Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance

David Gordon: The Ambiguities

David Gordon: The Ambiguities AVID GORDON'S work over the past eighteen years has been concerned with finding structures for framing the individual, fleeting act. In one sense, he views choreography as self-defense: since the ideology of modern dance has always promoted tolerance for individual performance styles and body structures, it can be forced to make room for those dancers whose bodies and styles fit into no one's vision but their own. They survive artistically by becoming choreographers. But this kind of self-defensive thinking has also put Gordon on the offensive. Inventing new systems for ordering movement — changing the rules — means criticizing and discarding academic formulae. As a student, Gordon always managed to find the holes in the teaching. But he will criticizethe new as well as the old. In the heyday of the Judson Church, his trenchant Random Breakfast (1963) parodied his peers' new methods of making dances. And his most recent dance, Not Necessarily Recognizable Objectives (1978), comments ironically on its own content and construction. Refining his offensive/defensive strategies slowly, finding highly systematic constructions with which to frame the most elusive or undistinguished movements, concentrating on minute details of simple actions, and using repetition as a key device, Gordon has evolved a choreographic practice that works analytically. Like a cubist painter, he accumulates and organizes multiple views of a single phenomenon into one composition — a method that despite apparent distortion often reflects more accurately the complex psychological processes of visual perception. As Cezanne and his followers made near and far objects equal in the picture plane, so Gordon effectively erases David Gordon in The Matter. Photographs © Babette Mangolte, 1972. D hierarchies between classes of movement. Transitions between one kind of gesture or step and another become as important as the step itself. Or transitions disappear entirely. Habitual or functional gestures appear side-by-side with abstract movements. But an inclination of the head or the lifting of a chair may be given even more weight than a jump. The process of isolating and focusing on particular movements tends to stress their formal qualities, though Gordon's dances also bristle with humor, irony, and social comment. In the debate on theatricality among post-modern choreographers, Gordon espouses spectacle. But he uses spectacular moments and glamorous touches cunningly, often intensifying them until a gap between the movement relationships and their theatrical overlay throws the movement into high relief. Or, until ultimately the ambiguity of what is "Teal" and what is dramatic, or scripted, floats tantalizingly to the surface of the dance. Gordon was born and grew up in Manhattan. He earned a degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College, where he performed with the school dance club. In 1956, while still in college, he began dancing in James Waring's company. From Waring, he learned to value wit and style, to consider any movement as something that might be included in a dance, to study the work of Merce Cunningham, Merle Marsicano, Katherine Litz, and others who were outside of what was then mainstream modern dance. He studied composition with Waring, choreographing his first publicly performed duet with Valda Setterfield1 for a program of work by Waring's students given at the Living Theater in 1960. While studying with Cunningham on a scholarship at Connecticut College in the summer of 1960, Gordon decided to take Martha Graham's technique class and Louis Horst's composition class as well. "I had no knowledge of this work that everybody else had revolted against," Gordon remembers.2 He wanted to find out what Waring, Cunningham, Marsicano, Litz, Aileen Passloff and others had left behind. He found Graham "extraordinary" but after the first week, she turned the class over to another teacher who was disappointing. Gordon's interest in Graham technique ended. In Horst's class, Gordon immediately found the chinks when he tried to fit his own content into the preclassic forms Horst assigned. "I did an ABAnumber in which the A part was jumping around and shaking a lot and the B part had to do with leg lifts and the A part was a return to shaking again." Gordon admits he was looking for trouble when he 98 TERPSICHORE INSNEAKERS told the teacher that the name of the dance was The Spastic Cheerleader. But he believes that his attempt to solve the next assignment, a duet in ABA form, was earnest. He asked Setterfield to...