ABSTRACT
Of all the dance work presented at Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, which I discussed at length in the previous chapter, has received the most scholarly attention. In general, works such as Trio A which explored issues that were primarily formal and abstract have received more attention than those that contained explicitly representational material. For much of the twentieth century, as I argued in Chapter 1, writers who have adopted formalist, modernist approaches to dance considered that works that included dramatic and representational material were less advanced than ones that were purely abstract or in which any representational elements were abstracted or minimized. This has set up a false dichotomy between abstraction and representation, and between form and content. Don McDonagh, in his 1970 book The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance, divided the dance of the late 1950s and 1960s into work that was concerned with ‘the matter of movement’ and work concerned with ‘the matter of presentation’. He aligned nearly all the artists associated with Judson Dance Theater with the former category, while the section of the book concerning ‘the matter of presentation’ includes chapters on Alwin Nikolai, Paul Taylor, James Waring, Rudy Perez, Elizabeth Keen, and Art Bauman. With the exception of Waring, none of these had any connection with Judson Dance Theater; however, Fred Herko and David Gordon, who danced in Waring’s Company, are included in a roundup chapter at the end of this section. McDonagh described this group of choreographers as ‘more romantically skewed’ and suggested they sometimes ‘brought back to modern dance an interest in the “illusionism” that had been eliminated in the 1930s’ (McDonagh 1990: 127-8). Robert Dunn, in an interview with McDonagh published in the book, detected a very similar distinction within the work performed by Judson Dance Theater, which he talked about in terms of architecture and camp: ‘I
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it but I was interested to get people’s minds working on questions of architecture’ (ibid.: 51).
