ABSTRACT
T he first center for modern dance in SoHo was a pair ofadjacent buildings on Broadway, just north of Spring, that George Maciunas, always sensitive to the particular needs of his fellow artists, had, in 1974, purchased, organized, and renovated with dancers in mind. Wider than the standard 25 feet, the buildings, first, had no interior pillars, making them ideal for dance spaces. Second, their floors were made entirely of wood, rather than wood directly over concrete, as, say, in my own building, which meant that dancers would not jeopardize their legs and feet with their jumps. Into the northern building moved Lucinda Childs on one floor and David Gordon and Valda Setterfield, longtime husband and wife, both choreographers as well as dancers, on another. While Childs is best remembered for a spectacular repetitive solo on a diagonal line for nearly an hour in Glass and Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1974), Setterfield had danced with Merce Cunningham, as did Meg Harper and Douglas Dunn, who took separate spaces in the northern building. Another space went to Trisha Brown, who had lived in an earlier Maciunas building on Wooster Street. Whereas New York dancers of a previous generation customarily lived in modest
apartments distant from their studios, SoHo gave them the opportunity to live in the same spaces where they did their daily exercises and sometimes performed.
