sarma

What is dance? What is choreography? What does this process entail? What is real? What is illusion? When is somebody on stage? In character? What is a preference? What is a choice? What is set material? What is improvisation?

The Grand Union was a performance collective in New York in the 1970ies, with key members Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Leiris, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. The collective’s venture is still reflected in the work of most artists and collectives working in the field of contemporary choreography today. Due to this group, techniques like Contact Improvisation, Alexander Technique, Authentic Movement became an integral part of contemporary dance training. The use of compositional methods and approaches from music and visual arts in dance was a challenge for every dance and theatrical convention at that time.

The Grand Union was preceded historically by the Judson Dance Theater, which was founded by a group of students with a specific line of interest in dance.

In the 1950ies, when Merce Cunningham created his dances on the West Coast, Anna Halprin was starting a studio outside San Francisco. She invited people to come there and gave workshops. She had a background of anatomy, kinesiology and improvisation. Dancers and non-dancers participated in her workshops, and together they explored different ways and ideas concerning dance. Her first piece "Parades and Changes" (premiered in New York in 1955) was received very controversially, because the dancers were not considered to be professionally trained and took off their clothes during the piece.

Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Robert Morris, and Trisha Brown, all of whom were working with Ann Halprin, moved to New York, where they joined workshops with a man named Robert Dunn. He was a musician and a disciple of John Cage. He applied John Cage’s techniques to dance. Together they analysed movement and created very elaborate rule games and devices that would structure the dances for them. The dancers didn’t have to come up with the dance, but with a structure, a system that determined the dance by itself.

Choreography as a framework to see ordinary movement

In 1962, several students of this workshop convinced the pastor of the Judson Church to let them use the basement gym for informal concerts and created a group called the Judson Dance Theatre. They reduced movement to the most essential: standing, running, sitting, lying and other everyday movements which could be considered to be dance.

The dancers wore sneakers and pedestrian clothing. The audience sat all around the “stage”. It was the first time that there was no real stage, no real front.

The idea of the dancer as an heroic figure (as stated by Martha Graham and others) was deconstructed and the choreographic process demystified. The group opted for very clear structures in dance and repetitive patterns. Performers would talk on stage without any theatrical impetus.

They called their performances "concerts" and these concerts were not only made by dancers, but by poets, visual artists, film makers, musicians and people from different disciplines. The first evening was a great success, and it lead to a succession of evenings between 1962 and 1964; it not only blew up the convention of modern dance, but also the western concept of dance in general.

Crossdisciplinary revolt against self-expression in art

Get rid of the artist's hand. Get rid of self-expression. Get rid of monumentality in sculpture and get rid of virtuosity in dance. Replace it with democratic human scale and total neutrality.

At the same time, artists in the visual art world turned away from heroic self-expressionism. Between 1963 and 1968, people like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris (who also had participated in Anna Halprin’s workshops) were working on Minimal Sculptures. These sculptures were neither monumental nor very small. They were on a human scale, so that one could see the object in relation to architecture and the human body. One had to construct the perception of one’s own body into the conception. The work was not about seeing an object, but the relationship of the object with space and time as you moved around and through the sculpture.

So while these artists turned objects into performances, the Judson people were almost turning the body into an object in their performances.

In 1969, Yvonne Rainer started to work on a project. The title was from a sculpture by Robert Morris: “Continuous Project Altered Daily”.

Yvonne Rainer took this visual arts concept and to converted it to dance. She decided to incorporate various aspects of rehearsal and the choreographic process, like learning the material, marking it through discussion with the other dancers, running it and finally performing it in a certain style in the performance. She wanted to put that process on stage for people to see. With her version of "Continuous Project Altered Daily" she created a mixture balancing between two extremes: improvising and talking casually with each other, and performing material in a very finished and perfect way.

The performers of this project would later be the Grand Union: Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Leiris, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. They invited Trisha Brown to join them. They renamed the project "Grand Union", because they thought it sounded more like a rock band; and rigorously decided only to improvise in their performances.

Limits of one’s creativity

In the beginning, these 7 members were quite uncomfortable with improvisation. David Gordon had never improvised before – so he started the performances by just doing Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A” over and over in different speeds.

They performed from 1970 to 1976. When they started, everybody was in love with each other. By the end, 6 years later, bitterness and irritations had grown considerably. All of them were strong personalities who also wanted to develop their own work and were critical towards the work of each other. Nevertheless, they continued to improvise together throughout this period. Yvonne Rainer left the Grand Union after three years. She once mentioned that continuously to be tasked to the limits of one’s creativeness created terrible pressure.

Let it rock

The video excerpts shown and introduced by Lena Wilson, who is a dancer, choreographer, film-theoretician and curator for the New York Festival PERFORMA, were selected by her from 10 hours of documentary material.

The moments presented tell about a tremendous sense of space and freedom. We see decentralized activities which emerge simultaneously, and group situations; dancing to Cat Stevens and sharing a cigarette between Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown and Barbara Dillon while conversing and showing their scarves to each other. We see Yvonne Rainer transforming a baby-like scream of "mama" into funny gibberish mumbling, addressing different performers and seducing them to smile. We see them struggling to make a moment work, sometimes feel their ease with simplicity, and at other times see them collapse into distant boredom. They are playing and investing, in dance, movement, tasks and presence. Yvonne Rainer reads from a book the story of a man and a woman dating, described by absurd and impossible movements which are executed by Trisha Brown and David Gordon, who are bound to fail, still trying to do their best. We see the performers joining games, supporting each other’s actions, challenging each other and competing. All the variations of different personalities stating and negotiating their different artistic choices are at stake.

The screening of the Grand Union is a reference. It is not an exposure. It is great to see this rare material of a generation of artists, which were smart and rebellious and re-examined what it means to perform and create by taking it to the limit.