Virtue and Virtuosity

To oversimplify: since its beginnings more than a century ago, modern dance has negotiated between several pairs of philosophical and performance extremes. These opposing poles include—but are by no means limited to—natural movement versus the high artifice of ballet; pure gesture that signifies only itself, absent of symbolic import, versus movement designed to tell stories or express feelings and psychological states; and gestures and tasks anyone at all can perform, versus those demanding specially trained personnel. Beyond the level of individual gesture, we find similar extremes defining entire dances: works that can be performed anywhere—a gallery, a gymnasium, a rooftop, a streetscape—and seen from any perspective, versus those requiring the privileged audience view provided by a traditional proscenium or thrust stage; dances that unfold in silence, or for which simultaneously performed music sounds simply coincidental, versus those that appear to express a specific musical accompaniment, or feelings implied by it; and dances that acknowledge the body's subjection to gravity, versus those whose illusions include weightlessness and flight.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, an exhibition that ran last fall and into the winter at New York's Museum of Modern Art, documented in texts, drawings, photographs, films, and videos the work of the choreographers who, in the early 1960s, experimented with a series of "events" and "tasks" (as they often called them, rather than "dances") that tended to pull dancing toward an anti-virtuosic purity. Isadora Duncan, at the turn of the 20^th century, had championed natural movement against what she called the "living death" of ballet and its "delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist." She invoked dance's higher purpose of revealing the body's beauty and aspiring to "a high religious art as it was with the Greeks."

The Judson group also aimed for a purity based in democratic principles, redefining dance entirely by seeking its essential virtues, which could be shockingly ordinary. Yvonne Rainer has joked that she "invented running" (a 1963 work, We Shall Run, used a combination of trained and untrained performers), while Steve Paxton "invented walking." (Curiously, although several Judson choreographers aspired to creating gesture that anyone could perform, even their untrained performers tended to have the slender bodies of dancers.) Such pedestrian—often literally "pedestrian"—movement challenged audiences who witnessed not an aesthetic transformation, but movement resolutely determined to remain what it was. Similarly, the group's most frequent performance space, the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South, did not become an enchanted forest or an abstract modernist space, but stayed the "area it was," according to Robert Dunn, whose dance composition students in 1960 included several future Judson members. Nevertheless, pedestrian movement could be adapted in witty ways by choreographers like Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs. Childs's 1964 Carnation, for example, at one point involves her plucking a set of foam hair curlers from a steamer basket she has been wearing as a hat, and at another, stuffing a multicolored set of sponges into her mouth, one at a time, until they create the impression of a bouquet blooming from her face. In the work's final sequence, a blue bag lying on the floor continually stymies her until she triumphs by springing over it in a backward somersault.

Choreographer Simone Forti helped define Judson's principles with a series of five "unadorned actions"—tasks collectively titled Dance Constructions and first performed at Yoko Ono's studio loft in May 1961, more than a year before the first dance concert at Judson Memorial Church. MoMA has acquired these works, and during my museum visit a group of young dancers performed them in one room of the exhibition. In Huddle, eight dancers form a tight mass. One dancer at a time leaves the floor, climbs up over the huddled others, and descends on the other side. In another work, Slant Board, four dancers climb and descend a large plywood board angled against a wall at forty-five degrees, assisted by six thick knotted ropes, in which they periodically entwine themselves. In Platforms, a woman helps a man lie down under a...