Words Without Music by Philip Glass

Author:Philip Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2015-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

ALONG WITH THE ARTISTS AND THEATER COMPANIES, dancers and choreographers were moving into SoHo, making the area rich in talent and invention. The Grand Union, a contact improvisation company, came into being. It included, at various times, Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, and Molissa Fenley all had companies in the early 1970s. I’m citing as many as I can remember to give a sense of the depth of talent that was working and reinventing dance. They were emotionally, artistically, and actually younger than the older companies—Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and Merce Cunningham—though quite a few of them came out of Merce’s company or his classes.

These dancers were taking colloquial movement—movements of everyday life—and turning that into dance. They weren’t specialized movements made for dance bodies and dance-trained people. They were for people who could just be walking, running, or jumping around. They didn’t always wear dance clothes. Sometimes they even wore jeans. They also didn’t wear dancer’s shoes. They might wear tennis shoes, or sometimes just bare feet was enough.

One of Yvonne’s dance pieces began with a ladder and a pile of mattresses. The company would climb up on the ladder and dive onto the mattresses, and whatever happened, happened. They would let their bodies respond to the gravity and the fall and the physicality of the mattresses. It was like watching a study in human motion. There were eight or ten people who would just continually dive onto the mattresses. This was something that came out of the idea that the aesthetic content of this “dance” would be in the mind of the viewer and, in this way, John Cage had really affected young people. In this tradition, Yvonne didn’t choreograph the piece, she let the falling body choreograph it.

I performed in 1971 with Yvonne at the Galleria l’Attico in Rome, where the gallery director, Fabio Sargentini, was putting on a series of performances in an apartment building garage. Yvonne built a box that was six feet high, three feet wide, and twelve inches deep that one could stand in. Yvonne just put your body into the box, and the interaction of you and the box made something happen that wasn’t programmed or anticipated. The viewers could find choice aesthetic moments, if they cared to, and if you yourself were performing in it, you were in for an unknown experience, because there were no real instructions and no rehearsal. I just walked into the box and moved inside it for fifteen or twenty minutes while Yvonne was moving around on the outside. I was always curious about dance, but I came to it too late and without the discipline. Even so, I did actually perform once, and it was with Yvonne.

Who were the audiences for these theater and dance performances? We were: the musicians, actors, painters, sculptors, poets, and writers, many of whom lived and worked in the area. If Yvonne or Trisha

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.