ABSTRACT
Reviewing the New York premier of Cunningham’s Walkaround Time in May 1968, Jill Johnston discussed its similarities with Rainer’s The Mind is a Muscle, which she had seen the previous month. In particular, she had been surprised by the onstage intermission in Walkaround Time:
The curtains remain drawn, the house lights come up, the performers had been instructed to do what they would as though it were an intermission. Thus the piece continues but with a break in choreographic formality. David Behrman’s score shifts from electronic manipulations to South-American tango music, the dancers walk on-and offstage, lounge about in leg warmers, practice their steps, chat with each other, etc. I don’t think Cunningham ever presented ‘ordinary’ movement in this manner before. It was too self consciously casual to be very ordinary but it was a drastic cut from his high-powered dance routine, and it was, after all, presented as valid nondescript movement in the context of a dance piece
( Johnston 1998: 170)
Johnston goes on to say that there had been similar onstage interludes in The Mind is a Muscle, some of which had been accompanied by popular music. Curiously, although she had seen Rainer’s piece in April, Walkaround Time had actually been made before that, receiving its premier upstate in Buffalo on 10 March. Johnston dismissed the idea of accusing either artist of plagiarism: ‘That’s the game of history. The answer is lost in infinite regress, but we make arbitrary decisions to have something to talk about’ (ibid.). She concluded instead with a most interesting observation about the relationship between Cunningham and Rainer’s
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While Cunningham has been unwilling to sacrifice an aesthetic he had become deeply committed to he’s been more than sympathetic to a new aesthetic for which he was partly responsible. I think he makes occasional forays into a territory which he completely understands but which remains alien to the sweep of his classical purity
(ibid.: 171)
To put this another way, Johnston was suggesting that Rainer and her peers produced works that were generally more extreme than Cunningham in their break with some of the traditions and conventions of western theatre dance. They were following in an avant-garde tradition that Cunningham and Cage helped reintroduce into the US during the 1940s and 1950s. It is with this re-articulation of avant-garde artmaking that the current chapter is concerned.
