Title: 1: On Improvisation
Order: 1
Date: 05-10-2001
Location: Mad Brook Farm, Vermont
Image: images/steve-paxton/cluster-3/part-1.jpg
audio: audio/steve-paxton/cluster-3/on-improvisation.ogg
audio/steve-paxton/cluster-3/on-improvisation.m4a
audio/steve-paxton/cluster-3/on-improvisation.mp3
Voices: Steve Paxton (SP)
Myriam Van Imschoot (MVI)
--- SECTION: The Tape Piece --- [00:00]
SP: […] So, this is improvisation day, and we're talking about the
first solo I made, which was…which I considered improvisational. I don't
recall the name of it. It was in 1967. It was for a tour that I made of
the West Coast, and it was a text, which was being typed, was
being…wait a minute. It was being produced on a tape machine for the
audience and the typist and was being typed. And whenever the text got
ahead of the typist, the typist would tell me, and I would come and
rewind the tape for the typist and start it again. And whenever I wasn't
involved with this duty, I was free to dance and improvise, and all I
can remember was that I stood on my hands during that improvisation. I
danced around in a - I think - a kind of Cunningham-like way because
that material was still very strong in my body, that technique, and I
think it was about 12 to 15 minutes long all together.
And as I have said many times, what I…why I started working with
improvisation, I had seen improvisation, I had been impressed with some
improvisations that Trisha Brown and Simone Forti had done - for
instance - in the Judson workshop, really more than any, strongly
impressed, and was very intrigued with the idea, but I didn't feel like
I knew what it was they were doing. I didn't feel in the way that I felt
more secure with thinking about technique and dance aesthetics of that
time, I didn't understand what I was supposed to do if I was
improvising. I had studied with a man named Eugene Lyons, who was
actually a kind of friend, a director who was interested in working with
improvisation. We did some workshops, a series of workshops, with other
dancers trying to improvise, but the premise of that improvisation was
things like… You would take a theme like self-sufficiency or security,
and you would improvise that, you know, so I didn't, it didn't help. It
wasn't helpful in illustrating what the word might mean.
As I think is pretty clear, I wasn't a great fan of jazz or other
improvisational forms where improvisation might be found, nor did I
understand classical music and its relationship to improvisation. And
there was no improvisation in Cunningham or in Cage although they
employed forms, which required choices, it was not considered
improvisational. So, the word floated there really in abstraction, and I
had no idea what it was. And I began trying to do it. I simply set out
to try to do something and see if I thought it was improvisation. So, it
was at a very low level of theory that I began and… But eventually, in
that solo, and with trying to define the word in action, I came to
accept what I did as improvisation to some degree although, again at a
very low level, and began to see the possibility of other higher degrees
of improvisation.
: Steve Paxton washing hands, probably during Cunningham Dance Company World Tour. Photograph Collection. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York. Photo: Unattributed, 1964.
So, as for defining the word, I defined it in a much later article as
improvisation is a word which, in which the subject is constantly
changing, the actual attributes of improvisation are not fixed. So, we
have words like this in which the definition is a changeable one. I can
think of other such words that we use, freedom for instance, would mean
something different to every person. God would mean something different
to every person. Love would mean…would be very specific. So, this is a
category of words. Improvisation is one of those words.
MVI: Do you remember what you found out about it - about that word -
during the solo?
SP: I think I've just described it. I found out not very much. I found
out a little bit though, and I found out, I felt like I had found…I
found out what I thought by doing it, by trying to do what I thought the
word meant, which was simply not the plan, you know, I ended up noticing
that I more or less improvised a selection of movements, recognized some
of those movements as being my technical…
MVI: …repertoire?
SP: …repertoire. Yeah. And some of them not, you know, that I, for
instance, I mentioned standing on my hands because that was not
something Cunningham would have done, you know. So, but at the same
time, I'm sure that my toes were pointed most of the time, you know,
kind of the habits that you're in. My arms were used in a certain way. I
probably used my torso in a Cunningham-like way. So, I recognized that I
had a collection of habits and made me see that, that were there
underneath my will. That if my will directed me in space, or to move a
certain part of my body, it was apt to be in the style of something that
I already knew. And that had been given to me as a piece of dance to
learn, you know, or a technical piece of the dance equipment. And so it
had been defined as dance, so there was not much chance at that stage
that I could have done something - improvised movement - that was not
technical, and I had a prior definition as dance material. I don't think
I would have been doing anything very surprising with my body. It was
perhaps a little bit surprising that, you know, this form that I created
showed that my dancing was to be stopped by another event, you know, the
rewinding of the tape machine, and… So, it sort of illustrated that it
was being improvised and that I was… The dancing, the movement, which is
meant to be the subject of a dance was actually subject to something
else, subject to another process.
MVI: I don’t understand that. The movement…
SP: The movement was subject to another process, which was being the
servant to the typist, who was typing the tape. So the tape was actually
running the situation. And, really, we both had a relationship to the
tape machine.
MVI: It’s a great structural device, also. It's unpredictable, it can…it
will structure your movement sequences. So, it’s like you find also a
way to add or to have composition. Were you, other than what the tape
offers time-wise and action-wise, were you aware of other compositional
tools you could apply to the movement you were generating?
SP: Well, I was aware of the choices I had to generate. I had to
generate choices of movement and space and maybe even in relationship to
the audience, you know, like how I performed the thing. It's unfortunate
that I don't have the text. I have no memory of what the text might have
been. I wrote it. It was my text as I recall, and I recorded it. And
maybe someday I’ll come up against it. I don't know, maybe someday I'll
find it.
MVI: Is there an audience member we could ask that you remember that…
SP: It might be possible to find the typist who typed the text. But I
mean, I've been out of touch with this guy for…
MVI: I can do that.
SP: Well, his name was Dwayne, and he was…he worked for Douglas Chrismas
at the…at Douglas Chrismas’ gallery in Vancouver in 1967. And he…and
Douglas Chrismas now has a gallery in New York City - the ACE gallery.
So, it might just be possible to track this guy down, but if he would
have any memory of this, I would be very surprised.
MVI: Why would you be surprised? Just because…
SP: …because it's 35 years later, you know? Anyways, so that was '67,
and it wasn't until the early 70s that I decided that I had had enough.
I had been 10 years working with pedestrian movement, and I was ready to
move on to something, and I decided that improvisation was… By that
point, I was interested enough in this problem of defining it through
action that I went on to - actually, I thought I would - well, another
10 years…the next 10 years, I'll devote to improvisation, but it has
proven to be much longer than that.
MVI: Did you perform this solo a couple of times?
SP: I started it in Vancouver, and I performed it all the way down to
San Diego. So, it was Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Berkeley or
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
MVI: That’s really important because for your question, defining that
word, you need a couple of performances…
SP: You definitely need more than one. [laughing]
MVI: …at least!
SP: Maybe more than two. No, I performed it for a while, and I realized
that I had a lot of limitations in terms of how I could improvise or
what I thought it was, you know, so… And I began to realize that I was
defining it…that nobody else could define it for me. And that, I think,
is important to realize about improvisation. I mean, people who teach
improvisation, myself included, I have heard say that it can be learned,
but it's not possible to teach it. But you can help people. You can put
them in a position where they can learn it. You can help them learn it
by first of all, just by using the word and suggesting that they try.
I was brought in as a lecturer to Bennington College at some point in
the 80s…the point at which I did *Flat*, so whatever date that was. And
I was shown a class of people who are studying improvisation with a
number of people…Dana Reitz and myself and other people. And I was one
of the sort of late…I was late in the series. So, I came in, and the
dancers were warming up, and I said, “Have you, have you warmed up?” and
I got some responses. “Yes, you know, we’re warming up.” And I said, I
can't remember exactly how I said it. But I asked them if they were
ready to improvise. And they said yes. And so I said, “Well do it,”
[laughing] and they did! That's how we started. And so, I made them
define it for me. And then afterwards, we talked a little bit about what
they had done, but not on a level of good or bad or anything like that,
but just what actually occurred and what choices did you make and or did
you do this or what happened there that was interesting to me, you know,
sort of dealing with it as phenomena, and I think it is phenomena, and
whether it is art or whether it is even performance in the normal way, I
think remains to be questioned, but that it is a phenomena that you can
do and play with and get material from is quite established.
MVI: It seems to me that the solo was also a way back into dance.
SP: Well, the basic question of somebody who comes out of a strict
training, and then you've got all this training, but, in fact, in modern
dance there is this…the highest level of modern dance seems to be the
people who did not do what their teachers taught them. So that you…if
you look from Isadora Duncan, say, through Ruth St. Denis to Graham to
Cunningham to the Judson students of Cunningham, you see that none of
those figures followed their leaders, and that they took the permission
to create a new direction when they became…once they left their
teachers. So that's one level of work that the modern arts have, as
opposed to people who sort of maintain the technique of their teachers
as their work, which is another and very important aspect of things.
: Steve Paxton’s *Afternoon (a forest concert)* (1963), performed in the woods near Billy Klüver’s house, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, October 6, 1963. Photograph Collection. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York. Photo: Unattributed, 1963.
MVI: Because if you look at that period of work up to '67, you can see
that you were either on a pedestrian track, which is, of course,
movement oriented, but it's not dealing with movement invention as such.
SP: Right, right.
MVI: And then if it really was dancing or moving, like *An Afternoon*,
it would be very much Cunningham-based.
SP: Yeah.
MVI: Probably.
SP: Yeah.
MVI: A lot of your works were bypassing the question of what to dance,
in terms of movement invention.
--- SECTION: The dictate of choreography --- [16:09]
SP: Not really bypassing it. I mean, what I was trying to do had to do
with feeling that there was a real stricture, you know, a real
constriction of possibilities by the dictatorship of the choreographer.
And this went deeper than just the movement given. Dance technique, and
subsequent choreographic use of those dancers who have been technically
trained is a kind of brainwashing of the dancer into being able to
accept motivation from another person for their movement, for the use of
their body. It is a…it's something we clearly know I mean, war, you
know, basic training kind of thing takes about six weeks to eight weeks
to train people to, you know…
MVI: Kill?
SP: …go from being students and accountants and storekeepers into
killing machines, and so it doesn't…brainwashing is not unusual, but
it was unusual to think or to realize that I had been through such a
process quite willingly. I enjoyed the whole thing of giving my body
over to somebody that I thought was a great choreographer, but then
realizing that it makes certain things happen, like, I didn't know what
I danced like. I knew what I danced like in the style of my teachers,
but I didn't know what I had to give. So, that question you could say I
was skirting is…that's a question you said I was getting around, but,
in fact it's a quite normal process to go through that. And the idea of
choreographing in the style of Cunningham or Graham or Limón, three very
influential teachers for me or in ballet, you know, which I felt
unprepared to even do technically, somehow seemed a kind of degradation
of the work that they had passed on. That the real work that they had
passed on was that you could create a movement style or technique, a new
process, a new way of looking at the body, and that that was the,
finally, the most precious gift that they had given. The repertory was
proof and presentation of that movement work, but that it was important
to create a vocabulary. It was important…like writers, you know, to
find a voice within the body. So, I felt that that was my basic job, to
discover what my own voice was, but there's no way that somebody can do
that for you, you know, you actually have to grasp yourself by your own
horns [laughing] and wrestle yourself around and find out what you
want to do. So, it's a long processing of the question, what…how do I
dance?
MVI: Yeah. Did the presence of the tape, like the tape recorder, did
that evoke for you any kind of connotations as to a technology of
reproduction versus the unique improvised solo or dancing, you were…
SP: Yeah, yeah.
MVI: …you were aware of that opposition you were playing with?
SP: Yes, yes.
MVI: Can you tell something about that? I mean, about that awareness or
about that…
SP: I think you said it so well. [laughing]
MVI: Saves time!
SP: Well, it was my voice being heard and my body being seen, and my
voice was controlling my body.
MVI: Yeah.
SP: And my voice was not my voice, but it was mechanically reproduced,
so it was actually the limitations of the tape machine controlling the
situation.
[…]
MVI: Do you have a feeling that this opposition was alive at that time?
Like there's more and more available technology for reproduction, and
something we could say…improvisation is something which is, well,
challenges the idea of reproduction. Was that something alive in that
time?
SP: I think it's obvious. You know, even at that time, we were hearing
dead people sing all the time on the radio, and we still are and there's
more and more of them. We have a huge repertoire of voices no longer
connected to human beings. And it’s not been possible before this
century. So, it's pretty obvious that it's happening, and that it's
going to have an effect or has had an effect. I mean, every time I hear
Janis Joplin, what am I supposed to think, you know? This is a
reproduction being played into a broadcasting system and being
reproduced on my radio. It's a completely mechanical event. It has
absolutely no feeling…absolutely no…There's nothing human about it.
It's the most abstract thing that's ever happened, and yet I hear Janis,
you know, getting down again, and I'm filled with emotions. I find it so
bizarre. I think we're in a very bizarre situation.
[…]
MVI: There's a lot of typewriters in 60s performances. It’s, you know,
in the music of Cage. There’s a lot of them. In Claes Oldenburg’s *Late
Happenings*, dealing with some secretarial women typewriting, Robert
Whitman[^Whitman] in his, in the *Nine Evenings* piece that he did, there was a
typewriter. There seems to be somehow an attraction for avant-garde
artists at that moment, and I was just wondering why. What that object
represented at that moment because I have a computer. I am from a
computer generation.
SP: But the typewriter was what we had. Yeah, I don't know what its
fascination was. […]
MVI: When you were saying that your dead voice, if we can call it that
way, was dictating your life presence because it really was kind of a…
SP: Controlling.
MVI: Controlling. Does that imply critique on the technological tool
you’re staging, you’re using, the technology it represents?
SP: A critique, maybe an observation.
MVI: An observation.
SP: And also, I mean, there are three relationships: there’s the tape
machine to the audience, there’s the tape machine to the typist, there’s
the tape machine to the dancer, and as the dancer was also the voice on
the tape machine, I was apparently…
MVI: Split?
SP: I was, well, not split. I was doubled. Different than split. I was
providing one line of thinking through the machine, and I was then free
to have a completely different line of thinking in my dancing and to
work in on different levels, so…
MVI: Did you magnify the sound of the typewriter or the tape recorder?
SP: No, no.
MVI: Was it audible for your audience, then?
SP: Yes, it was audible and visible, and it was clear what the job was.
[•••]
MVI: So, what else was on the program? [•••]
SP: Oh, *Satisfying Lover*, *State*, *Salt Lake City Deaths*… And
this…it might have been *Audience Performance \#1*. I really can't
remember the name of it. But there was something in…the *Audience
Performances* were events in which…*Audience Performance \#1*, as I
recall, was somewhat guided, but it left the audience a chance to do
more or less what they want. It's sort of another word for intermission,
as well, an audience performance. *Audience Performance \#2* was
completely open as to what the audience did, and sometimes, people would
get up and dance or run around or…
[•••]
MVI: Tell me something more about the audience…
SP: …performances?
MVI: …performances. Yeah. I’m really interested.
SP: Well, I mean, I can't quite remember them. I just remember that they
were a situation in which the performance power was shifted from me to
the people watching me. The right, the permission, the whatever.
MVI: Was the tour the first time you…
SP: I wonder if *Audience Performance \#1* was…there was an event at
The New School in which I gave the audience cards with lines on them,
and each person's activity or line - stand up in the audience, and say
their line - triggered, in a kind of like lineage way other events in
different parts of the audience. So, that might have been *Audience
Performance \#1*, the cards and the readings, and then audience
performance…that's probably…that was probably right.
MVI: That’s very…the New York performance was right before you went on
tour?
SP: In '67?
MVI: Yeah. So, you went on tour, like the New York performance was in
November or something…
SP: That was The New School performance, yeah.
MVI: So you left in the winter for…
SP: My first solo tour!
MVI: Yeah! Late '67 up to '68, your tour, and you did some more audience
performances.
SP: Yes, I did these performances.
MVI: How many performance events did you make?
SP: The '67 tour was a Spring tour, so I started in Vancouver and went
to San Diego. In '68, I did it again. I did it for about eight years,
that tour at that same time.
MVI: There's fairly few or little information about those performances.
SP: Well, I do have some people I could ask if they remember anything.
And the other thing is one of them was at Mills College, so Mills
College might have some record or memory.
MVI: I’d love to do that, actually yeah.
SP: I did another one at ACE…Oh! I had a couple of other pieces. There
was *Beautiful Lecture*, which was the contrasting of a pornographic
film with *Swan Lake* with myself in the space between. What else did
I…there was something, I can’t even remember, called *A Lecture on
Performance*. I wonder if that was the one with a dog with like a…
MVI: If you like, we can go into that in questionnaires because that
would mean that I put out all my little bits and pieces of what I
found…
SP: Of information to spark my memory…
MVI: Of information, and then, you can see more.
SP: Well, it would be good to get everything tied down properly, so I
don't misattribute.
--- SECTION: Dunn's workshop and Trisha Brown --- [29:17]
MVI: [•••] I jump to Robert Dunn’s workshop. According to Trisha
Brown, who was involved in improvisational dance from early 60s on,
she's like, really pursuing that track. At the time, she said that
although it had some role in a workshop, as it will have in any kind of
workshop dealing with creation and process and all of that, she didn't
feel like it was like highly valued for one thing. And that secondly…
SP: Not only not highly valued, I mean, maybe not valued because not
understood, and not present. That is, there weren’t examples of
improvisers in New York that I know of, so it was rare.
MVI: The second thing she said [•••] when she did it, she felt also
that there was…that it was ambivalent…
SP: The response?
MVI: The response. That people felt uneasy about some virtuosic display
that was part of the physical feats that she was into while doing these
improvisations. So that there was a slight…not only disinterest but
maybe a slight disapproval of this artistic stance or…
SP: Well, I certainly couldn't feel that.
MVI: No, that's right.
SP: And I didn't pick that up. I wonder if that's not a bit of kind of
paranoia on her part because I think the real problem is that we had
absolutely no way to mentally grapple with what she was doing. She was
doing something that was obviously different than composition, and the
way that we were attacking it and the examples that we had, you know,
Cage scores or even going back to an earlier age, the Louis
Horst…essentially use of music as a format. So here was something
without music that was just emanating from the body that this person was
evidently able to do in the way that a jazz performer can blow, you
know, and there, the rest of us were drawing a blank about what was this
space, which is a great place to start, but we didn’t know that. We just
thought we didn't understand it. And we didn't know what she was
suggesting by doing it, you know. Were we to learn this? Were we
supposed to be able to do this too? How was it that she had permission
to do this, and we had never been told to do it, you know? Yeah, it was,
it was a permission that had arisen, I guess, with her work with Anne
Halprin and with those artists on the West Coast, and most of us had not
any experience of what she had found. So, she can say it was undervalued
or whatever, but I don't think it was a question of that. And you find a
new stone or a new artifact of some sort, you don't know what it is
unless you can see it or find it in its site. It's like an
archaeological process in the arts. She found it someplace where it had
value, where it was understood, and somebody like Anne who knew how to
work with it, or Anna as she’s now known, knew how to work with it or to
suggest it, or knew why to value it. Cunningham I'm sure considered
improvisation just one starting point that was known for making dance,
and he had found others. He didn't…so it just wasn't very present.
Now, it may have been happening. I mean, there were still Isadora Duncan
people in those days, sort of the late 50s.
MVI: Like teachers and schools?
SP: Well, practitioners, you know, going into studios and wafting around
with veils and expressing themselves in the way that the Duncan thinking
had been. I think it's slightly degraded. I mean, Duncan herself, claims
not to have been an improviser, but these people were clearly not
following any particular program. I used to watch them through the
cracks in the studio door, you know, when they were in there prior to my
class. And it gave improvisation the name of something practiced by
women in their 60s who were dressed a little bit inappropriately and
revealingly, you know, and with a lot of veils, like a kind of Salome’s
dance of seduction, and intrigue and all that business done by you
know…
MVI: Free, expressive dancing…
SP: Free, expressive dancing. Whatever, you know, all these things we
try to say about it, which actually means not very much expression, not
a very big range of expression, not a very big range of possibilities.
Yeah, just the barest nibble of what I think improvisation can be. And I
thank God at least somebody was doing something that was not
rigorously…or aesthetically rigorous to point out that not all
movement need have that quality.
MVI: […] I think it's also the remark of a sensitive artist, you know,
who also must have been unsure, you know, the whole question of response
and how people value one’s work is always…
SP: Yes.
MVI: …interspersed with anxiety. I’m sure you can…
SP: I could tell you stories of my own paranoia. I mean, I'm not…
MVI: Yeah, tell me.
SP: Why?
MVI: I don’t know.
SP: It’s not so interesting. It's just that one is in a position of
being evaluated from outside. Now, what is paranoia except feeling that
outside you there is some danger, you know, that they're out to get you?
Well, they are out to get you if you're a young artist. In a way,
they're out to evaluate you. They’re out to look at you as nobody is
ever looked at in this culture. There is no…well, sports figures,
perhaps, you know, but presumably, they're on a team and it's, you
know…boxers perhaps or tennis players get this kind of scrutiny of
every move and every…and if you're doing something, which doesn't
score points, that is to say, if there's no way really to evaluate
whether Trisha Brown is scoring at this moment or is losing at this
moment, you don't know what is going on, then you are in a different
aesthetic realm entirely than the kind of security that more formal
artistic stuff presents.
MVI: […] It's the difference between saying, like, I felt undervalued
and saying improvisation was undervalued.
SP: See, she knew something.
MVI: I’m sorry?
SP: She knew something, or she felt something about improvisation, and
it's…
MVI: You didn’t feel like that was shared, a shared interest?
SP: But it turned out, actually, I mean, her presentation of
improvisations was one of…and her focus on improvisation and Simone
and a few other people in that crowd.
MVI: Who were the other people?
SP: Who would improvise? I think Yvonne improvised to some degree or
would claim to be improvising, you know, as opposed to…but Yvonne was
actually more formalist in general. No, a few people kept that torch,
you know, those embers burning through the years, and it finally was
what provoked my questioning of… “Oh, what do they mean? What are they
doing?” You know, when we work with a score, we know what we're doing.
We know something about the process that we're in. How can you just
suddenly depend on the whole human temperament, armament, and aesthetic
choice-making mechanism in the instant? How can you go into the instant?
And it tallied, for me, along with the mysticism that was being
discussed by John Cage, you know, with his studies with Suzuki, with the
Beats, and with my own kind of limited understanding of the Stoics, that
there was another way to view time. I guess I was beginning to
understand that what you think, what paradigm you hold, determines what
you do, and so I was saying, well, what is this paradigm where there is
no named paradigm? What is it when you go outside of definition? And
realizing that I hadn't been outside my own self-definition or
somebody’s definition of me, you know, like I…which is all a very
tricky world anyway, I mean, that, you know, just the simple…
MVI: The decision to go outside.
SP: …the simple…to go outside is already a journey.
--- SECTION: Yvonne Rainer and improvisation --- [39:05]
MVI: Yeah, just to parallel Trisha Brown’s remark with another remark
that has some similar…has a similar ring is Yvonne Rainer about her
improvisations, and she did improvise. I mean, although she indeed was
more of a formalist, and she stresses the formalist side of her. Even in
retrospect, when I came…when I went to her to talk to her, she would
kind of say: “Well, I've never really improvised [laughing]. I didn't
do that, but, you know, I'm not the improviser. other people are. You
know, ask Steve. You know, I don’t know.”
SP: Yeah.
MVI: But that’s in hindsight, with an insight that she…you know, when
people really pursued that track from that point of view, indeed, she
isn't an improviser. But if you would think of her as she was in 1965,
like I have no idea what's going to happen, then she's like…she’s one
of the persons who actually is trying things out improvisationally and
has some improvisation solos even and duets and so on, so I didn’t
really buy her…
SP: Her putting it aside?
MVI: Yeah.
SP: I think she likes rigor.
MVI: Yeah.
SP: And, with improvisation, you have to accept a period before rigor
reappears, and it can be quite a long period, you know, of a lack of
substance in the work that you can think about, that it takes a long
time for consciousness to seemingly go from rigorous technical or
structural making of dance, and into an area where you don't have those
props anymore. And where you have to make…you have to choose from a
much vaster realm of possibilities than the structural way provides.
MVI: Well, she has these polarities in her anyway to…I think maybe
people forgot about this crazy woman that's in her, some of the quirky
movements and faces, you know…
SP: Yeah.
MVI: Facial expressions she used to have, some really like…characters
reappearing in her dance style, which she at a certain moment really
dismissed saying, I don't want to act…do this lunatic woman act
anymore, and she associates that somehow with improvisation too. And it
also seems that Robert Morris was a little bit influential in that, too.
SP: We're talking about the period of the manifesto?
MVI: Yeah and so he disliked that aspect very, very much.
SP: Have you talked to him?
MVI: I would, I plan to, if ever, you know, someone can…
SP: He's a really nice guy. You'll have a good time with him.
MVI: So, I would be very curious to know because he had an Anna Halprin
background, so he knew. I mean, he wasn't ignorant of…
SP: I didn't realize that. I didn't realize he had an Anna Halprin
background as well.
MVI: Yeah, he tried some classes, and he was around, so he…
SP: …and he was connected to Simone.
MVI: He was so…in that period, he was doing abstract expressionist
paintings, and she was doing abstract expressionist dancing. So, it’s
rooted, but, yeah, so the dismissal of a certain part of Yvonne Rainer’s
being or work or whatever was also somehow a little bit keeping
improvisation at a bay. Not thinking that was maybe the right…
SP: Artistic direction for her…
MVI: …artistic direction, yeah. So it seems like I have two remarks.
One of Trisha Brown saying I was doing it, but it wasn't really liked,
and it's Yvonne Rainer who has this in her work, but from herself and
other people…
SP: She didn’t value it. Maybe the two remarks really go together hand
in hand. There was Yvonne dismissing it, and there was Trisha saying it
was undervalued, and they’re friends at that time, right? They're still
friends, but I mean, they were friends at that time, so maybe that was
where Trisha’s perception of what was going on came from.
MVI: But was it at a certain point maybe, felt that it was just too hot
a form in a cool era?
SP: Possibly, but I mean, you're asking me, you're asking me to make a
judgment about a whole group of people and their assessment of this
work, you know, and I mean, what was happening at that time basically
was the assault of chance procedures on non-chance procedures, so-called
non-chance procedures, which actually arise from improvisational
procedures, the non-chance, you know, instinctual movement production of
which goes into choreography and set material and repertory and the
foundations of dance culture in a way. You know, the pillars of
our…but yeah, there is this other thing, which is…has always been
there, and which obviously choreographers use to some degree to make
material.
MVI: Always, yeah.
SP: So…but it wasn't a performance form. So, Trisha was saying it was
a performance form. She was one of the few voices along with Simone and
Yvonne to say that, and she continued to want to say that…and she was
one of the instigators of Grand Union in that way because she told me
that the point was…could we young choreographers get a grant to, you
know, get the National Endowment for the Arts, for instance, to
acknowledge that we were improvisers, and this was an art form? Could we
get it acknowledged? She had a program.
MVI: She had a mission.
SP: She had a mission, yeah…
MVI: On the other hand…
SP: …and they didn’t.
MVI: They didn’t!
SP: We got some grants from them, but it was always under the pretext
that one of us was choreographing the Grand Union, you know, which never
happened.
MVI: Interesting.
SP: So, we all lied to each other, you know, in a socially acceptable
way to get this money. I mean, we lied to the NEA, and the NEA lied to
us, for instance.
MVI: Consensual lying.
SP: Yeah, they had to give money under their mandate, which didn't
include the word improvisation. We were trying to get them to change
their mandate just a little bit to see what would happen.
MVI: And that didn’t happen?
SP: Mhm. [No.]
[…]
SP: It's still an issue, and I think it's a very, very potent issue
because I don't actually, at this point, understand how you give a grant
for something which is essentially free and open, to manifest in the
same way. You can more conventionally give grants for the process of
making choreography and training people. I have to say that for my
Guggenheim, I wrote and I told them that what I was going to do was
train people to work in a technique. That was what I proposed to them.
When it came out in the program, you know, when it was published, for
all to see that I'd gotten a grant, it was a choreography. So, I mean,
they're stuck on certain words, and these words are…
[…]
SP: They need the words. They need help. They need conceptual help.
[…]
MVI: Going back to say the Judson era. First of all, the first concert,
in its program, its announcement, foregrounds compositional methods.
It's something rare. So at that point, if you announce an event that you
kind of forward the compositional tools you've been working on…as you
mentioned, there's chance or rule games or…improvisation was within a
list of that, so it’s mentioned. It’s there. The second concert, the one
in Woodstock, not everyone was in that because its summer, and people
are…but there's a second concert, and that has even a note on
improvisation. I can maybe read it later. This third and fourth concert,
about those concerts Jill Johnston writes that they were decisive in
moving a little bit away from the Cagean and Cunningham model that had
been so prominent in the workshop anyway and also away from the chance,
the central position that the chance method had, and she mentions two
examples where she sees that it moves away from the chance, and she
mentions repetition and improvisation. So, already, we're in the early
concert history, we find every time a mentioning of improvisation, which
is interesting, because you have on the one hand, people saying that it
wasn't maybe that prominent, or we didn't really know what was going on.
Some people are doing it, and yet, it’s clearly foregrounded in a public
announcement in a program. So it's like it's present and it's not
present, you know. It's there, and it's not fully there.
[…]
SP: It was there in a very new state. I mean, it was not what I would
call highly sophisticated improvisation by our standards today. In other
words, things have moved on. We now see improvisation a little bit more
objectively. At that time, it was incredibly subjective as opposed to
the other methods we were using. And very difficult to talk about. There
was no vocabulary. There weren't examples. There weren't…this was
prior to contact improvisation, which was, as far as I know, the first
time there was a named methodology beyond just the word improvisation.
It…Simone didn't use the word improvisation in her *Dance
Constructions*[^Constructions], and yet, they were, you know…by today's standards,
clearly, ideas within which one improvised a form, but it was a discrete
form that one was improvising within. A little bit as though you would
improvise the blues or improvise cool jazz or something. So, we were
just arriving at that state. Simone would probably be really the person
who first put forward discrete forms of that kind of work. Whereas
Trisha’s improvisation or Yvonne’s improvisations seem not to be
discreet forms. They seem to be unformed, and that was their claim to
improvisation, you know, the sense of lack of form although you had a
resultant form in that you look at a performance of something, you know.
You could say afterwards what the form was, but you couldn't, nor could
they probably, have said what the materials or the space or the
performance quality would have been ahead of time - nor would they
repeat it, you know. I don't recall, for instance, that their dance on
the chicken coop roof at Seagull’s Farm, for instance…
MVI: Yeah, I’ve seen a film, actually.
SP: I don’t think they…I don't think they repeated it. I don't think
they tried to say, “We're going to do again what we did out there,” you
know, kind of thing. Whereas Simone repeated…
MVI: Her *Constructions.*
SP: The *Constructions.*
: Simone Forti. *See Saw* from Dance Constructions. 1960. Performance with plywood seesaw. Duration variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Media and Performance Art Funds. © 2020 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Performed by Simone Forti and Steve Paxton at Galleria L'Attico, Rome, 1969. Image: © 2020 Claudio Abate, courtesy of Simone Forti and The Box, LA.
MVI: What about…if people mentioned like two major influences on the
work of those young people in the workshops and even out of the workshop
context? It's Merce Cunningham and John Cage you just mentioned, and
then these other lineages, the Anna Halprin lineage. So, if that’s true
in terms of lineages, running through the memetic pool of the early 60s,
how would you have assessed this Anna Halprin lineage? How would it have
appeared to you or become visible to you?
SP: It would have been the unconscious as opposed to the highly
conscious. It would have been like a model of the brain, you know?
MVI: Because sometimes, I think it’s…there’s like a risk of making
something nearly schematic. There's like the Cunningham and the Anna
Halprin, so you have a father, you have a mother…
SP: Oh dear.
MVI: It’s Apollonian versus Dionysian. It’s Urban versus Nature.
SP: Yes, yes, go on…
MVI: And since…
SP: But why versus? Why not complimentary?
MVI: Well, yeah, you can say it compliments. It's…
SP: I mean, if we had open minds enough to try to work with new
structures and try to understand how new structures would impact on the
dance forms, why wouldn't we have been interested in all the new…all
the possible structures? I mean, we were, and yeah, I feel like Trisha’s
remark that it wasn't valued…I mean, aside from agreeing that we
didn't know how to value it and therefore it was difficult to…
MVI: …assess.
SP: …assess or say anything about at all, I don't feel like it was not
influential. I feel like it was influential and existed there as a very
potent force. Especially in contrast to the more intellectual approaches
that we were mostly involved with. But I mean, for instance, in my work,
I tried to get away from both the intellectual approaches that we were
involved with and this other force that seemed to be coming via Trisha,
Yvonne, and Simone, and a few other people, Ruth Emerson, I remember,
also was an Anna Halprin person. So, they had a kind of understanding of
something that the rest of us were only just getting a glance at, you
know, a glimmer of, and…so, anyway, I tried to stay away from that
too. I tried to find my own voice, my own way of making some kind of
creation.
MVI: Very often when there is like…there have been like major, more
improvisational events in the concert series like Charles Ross, who
provides an environment for improvisational activities to happen, and
there's some other examples, but very often, I don't find you back in
particularly those concerts.
SP: I happened not to be in town. Don’t forget I had to also…
MVI: Yeah, you had quite a life!
SP: Yeah, I was touring, also. So, yeah, maybe everything would have
happened much faster had I been able to be there for that.
MVI: You are mentioned improvising a rule game with…I'll look it
up…the over/under/around rule game?
SP: Well, as I was in Simone’s *Dance Constructions* as well, so I was
doing it but not necessarily. I mean, when you call it a rule game, and
somehow you've evaded the word and the impact of…the void of the word
improvisation.
MVI: Well, a rule game is like a structured improvisation.
SP: Well, all games, actually, rely on improvisation, but again…I
think that’s what rule game in dance acknowledges is that football, for
instance, is an incredible improvisational setup, you know, as is
tennis, and they're different. So, you have with every game. It's a
place with rules within which you improvise. Or music. It's a place
where there's some premise, that with which you're working. It’s very
important. That premise gets all important, doesn't it, you know? What
do you think it is? What is the paradigm for improvisation in this
situation?
MVI: If you were doing your own solo…did it seem that the Trisha Brown
work or Simone Forti was providing you tools for your own
improvisational solo?
SP: Well they were providing me with the questions. And I think what
they did…I mean, I can't remember very clearly or, you know, or put
this out as a certainty, but I think that what they did was much freer
and much more like the improvisation of today than my work was. So, if
they did provide some kind of pattern for me to work from, I wasn't very
good at it.
MVI: What I recognize as a nice kinship, is that the way the tape
functions it goes against the grain a little bit of what you're doing,
so it gives you…it gives resistance and even it sort of is a
disturbing or unsettling factor. And it seems to me that Trisha Brown
and her improvisations always have been looking for something that
nearly like interlocks - No, how do you say that? - that short-circuits
the two systems, like she would dance and talk because that was like
something very hard to combine, so she would put her into a physical
paradox where the systems, the two systems she brings into sort of give
like an electric spark, you know, like…or even her physicality is very
much about a physical paradox, you know, like if you walk up a facade or
if you do *Trillium*[^Trillium], and *Trillium* is defying nearly gravity laws or
laws of physics.
SP: Actually, just laws of verticality that existed…
MVI: Laws of verticality.
SP: …as a convention in dance.
MVI: So she doesn't seem to employ improvisation to, you know, to go
with it, but she uses always like something that will…that she has to
fight against or that will…so, the tape recorder, those two elements
seem to also have a similar effect or function. That's a strategy, I
would say.
SP: It is a strategy. It’s a structural strategy. Yeah.
MVI: So, it's interesting that that's…you didn't do an improvisational
solo in which you were whatever for 12 minutes, but you were also
looking for resistance and…
SP: …and structure and material. So, the structure and the material
existed outside my body, and my body was doing whatever for brief
periods of time.
MVI: How did it develop from there on?
SP: I went on looking for other mechanisms. I mean, you know, having
this structural background in dance composition. When I did the class at
Oberlin College and realized that what I was working with had a
structural integrity - *Magnesium* is what I'm talking about - I decided
that structural integrity was structurally interesting enough to
produce, you know, to go ahead and produce, to do a New York, you know,
to perform in New York and to perform in New York at a very raw state,
so that people would see the development of the form from it’s very
first stages.
MVI: How did the experience of being in *Continuous Project - Altered
Daily* give also permissions for presenting something in a raw state or…
SP: Yvonne had several ways of…
MVI: You were part of *Continuous Project*.
SP: I was.
MVI: Very early.
SP: Yeah, yeah, I was part of *Continuous Project - Altered Daily,* and
I learned the materials and some of the materials were not set. I mean,
for instance, learning something on stage, that there was material, so
the dancer had to…was presented as a person learning dance in
performance. And I just recall, there was a performance in the Midwest,
and we were very high after the performances, and we would often talk
for hours about what had happened, and you know, how the material had
gone. And I said that it looked to me like we were headed for
improvisation and that, you know, within a year, this would be an
improvised performance. And Yvonne said no, and Douglas Dunn said he
couldn't imagine how to improvise, and you know, everybody said no,
essentially. And we were within a year doing the prototypical Grand
Union if…I don't remember exactly the dates, but it might have been
that we had changed to being Grand Union then. And that occurred, that
change occurred because of Barbara Dilley and I being at the same time
in Urbana, Illinois, and Yvonne was in New York and asked us to come and
be in a performance, but we weren't going to be available for rehearsals
of *Continuous Project - Altered Daily*, and she wrote us something [^Letter]
which suggested to me at least that we were free to bring new material.
[^Whitman]: Robert Whitman, *Two Holes of Water - 3*, 1966.
[^Constructions]: “Forti’s simply typed handbill for her performance event titled “Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things, by Simone Morris,” listed Ruth Allphon, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Marnie Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and herself as participants, along with a “tape by La Monte Young.” Forti’s works were performed twice, on Friday, May 26, 1961, and on Saturday, the 27th. Her event was one of a series organized by Young, with Yoko Ono, in Ono’s loft space at 112 Chambers Street in downtown Manhattan. Ono intended to make her loft a performance space that was an “alternative to classic concert halls uptown,” according to Midori Yoshimoto. One of several similar events during 1960 and 1961, the Chambers Street series represented an early bringing-together of experimental music and other performance practice that shared in common a concern with the score after Cage, a pared-down approach, and an emphasis on the single “event.”” Meredith Morse, *Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and after*, The MIT Press, 2016, 84-85.
[^Trillium]: *Trillium* is a three minute solo created and danced by Trisha Brown. It premiered at the Maidman Playhouse, New York, March 24 in 1962. “Trillium [is] a structured improvisation of very high energy movements involving a curious timing and with dumb silences like stopping dead in your tracks. I was working in a studio on a movement exploration that moved to or through the three positions of sitting, standing, and lying. I broke these actions down into their basic mechanical structure, finding the places of rest, power, momentum, and peculiarity. I went over and over the material, eventually accelerating and mixing it up to the degree that lying down was done in the air.” Trisha Brown in Hendel Teicher (ed.), *Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001*, The MIT Press, 2002.
[^Letter]: The document Steve is referring to consists out of two subdocuments “*Instructions for Steve and Barbara*” and “*Prescript for Steve and Barbara*.” Both documents are to be found in *Work 1961-73* by Yvonne Rainer. As Steve mentions, the letter indicates Rainer's willingness to “open up,” to let go of her desire for control and bring in new possibilities. Yvonne Rainer speaks of a “huge trust” in Barbara and Steve. She says: “Forgive me dear friends. As my affection and esteem for all of you grow I am forced to examine these vestiges of parsimony and control.*”