“Minimalist” Dance, Social Critique: Revisiting Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton’s 1963 Word Words

First Words on Word Words: Recovering Social Critique

Word Words was a dance choreographed by Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton in the context of downtown New York City’s interdisciplinary arts milieu of the early 1960s. It was performed only once, as the third work at the Judson Dance Theater’s A Concert of Dance #3, the first in a set of two back-to-back dance concerts held in late January 1963 in the Judson Memorial Church’s gym, according to dance historian Sally Banes’s detailed chronology of the Judson concerts (Banes 1993, 82–83). The accompanying “music” for the dance was a separate piece titled Music for Word Words that was a “prelude” to Concert #4 the next night, followed by the “first” performance in Concert #4, Paxton’s dance English (Banes 1993, 85).

In terms of the tone of the work and the nature of the performers’ movement, Word Words might have seemed a typical example of the type of Judson Dance Theater work that Banes has termed “analytic” (Banes 1987, xx–xxii). Analytic dance “was a style and approach that was consistent with the values of minimalist sculpture,” Banes writes, and it was distinctly modernist in its “separation of formal elements, the abstraction of forms, and the elimination of external references as subjects” (xv).¹ In accounts of Judson work overall, this kind of dance has overshadowed Judson artists’ more outré production, partly due to the prominence and persuasive legacies of analytic choreographer-performers Rainer and colleague Trisha Brown. Rainer in particular is known for her “NO Manifesto” of 1965, eschewing emotion, glamour, and camp (Rainer 1974c), and instead favoring a deadpan, paced delivery that aimed to render a dancer an impersonal agent: a “neutral ‘doer,’” as Rainer has put it (1968, 267). Word Words, a ten-minute dance, consisted of one movement sequence executed by Rainer, repeated by Paxton, and then danced again together, all in a matter-of-fact way (Rainer 1974a, 293).

As it was performed once and only attended by a handful of arts insiders, accounts are limited (Rainer 1974a, 293). Paxton’s contributions to the single, recapitulated movement sequence were “complex,” Banes indicates, reflecting Paxton’s time with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, while Rainer’s consisted of “twisting poses and very tiny, repetitive gestures” (1993, 89). In photographs published of this work, Rainer and Paxton stand next to each other or lie on their sides in identical postures, maintaining impassive expressions while looking straight ahead (Perron and Rainer 2014; Rainer 1974a, 293; Sayre 1989, 119). As was the case for many such Judson works, Word Words was performed in silence, accompanied only by the sounds made by Rainer and Paxton as they stepped or contacted the floor.

Though this little dance may at first glance seem unremarkable, I want to argue for its radicalness, given the details of its context at a time in New York’s experimental dance and visual art when, as I will shortly explain, “desubjectivization,” or a deliberately inexpressive modality of making, was ascendant, camp aesthetics were still underground, and gender roles were fundamentally binarized. One such detail, upon which I will focus in this essay, was the work’s costuming: G-strings and pasties (small patches or decorations covering female performers’ nipples), the legal minimum for performers to be considered clothed and thereby not breaking laws of the period concerning public “indecency.” While there was certainly an element of pragmatism involved in this choice, I suggest it was also provocative, and indicative of another side of Judson work influenced by camp performance. Before clarifying what I mean by “camp,” especially in performance by women, I wish to state my core argument in this article. Word Words may have appeared at face value to further the formalist reading of much Judson work, championing a modernist abstraction and reductivism of movement qua movement. However, it also brought into question the otherwise unassailable matter of gender roles, even managing for a moment to de-essentialize the gender system’s binaries: a deeply radical move, even in...