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24 Judson Rides Againl Judson Dance Theater has become the kind oflegend whose reality is lost in a mist of nostalgia and imperfect remembrances. The people who were involved in the group nearly twenty years ago remember only fragments and each one, of course, has a particular perspective on that past. The people who weren't involved, either as participants or spectators, feel compelled to justify their absence. Dance historians and critics invoke Judson for all sorts of reasons, many of them inaccurate. And meanwhile, no one can agree on what, exactly, Judson Dance Theater was. With two programs ofJudson reconstructions taking place this weekend at Danspace at St. Mark's Church, a great deal of light will be shed on just what happened at Judson Church in the sixties and its pervasive effect on new dance over the past two decades. The strictest definition of Judson Dance Theater is that it was the loosely organized collective of choreographers who met in a weekly workshop at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square from 1962 to 1964, producing over two hundred dances in twenty concerts, mostly onenight stands. The first concert, on July 6,1962, was a marathon that lasted over three hours, attracted hundreds of spectators (mostly Village writers and artists), and pointed a way for the future of avant-garde, downtown dance. That first concert, organized by students in a choreography class taught at the Merce Cunningham studio by Robert Dunn, set up a model for producing dance cooperatively and cheaply that corresponded to similar activities at the time in the poetry, film, and theater worlds. The brash, iconoclastic energy and ambition of the event foreshadowed the impulse toward physical and political liberation that captured the American imagination in the sixties. Jill Johnston wrote about this concert in the Village Voice and called it "Democracy." She also rang Judson Dance Theater's death knell in the Voice in 1965, after zealously covering nearly every concert in her column. A broader definition of the Judson Dance Theater begins with that same concert but moves back in time to encompass the social and artistic networks that impinged on the workshop group. It also includes choreographers who gave concerts at the Judson Church but were never part of the Village Voice, April 20, 1982. 207 208 Poslmodern Dance weekly workshop. So James Waring, who began to give concerts at the church after the group, but in whose company some of the group danced, and who shared a studio with Aileen Passloffand Yvonne Rainer where he taught many of the Judson dancers, is part of the bigger sense of Judson Dance Theater, as are Passloff and Katherine Litz, and Remy Charlip. It also includes people like Simone Forti, who was in the Dunn class but never appeared at the church, and people like Meredith Monk, Phoebe Neville, and Kenneth King, who began performing at the church after the initial workshop had disbanded. In any case, the Judson Church, with its Dance Theater, Poets' Theater, Gallery and numerous political events, was a lively place in the sixties and the Judson Dance Theater was a particularly vital gathering place for artists in all fields. In the early years, anyone who abided by the democratic rules ofthe workshop could make a dance, whether trained as a dancer (like Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Ruth Emerson, Fred Herko, Elizabeth Keen, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Judith Dunn, Sally Gross, Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers) or as a musician (like John Herbert McDowell, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney) or as a visual artist (like Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, Robert Morris). The notion ofchoreography was an open field waiting to be explored. Although we think now of Judson as the seedbed for the reductive, at times austere, style that characterized postrnodern dance in the seventies , diversity of style and method was key to the group's operations. It was an attempt to plumb that diversity that led to the current Judson reconstructions . Wendy Perron, a dancer, choreographer, and writer, led her students on a search for their shared "roots" and began excavating Judson Dance Theater two years ago. Perron and Tony Carruthers set up the Bennington College Judson Project, which commissioned performances by Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer at Bennington, videotaped interviews with over twenty Judson Dance Theater "members," and mounted an exhibition of photographs, scores, programs, and videotapes (seen at Bennington and at New York University's Grey Gallery earlier this year). One problem with...

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