SPRING 1997
The Judson Dance Theater came into being in the summer of 1962. I had been Associate Minister of the church for one year, with special responsibility for directing the arts program. The previous year I had been engaged in beginning a theater devoted to presenting the work of new playwrights, and in many ways the dance program came into being as an alien reality—removed from my history, my understanding, and any knowledge of art which I previously had had.
The first concerts, more than anything else, created in me an immense anxiety. I did not understand what these dancers were doing. I had no way of relating it to Modern Dance history—because I knew none. My sensation from the first concerts was one of awe at the stinging vitality of the work, and fear and anxiety that the traditional ground rules of all art seemed to be obliterated by the work. I watched the pieces in a kind of frenetic trance, hardly believing my eyes or ears.
Not, I must hasten to add, because the work was particularly shocking or bizarre. No, the pieces shook me precisely for the opposite reasons. Here the primary movements of living and the primary sounds of life seemed to be used in all their “ordinariness” to create a powerful aesthetic experience but one which was not “arty” or “pretty” or “moving” in the usual sense. Suddenly the simple facts of moving, standing, kneeling, crouching, lying down, listening, seeing, smelling, touching, not-touching, took on what I can only call a kind of classicism. Indeed, my most immediate memory of the early years of the Judson Dance Theater is of a kind of classicism—a nobility of primary movement and sounds. There was none of the emotion-wrought myth-sense which I had experienced at my few forays into Martha Graham concerts and those of a few other modern choreographers. Indeed, the one quality which seemed to pervade most of the early Judson dance pieces (though not all’ one could never be absolute about such extraordinary diversity) was kind of serene, powerful attention to the movement—or lack of movement—happening at the exact time. Despite its rather general characterization of the initial Dance Theater, almost as important an influence on the early—and later—days was the immense diversity of the first dancers and the “participatory democracy” which informed the way the first concerts were put together and presented.
Many of the dancers had been involved in a workshop led by Robert Dunn, exploring dance meaning and methods. All, it seems to me, had been immensely influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. And then, of course, there were the very diverse backgrounds of each of them as individuals. Despite the Dunn-Cage-Cunningham influences, those individual differences were immediately apparent in the first concert of the Judson Church Theater, given July 6, 1962 in our gymnasium. (The concert later moved upstairs to the more spacious and slightly more elegant sanctuary.) I consider three of the dances on that evening:
Ruth Emerson (who later moved from New York and thus from the Dance Theater) presented works of a kind of broad and delicate austerity. I remember her own dancing as being a combination of largeness and details which was intriguing and peculiar. One did not expect her body to do what it did in dance. Many times, in fact, I have been intrigued by the combination of certain types of bodies with what seems alien movement in the Judson Dance Theater. Gradually I came to feel and appreciate this tension as a controlled and experimental excitement.
Fred Herko seemed to me the most “out” of the general tempo and style of the Dance Theater as a whole. His work was often piquant and ironically flamboyant, with cadenzas of pure lyrical movement. His work tended to be more directly commentary-like than most the of the other dancers.
Even on the first concert, and knowing little or nothing of dance, I recognized the work of Yvonne Rainer as brilliant, and containing what I can only call greatness. The outlines of her work were so absolutely distinct; every gesture, small or large, was honed to exactly what it was. There was never any sense of the extraneous in anything she did. And yet the economy of her choreography never gave the feeling of sparseness; rather it created always a feeling of immense and full presence with no fat—all sinew and marrow and richness. With many avant-garde dancers one feels a certain offhand attitude toward technique. It is simply a means to getting something done. Brilliant technique is tossed off as if to say: “Oh, yes, I can do difficult things but that really isn’t important.” With Yvonne Rainer’s work one never got that feeling. The technique was respected and accepted for its own power. There were no means to ends. Rather, every movement or silence was an end in itself.
I have spoken only about three dancers on the first concert individually and I am slightly shamefaced at even daring this, since I am certainly not a critic nor dancer. Nevertheless these are my impressions of them at that time, and I can only say that their presence completely changed and revolutionized my entire aesthetic outlook—not only as it referred to dance, but also to theater, painting, music and sculpture.
Now briefly let me speak as a churchman about the meaning and influences of the Judson Dance Theater on a fairly middle-class Protestant congregation. I have spoken of my own anxiety, and fascination, with the first concerts. Gradually I came to see that anxiety as, in fact, repressed excitement. Here was movement and action like none I had seen, with meanings which no explanation and no concepts could capture or explain away. I think our congregation’s reaction was very similar.
The church in our own time is terribly verbal. Even our forays into the arts tend to be verbal drama, or paintings with explicit meanings, or that most odious of all bastard arts—religious dance. The Judson Dance Theater gave us an experience where our verbal facility was left bumbling—where our penchant to conceptualize about meanings and philosophies was muted. It was good for us. It opened again for us the springs of revelation muddied by rational, verbal comforts. It took us in many ways beyond our depth, both religiously and aesthetically; but where else should a church be?
The influence on our worship has become increasingly clear. I doubt, for instance, if we would have had the courage to have a period on our service which as simply opened up to the congregation for statements and concerns—had we not first seen the insouciance with which the dancers could allow the unexpected to enter their concerts. The importance of the gesture, the movement, of the congregation and of the liturgists, would have remained lost to us have without them. And certainly we would not have instituted the period of silence in our service had we not seen silence made profound and aesthetic in many concerts of dance in the sanctuary.
Where the Judson Dance Theater now is, is puzzling and unstructured. After the first two years of concerts, democratically organized by the whole workshop, the workshop ceased and I took on the responsibility of choosing the choreographers and dates for concerts. Without funds it has been impossible to maintain a steady growing workshop in dance—a situation which distresses me. Many of the early lights of the Dance Theater—Rainer, Judith Dunn, Steve Paxton, Elaine Summers—began to give whole evenings, presenting broad spectrums of their work. Some of the excitement of that incredible dash and flurry of diversity which made up the first two years was inevitably lost, but the depth of seeing one dancer’s work in all its breadth had its own interest. Gradually, also, new dancers, sometimes pupils of the first choreographers, began to give concerts, and other choreographers associated in style or mood with the Dance Theater began to request dates. James Waring, for instance, has given several concerts with his witty and elegantly dramatic sense of dance. Katherine Litz created a concert, wry and beautiful, with her pathos and delicacy. Two of the younger, Kenneth King and Meredith Monk, in many ways create anew the dry excitement of the early years—indeed, they seem like a second generation of Judson Dance. There are, of course, differences, as there should be. In some ways their work is even less concerned with what we think of as “dance” movements. In this they take the classicism of the early Judson dancers and translate it into its primary elements. It is a reductionism, however, which for me work. It is as if King and Monk ask, with passion and precision, “What is dance?” and strive in their works for the most basic and fundamental answers. And the elements of an art, seen in such splendid isolation, may, indeed, not seem “dancey.” All to the good! They are excavating the underpinnings of dance with strength and courage. Curiously, however, they combine these austere explorations with many theatrical props and film and slide and strobe lights. The effect is then both complex and simple at once.
Every now and then, critics from the Voice or the Times speak of the Judson Dance Theater and obviously long for its demise so that they may write the official and polished obituary. We are, in our peculiar way, rather determined to deny them that privilege.
Al Carmines is Pastor of Rauschen Busch Memorial United Church o Christ and an Adjunct Professor of Musical Theater at Columbia University. For twenty years he served as Pastor at Judson Memorial Church, where he administered the Judson Dance Theater.
Reprinted Courtesy of the American Dance Guild.
