Reflections on the Early Days

Pick up a rock and feel the earth's pull. To me, that's the feel of the aesthetic of the early 60s. What attracted me in Robert Dunn's teaching was his sense of clarity of concept and the simplicity and directness that resulted. I had just spent four years studying improvisation with Anna Halprin, and I had so immersed myself in that feast of openness to movement impulse that my head was spinning and I needed to hold something still in my gaze. Certainly Anna Halprin and Bob Dunn have been my two teachers.

In 1960, Bob Dunn started teaching a composition class at the Merce Cunningham dance studio. In the first few classes he introduced us to the work of John Cage. He showed us Cage's score Imperfections Overlay, which consisted of a grid on a sheet of clear plastic, to be dropped on a piece of paper marked with dots where there had been imperfections in its texture. The chance conjunction of dots and grid would determine the placement and timing of the sounds musicians would make. I was especially affected by Bob's talking about Cage's affinity with Zen Buddhism. Cage's intention in using chance operations was to liberate sound from the composer's choice, thus freeing it from personal taste and conventional patterns of expectation. Then the sound could be heard for itself, for the very shape, texture, the very sound of the sound. In using the Imperfections Overlay score, Cage had left the nature of the sounds to be determined by the musicians. There could be the sound of a bell, of breaking a twig, falling off a cliff, anything. In Dunn's class, as I believe Merce Cunningham was doing, we used the score to determine which body parts to move in what direction and timeframe.

Bob’s presence in the classroom was soft-spoken and subtle. He'd give a deceptively simple assignment and then stand aside while we look over. It was up to us to approach him as he stood by the piano showing some scores, giving further explanations or suggestions. The class met once a week. One of the first assignments I remember was to make a three-minute piece and not to work on it very much. I think that the suggestion to not labor the piece was a way to induce us to put our main emphasis on the conception, or the idea for the piece. In another assignment, he asked us to make a movement composition based on the time structure of Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies. (Yvonne Rainer's Three Satie Spoons grew directly out of this assignment, and just last year I saw it on a video monitor in a show of conceptual work in the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum.)

I had quite taken to heart the idea of not working a piece too much. And in response to the Satie assignment I decided to jump up to begin from a state of separation from the ground, to land setting down the appropriate number of body parts one after the other then jump up again to begin each new phrase. No technique. Just a young woman jumping up and landing on one foot, setting down another, a hand, a knee, top of head. The simpler the better, so it could simply be seen, could simply be. For another assignment I took a service sink as my score. From the body of the sink I took a long stillness. From the turning handles I abstracted a hand gesture, then hurled myself to the ground; the falling of the water.

Trisha Brown and Dick Levin were working on some rule games for determining their movements. I joined, and sometimes Steve Paxton worked with us. In the game Over, Around and Under, we would alternate actions of going over, around and under each other in particular sequences, with visits to bases. A radio tuned to any station would give each of us cues for when we were to change to our next type of action or to visit our next base. Sometimes the cues would come very fast. And when you'd go to pass under someone they might also be trying to pass under you, or around you while the third player was trying to...etc. It was so hard to catch the cues and execute the moves that we took on the concept of just going for it and doing the very best we could. There was no time for aesthetic choice, just reflex, as we flung ourselves into accomplishing the impossible. Actually, we did apply aesthetic choices. When we first tried the Over, Around & Under game, there was no provision for going to bases. We added this requirement to give the action more space. And this is an example of one of the basic principles of Dunn's course. You don't tinker with the look of the final product of a process. If you don't like it, you go back and try a new plan.

We had showings for invited audiences, which helped to bond the group and set the ball rolling for the eventual Judson Church performances. Though I didn't go on to participate in the Judson Dance Theater group, I still feel a strong kinship with those classmates and I feel Robert Dunn's composition class as a landmark in my life. Somehow on the basis of our showings I was invited by poet Jackson Mac Low and composer La Monte Young to do an evening in a series being presented in Yoko Ono's loft on Chambers Street. I still remember sitting cross-legged on my bed, crayons and a pad of paper on my lap, wondering what I would do. Seven ideas came to me. I drew them on the pad and presented them as an evening of what I called dance-constructions. It included a piece called Huddle, performed by six or seven people closely knit together in a standing form like a small mountain. Without ever detaching from the mass, each performer took turns climbing over the top. The piece was set out in space as in an art gallery, for the audience to view as they walked around.

In 1982 I saw an exhibit of photographs from the Judson Dance Theater performances. I remember feeling a visceral satisfaction from the "look" of these images, and thinking that it would be impossible for someone seeing those photos in the 80s to have a sense of how this "look" looked back then in the 60s. Because now the natural stance, the walk as we walk, run as we run, lean as we lean, carry as we carry, be as we be is something we've long accepted.

But back then it was very much a revelation and a statement. As a young fundamentalist I had thought that aspects of performance such as technique and the proscenium were finished forever. I still sometimes present my Huddle, but I tend to use it as one element among others on a proscenium stage. And it's now next to impossible to recreate its original raw movement style. Back then, making a piece was like brushing away all the sand and debris to reveal one stone. Now our hands brush together the ten thousand things. The thread in my life that I can most clearly follow back to the visceral aesthetic nourishment I got from Dunn's classes is my sitting meditation practice. To try to simply be.

Simone Forti is a movement artist and has been a longtime member of the Movement Research community.