia

Sculpting Time: Sara Rudner in Her Studio

Sculpting Time: Sara Rudner in Her Studio

Judson Memorial Church and the intersections between happening and dancing

The article examines a short excerpt from the New York scene, namely the period around 1959–1963 in the context of the environment, happening, dance pieces and draws attention to the leading influences of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. We are focusing on the gravitating artists’ circles around the Judson Memorial Church and some of their distinct practices and centers. Among the many, we consider the Reuben Gallery, Judson Gallery, Judson Dance Theater, and artists such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Simon Forti, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg. The text does not aim to provide a complete overview of Judson Dance Theater or the artists` practices, but rather to consider some of their common influences in their period of formation. We will bring the environment and the happening under their contradictions and variability and will consider the first generation of dance reformers at Judson Dance Theater as an influential force for involving visual artists in intermediate zones.

Contributors

Contributors

Breaking at the Edges: Carolee Schneemann's Desires for Dance

Abstract During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Carolee Schneemann primarily identified as a painter. But she was a keen and cutting observer of dance. This article considers Schneemann's audacious performance work for the Judson Dance Theater and reflects on its ongoing importance both at the time of her death and in a world forced apart by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Investigating Theatricality in Trisha Brown’s Work: Five Unstudied Dances, 1966–1969

Trisha Brown (1936–2017) forged her artistic identity as part of Judson Dance Theater, which embraced everyday pedestrian movement as dance. Between 1966 and 1969, Brown’s work took a surprisingly theatrical turn. Five unstudied dances from this period reflect concerns with autobiography, psychology, and catharsis, influences of her exposure to trends in Gestalt therapy and dance therapy during a sojourn in California (1963–1965). Brown let these works fall from her repertory because she did not consider them to qualify as ‘art’. Close readings of these works shed light on a period in Brown’s career before she rejected subjectivity as the basis for her creative process prior to her consolidation of her identity as an abstract choreographer in the 1970s and 1980s, while raising intriguing questions as to Brown’s late-career devotion to exploring emotion, drama and empathy in the operas and song cycle that she directed between 1998 and 2003.

Dance Exhibition as Dance Archival Theory into Practice : Focusing on Judson Dance Theater : The Work Is Never Done by MoMA and Known Future by SeMA

Dance Exhibition as Dance Archival Theory into Practice : Focusing on Judson Dance Theater : The Work Is Never Done by MoMA and Known Future by SeMA

Diffracted Temporalities

This article engages with North-American choreographer Trajal Harrell's interrogation of the relationship between performed histories, presents and futures. Working with the new materialist concept of diffraction, it examines how his choreographies engage with crucial questions surrounding racial politics and the construction of history, arguing that his works are performative and imaginative enactments of an ethical responsibility to rethink dominant cultural and historical discourses. Through an engagement with Harrell's Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series (2009-2017), a convergence is highlighted between his experimental performance practice and Donna Haraway's and Karen Barad's idea of diffraction as a method for recording and accounting for interferences, patterns of difference and entanglements of phenomena. The seven works of the series, identified by size from extra-small to extra-large, explore the idea of an imaginary encounter between New York's post-Cunningham choreographers and the voguing tradition in the early 1960s – the socio-historical impossibility of Harlem's black and Latino drag-ball scene meeting the predominantly white and middle-class world of the early postmodern dance of Judson Dance Theater. Through the lens of the new materialist notion of diffraction, which troubles the idea of the absolute separation of entities and illuminates their relationality, such impossibility can be entertained, as matter and discourse are seen as entangled and produced by shifting relations – of power, of bodies, of identities. Thus, a diffractive approach offers an ethico-epistemological model for the understanding of the material-discursive entanglement of seemingly opposing conditions. The article proposes that, in reimagining dance's past, Harrell's work diffracts temporalities, affirming and practising the possibility of other histories and of thinking history differently.

Trisha Brown: Between Abstraction and Representation (1966–1998)

Choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017) is renowned as one of the most influential abstract artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Emerging from Judson Dance Theater and the 1960s avant-garde, Brown invented what she termed her ‘pure movement’ abstract vocabulary in the 1970s, rejecting narrative, psychology and character as bases for dance-making. Yet Brown’s notion of abstraction, when examined across the long arc of her fifty-year career, is more complicated and elastic than previously known. This essay addresses selected choreographies dating from her first decade as a choreographer, the 1960s, to the production of her first opera L’Orfeo (1998), underscoring how memories, images, language and stories fueled a previously unexamined dynamic relationship between abstraction and representation that profoundly influenced her choreography’s development.

Dancing Anarchy: anarchist theories and practices in the Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union and Contact Improvisation

Dancing Anarchy: anarchist theories and practices in the Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union and Contact Improvisation

How We Remember: Judson Dance Theater at MoMA

How We Remember: Judson Dance Theater at MoMA

Nanako Nakajima in Conversation with Yvonne Rainer

‘Nanako Nakajima in Conversation with Yvonne Rainer’ was the document used during the lecture-conversation event that was held on 28 January 2019. Nakajima's innovative project ‘Performative Exhibition of Yvonne Rainer's Work’ was held at the Kyoto Art Theater (Shunjuza) from 11 - 15 October 2017 in collaboration with the postmodern choreographer and filmmaker, Yvonne Rainer, a co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York. Nakajima examines how various dramaturgies related to ageing and dance were interwoven into this exhibition in order to go beyond the typical dance presentation in a museum. Moreover, to reverse the current ‘dancing museum’ trend, this project revived the postmodern works of Rainer and combined their dramaturgical qualities with those of the traditional Japanese theatre for the purpose of connecting the past with the present. Nakajima explained her attempt to utilise archival materials to represent the postmodern oeuvre to the audience in Kyoto. She reconstructed stage sets and props of Rainer's legendary piece to demonstrate the working process on stage. Professional dancers of different ages and with varied training backgrounds were also employed to re-perform Rainer's seminal work of Trio A, including a Noh performer in his 80s. Inspired by the Noh performer in Trio A and Yvonne Rainer's Trio A Geriatric Version, Nakajima built up a dance dramaturgy and spectatorship of ageing, engaging with the premise of Trio A and the aesthetics of the Noh theatre. Nakajima's lecture was followed by a conversation with Yvonne Rainer, which revealed the condition and aesthetic prejudice of dancers regarding ageing in the American postmodern dance context that Rainer had been confronting. Rainer also discussed her private stories with the legends of American modern dance such as Ruth St Denis and Martha Graham by continuously returning to her own past and allowing her past to return to her.

Church or Factory: Radical Inclusivity and Vanguard Practice in 1960s New York

Art historians have often discussed Andy Warhol's Factory as a unique creative space in 1960s Manhattan. Similarly, scholars of dance and performance have provided valuable insight into the vanguard activities associated with the Judson Dance Theater located near Union Square. Few studies take time to compare these two places and consider their relationships to one another. This article looks at Warhol's Silver Factory and the performances that took place at Judson Memorial Church more or less simultaneously with a goal of identifying overlapping actors and establishing shared concerns and a sense of radical inclusivity that existed at both sites.

The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard ed. by Douglas Morrey, Christina Stojanova, and Nicole Côté

Morrey, Douglas, Christina Stojanova, and Nicole Côté, eds. The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. ISBN 978-1-55458920 -3. Pp. xxv + 244. $49 Can. Godard’s influence is widely acknowledged, and it extends into various disciplines, including art, culture, society, and philosophy. This collection of essays explores Godard’s interdisciplinary contributions. Legacies finds its naissance in a 2010 University of Regina conference in honor of Godard’s eightieth birthday. The four sections of this collection include his influence on other forms of art, politics and historical documentation, philosophy, and the intertextual relevance of his work when considering those who came before and after him. In “Dans le noir du temps (2002)—The ‘Filming’of a Musical Form,”Jürg Stenzl compares Godard to a composer and analyses his short film as a musical composition with melody and counterpoint. Stenzl asserts that this comparison is possible due to Godard’s use of images instead of actors, which allowed for the manipulation of images on screen.In the same section,John Carnahan’s “Contemporary Dance: The Judson Dance Theatre Runs across Breathless” insists on a similar rhythmic progression from one scene to the next. Carnahan comments on Godard’s ability to use continuous movement to disguise the discontinuity found between moments in the film. The next section of essays focuses on Godard’s representation of memory and history. Of particular interest is Godard’s use of color to represent certain events (“The Obligations of Memory: Godard’s Underworld Journeys” by Russell Kilbourn) and his use of specific images to represent history (“Histoire(s) du cinéma Brings the Dead Back to the Screen”by Céline Scemama). Scemama asserts that despite Godard’s apparent efforts to present the spectator with an unbiased version, the act of recounting history is inherently biased by the storyteller. The third section focuses on Godard’s influence in the realm of philosophy. In “The ‘Hidden Fire’of Inwardness: Cavell, Godard, and Modernism,”Glen Norton examines Godard’s criticism of consumer culture and the ensuing abandonment of responsibility that results chez l’artiste. While Godard’s films criticize the current cultural climate of consumption, he offers no positive alternatives. In “The Romance of the Intellectual in Godard: A Love-Hate Relationship,”Tyson Stewart offers an evaluation of Godard’s mélange of diegetic and non-diegetic realities. To offer an aspect of realism, Godard frequently places images of politicians, or politicians themselves, into his films. This adds an additional layer of criticism to the consumer climate discussed in Norton’s essay. The last section places an emphasis on Godard’s contemporary influence, such as the discussion of his exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, as analyzed in “Godard’s Utopia(s) or the Performance of Failure” by André Habib. Overall, the collection is well-organized, with each essay expanding upon the ideas of the last, leaving the reader with a sense of accomplishment and understanding. University of West Georgia Ann Marie Moore 272 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 ...

The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard

This fine collection is in the tradition of landmark volumes in English engaging with Godard's work, such as Michael Temple and James S. Williams, eds, The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000) and Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt, eds, For Ever Godard (London: Black Dog, 2004). This more eclectic volume is a valuable contribution to the field. It demonstrates the significance of Godard's work to a wider network of artistic and theoretical creation, not merely in terms of influence, but also in terms of relation in the sense of Wittgenstein's concept of ‘family resemblances’, as evoked by Christina Stojanova in her discussion of the connections between philosopher and filmmaker (p. 128). Just as Godard's own work troubles the boundary of what may be considered ‘cinema’, so this volume asks us to consider Godard beyond his work, exploring ‘striking examples of conceptual and structural affinities’ (ibid.), not only with Wittgenstein's thought but also with the music of Arvo Pärt, the Judson Dance Theater, artist Ian Wallace, or David Bordwell's concept of ‘parametric cinema’, for instance. While offering interesting chapters for musicologists or philosophers to dip into, taken together the essays lead back to Godard, emphasizing the impossibility of contemplating his œuvre without asking profound questions about cinema itself as ‘une forme qui pense’ (Histoire(s) du cinéma: 3A La Monnaie de l'absolu, dir. by Godard, 1989–98, 26 min.). The book consists of four parts, addressing film, music, and dance; the politics of representation, memory, and history; philosophy; and formalism, narratives, and exhibitions. The overall sophistication of the essays is rewardingly high. An opportunity for anglophone readers to glimpse Céline Scemama's rich, searching analysis of Histoire(s) du cinéma, including excerpts from her fascinating ‘score’ of the films' multi-layered intertextual references, is a welcome prospect. Those who have not kept up with David Sterritt's reflections on Godard since The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) will be struck by his mystical, Deleuzian, and invigoratingly joyful reading of Je vous salue Marie (dir. by Godard, 1985). Familiar films are addressed from fresh perspectives, as when John Carnahan illuminates the relation between the flow of gesture and editing in À bout de souffle (dir. by Godard, 1959) by attempting to import ‘a vocabulary for figure movement on film from the language of dance and performance art’ (p. 37). Inevitably, much space is given to questions of history, memory, and the (multimedia) archive, and relatedly to Godard's ongoing struggle with the ‘failure’ of cinema to become itself. This utopic ‘performance of failure’ — identified in the compelling final essay by André Habib — is highlighted as a crucial aspect of Godard's legacy: it dramatizes the impossible tension between memorialization of the past and the invention of ‘what could have been, what could still be: utopia’ (Côté, p. xiv) that is integral to cinema. Released after the book's publication, Godard's 3D film Adieu au langage (2014) confirms that the director continues to provoke thought through gaps and fissures opened up by cinematic innovation.

Modern Death: Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek

By representing or performing death in significant yet divergent ways, Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek accomplish two major modifications to histories of art in the 1960s. Firstly, if the art of the 1960s frequently called the subjectivity of the viewer into question, their works in film, sculpture, and performance uniquely stage the radical contingency of the viewing subject. Secondly, and as a refinement of the first hypothesis, they stage the absolute historicity of death and dying. In short, all three artists articulated new types of dying-that is, distinctly modern deaths-gesturing to the impossibility of a transhistorical conception of death.1 My understanding of the absolute contingency of death is informed by Jacques Derrida's argument in Aporias (1993), a book that challenges Martin Heidegger's articulation of death in transhistorical terms in Being and Time (1926). Derrida critiques the fiction of a unilateral understanding of death, stating that can be an anthropology or history of death, there can be culturologies of demise. . . . But there is no culture of death itself 2 The modernity of death does not assume a break with a specifically premodern or antiquated death but instead assumes that, in every period and place, death is significantly remodeled and reinvented anew by those whose experience is lost to it. This position assumes the absolute historicity of subjectivity, the particularity of individual experience, and death as the exemplary limit-experience of the subject. How, I ask, do Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek call into question the subject in one's utter particularity?Beginning with Flaming Creatures (1962), Smith's films, performances, and writings evidenced a striking fascination with death and decay, through the recurring motifs of reanimated corpses, vampires, mummies, and other figures of the undead. A sculptor, painter, and creator of ambitious installation projects, Thek is perhaps best known for his untitled meat pieces of the mid-1960s, a series he retrospectively referred to as technological reliquaries. These were paneled vitrines that recreate the primary structure of the minimalist cube as quasi-commercial display cases housing disturbing wax effigies of meat, often resembling hunks of flesh shorn from a slain body. A dancer in the first Judson Dance Theater concert in 1962, Fred Herko has entered history books on account of his final performance-a suicidal leap from a tenement window two years later. Until recently, Herko has mainly figured as a morbid footnote to studies of more established dancers in the period, such as Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, or Steve Paxton. However, enacting his own excess as a suicidal dispersal, Herko figures a performance mode in which the performing subject-in Smith's evocative phrasing-is given every opportunity to disintegrate to the point of gilded splendor.3 In formal terms, Smith, Herko, and Thek may seem initially like an unlikely trio of case studies, yet they belonged to the singular but broad social and artistic milieus of Downtown New York in the 1960s (and after, in the case of Smith and Thek). Comparative analysis of their distinctive practices stages the ways artists tend not to think of their own work in relation to a single art form or medium, but instead draw upon and inform (and indeed repudiate or disclaim) peers who they perceive as contiguous (or oppositional) to their own ambitions and imperatives.In the unlikely triad of artists discussed here, the links between Smith and Thek are particularly compelling, beginning with striking similarities in their lives and careers. Born within a year of each other, in 1932 and 1933, respectively, Smith and Thek were culturally prominent in the 1960s, and regularly reviewed in relevant periodicals, only to be largely forgotten in later life (and, indeed, recuperated posthumously to some extent). Both were vocal in their pessimism and their rage. Like Thek, Smith benefited from critical support by Susan Sontag, then perhaps the most eminent public intellectual in America; while Thek and Sontag drifted apart, Smith turned on her with disproportionate animosity, as was his wont in matters of art and the heart. …

When Liturgy Goes Wild, Worship Happens

When Liturgy Goes Wild, Worship Happens

In the Moment with Trisha Brown

In the Moment with Trisha Brown Jay Rogoff (bio) What exactly is dance? In the 1960s, during a period of intensive experiment, modern dance choreographers investigated the art's essence. Dances, especially by members of New York's Judson Dance Theater, a loose group of avant-garde choreographers, explored pedestrian movement (quite literally, since walking—not necessarily with a dancer's grace and certainly not with turnout—emerged as a signature gesture), often performed by ordinary people, not trained dancers. Dance events took place anywhere—at the Judson Memorial Church, but also in lofts and artists' studios, on rooftops, in gyms and on basketball courts, in public parks, in [End Page 271] any available open space where people might gather to watch—and many of the dances required no music, only silence or ambient noise. Dances aspired to have no subject matter but pure movement, just as Abstract Expressionism sought to express the qualities of paint on canvas and serial music to convey the nature of sequences of tones. Through all these methods, the dance avant-garde sought to eliminate the division between dancing and its audience, and while some of that audience applauded existential works in which anything might happen at any moment and viewers had their expectations continually overturned, others wondered whether these revolutionary choreographers had abandoned all the structural and symbolic qualities that made dance an art. In 1971 Trisha Brown, one of the Judson experimenters, formed her own company, which still goes strong. While she gradually has made her gestural vocabulary more challenging and absorbing for both audiences and dancers—her works clearly demand rigorous training and extensive rehearsal—and while more recently she has choreographed not only to music but to beautiful compositions that the dances seem to want to express, she has kept faith in some of the anti-virtuosic values with which she began making dance. Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Trisha Brown Dance Company in August 2011 brought retrospective programs to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires, where I watched the August 10 opening performance, and to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 16. Her fine, small company of four women and four men performed numbers that ranged back to her early days—despite their theoretical baggage, they looked fresh and surprising—and included her latest piece, a rather cool, intricately restrained dance for the whole company to a lovely score by Rameau. At Jacob's Pillow, Spanish Dance (1973), the earliest in either program, shows how a couple of clever jokes can help Brown's early minimalist aesthetic produce a witty, satisfying work. Set to Bob Dylan's recording of Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain," it takes place in the shallow space before the curtain. Across the width of the stage, at equal intervals, five women in white t-shirts and pants stand facing left. As the music begins, Leah Morrison begins shuffling forward, flexing her knees and lightly swaying her hips as she advances. She slowly raises her arms before her, then over her head in a classic, splayed-finger flamenco pose—the only thing remotely Spanish about the number. When she makes contact with Tamara Riewe from behind, they begin shuffling forward together as Riewe slowly raises her arms—and so on, until they pick up Diane Madden (Brown's rehearsal director and former dancer, filling out the cast), Laurel Jenkins Tentindo, and Elena Demyanenko. It's simultaneously dance and not dance, expressive and ordinary, and the anticipation gives the number affective structure and becomes part of the fun: will anyone break the pattern? No one does, but as we enjoy the comic spectacle of three, then four and five women slowly prancing [End Page 272] in close formation, hip to haunch, we notice the distinctions in their ports de bras, with Morrison's and Tentindo's more seductive than the others' more pedestrian avant-garde versions. Finally, with all five women chugging left, arms raised, they reach the left side of the proscenium, and Demyanenko smacks into it—boink—on the final plucked guitar note. It's a remarkable experiment in just how little a dance requires to...

Writing & Performance

Writing & Performance