burt goldberg history

StevePaxton 55

So, in order to fix this, he had started to do a ballet barre with tondus and battements outdoors on grassin Phoenix, Arizona (nearwhere he was born and where his family lived), listening to Glenn Gould on a walkman that wobbled when he danced. Paxton remembers that it was during the late I95os when he moved to New York that he had first heard Gould's recording of The Goldberg VariationsAt. the time he was taking a lot of ballet classes,and he continued to take these while he was with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from I96I to 1964. He even remembers observing a few classesby MargaretCraske that Carolyn Brown and Viola Farberwere taking. Craske had danced briefly with the Diaghilev company but is best rememberedasa teacherof the Cecchetti system in London and then after 1946 in New York. During the I92os and '3os, her pupils included FredericAshton and Antony Tudor.

Paxton's immersion in ballet at the beginning of his career will very likely come as a surprise to some. It is tempting to think of his choreography in the

I96os as only made up of sportsand pedestrianmovement-sports poses in Proxy (1963) and Flat (1964); walking, sitting, standing still in Flat and Satisfyin'Lover (1967);just standingin State(1968). Then, it is often observed that in the I970S his experience learning aikido contributed to the way contact improvisationdeveloped. It is thereforeeasyto forget or perhapsnot even realizehow much ballet Paxton studied as a young man, and how hard he must therefore have had to work to achieve the freedom he now appearsto have gained to researchnew movement possibilities.

Simone Forti, in comparison, had no professionaldance training before she went to work with Anna Halprin in I955. Halprin at that time had turned her back on conventional dance trainingand was working with anatomicalimagery and improvisation.7Whereas TrishaBrown had studied modern dance during the I95os at Mills College and at the American Dance Festival,she has said that "it never took." In New York in the early I96os she had hoped that Merce

Cunningham might askher tojoin his company but saidshe was eternallygrateful that he hadn'tdone so, because of the way working with him would havemolded her body (Brown in Rosenburg 1996). Paxton did dance with Cunningham for three yearsand in Brown's terms this molded his body in a particularway.

covering things he had learned years before. He said he had been surprisedat "how much my mind related to the technical training I had had; how much of it was still there including yoga and aikido and things beyond dance techniques, and how they had amalgamated."Observing that certain sorts of twists in the spine and torso inevitablymake the arm take up a ballet-likeshape,or thatmove- ments in the pelvis sometimes produced effects that suggested Grahamcontrac-

tions, Paxton acknowledged how much earlytrainingconditions dancers."Much later you startto rediscoverthe same materialbut at a differentlevel. What was

happening to me was that I was discovering that the logic of the skeleton has implicit in it certain forms that I know." Siegel neatly encapsulatedPaxton's

back, legs seem to consist of more partsthan we ever dreamedof, and they can

all move independently or in sequence as he wills them" (1987). This was not of course an innate ability but the result of persistent, hard work, researchingthe complex physical structuresof muscles and bones and the various ways forces transferthrough them. The tool for this exploration, Paxton says, is sensation.

He explains:

To try to find out what the structuresare as clearlyas you can and try to identify the sensationsof those structuresbecomes a way of finding new

material,deeper material.And they are alwaysthere and you are already

56 RamsayBurt

feeling them. That is what is so irritatingabout this whole process but you don't recognize them, they'rejust feelings of me-ness. So to separate out all those feelings and differentiatedbeing into separatemuscles and bony points is what one is attempting to do.

iationsin 1986 and Paxton's dancing, as Banes described it, in the late I970s. When I told Paxton that I thought he had done the same types of movements in

that is the way his body is: its particularshape and mass, its strengthsand possibilities for stretchingare "a kind of organic limit" to the range of movements he can do. Furthermorehe pointed out that "the body doesn't forget," as his redis- covery of ballet and Graham-like movement events attests. "I think that, no matter how I change my ideas, if you could see much earlier videotapes you could probably see most of those elements" (that I had identified in Goldberg

ThreeFilms (I963). In part of this Paxton jives to rock 'n' roll music and sure enough he seems to be moving more partsof his body than we ever dreamtof, while Judith Dunn, his jiving partner,has stopped dead with her mouth open, looking aghast. Paxton commented that the main difference between now and then was that "now I know that I do that but then I probablydidn't know." Or

"Yvonne [Rainer] asked me at one point in the sixties why I was interestedin what I was doing and why I wasn't using my body for what it could do. And I really didn't have an answer for her except, why do thatstuff?" (Bear 1975:30) What he was interested in during the I96os was very ordinarymovement and how to perform it with clarity.This posed the problem of how to ensure that the audience would actually focus on the phenomenological experience of the

extraordinaryphysicalconcentration while he was performing this piece in 1986 communicated itself to the audience. Nevertheless, the problem he faced then, as he had in the I96os, was, having overturneda way of communicating through dance and instated another preferredway, how could he ensure that what had been overturnedcould not become reinstated?Some abstractpaintershave called theirworks "Untitled" so asto focus the spectatoron the substanceof the painting itself. Paxton, in order to direct the audience toward his body needed to ensure that they stopped looking in other distractingways. His solution to this in 1986 was the clay half-mask,and this, like the music and his ballet training,alsolooked back to his early career.

In English,a group work made in 1963, Paxton wanted all the dancersto look the same so they used "flesh-tone pancake makeup" (Rainer quoted in Banes 1993:98) to uniformly cover the face including eyebrows and lips. The idea of using makeup to make dancerslook alike had been considered in anotherpiece, WordWords,also from 1963, which he made in collaborationwith Yvonne Rainer. Paxton has suggested that a startingpoint for the piece was a response that he andRainer had receivedwhen they had unsuccessfullyauditionedfora concert at the 92nd Street YW/YMHA. They heard that someone at the Y had said, "ThoseJudson people all look alike to me" (in Bear I975:26). Rainer remembers that, in order to make the two dancersin WordWordslook the same, they orig- inally thought of wearing gorilla suits, then SantaClaus suits. Then they thought of using makeupto redrawtheir facesto make them look alike,then finallysettled on the idea of dancing in the nude with g-strings and with paper covering Rainer's nipples (in Banes 1993:89).Paxton was not, of course, doing this merely

StevePaxton 57

in response to what the programmerat the 92nd Street Y may have said. But it is suggestivethat a venue that had for so long been associatedwith modern dance would have rejected choreographerswho eschewed the kind of expressiveindividualism with which the dance program at the 92nd Street Y had been connected since the I930s.

I have suggested that Paxton was concerned with minimizing the expressive- ness of the performer'sface in order to redirect the spectator'sattention toward the expressivebut abstractmovements performed by the rest of the body. Siegel commented that, "During the whole dance he maintainsa blankexpression,with only glints of alivenessbreaking through to reflect the scintillation,joy, humor conveyed by the rest of his body" (1987). This strategicuse of a blank expression appearsto have derived from Paxton's analysisof his experience dancing with the Cunninghamcompany.In a recordedinterviewwith MarthaandGeraldMyers during the American Dance Festivalin the I990s, Paxton contrastedthe use of masks and of blank faces in Alvin Nikolais's work (which they hadjust seen at the festival)with the empty faces of Cunningham's dancers. He suggested that the blank face which Cunningham's dancersadopted in the time he was a member of the company was not a mask but an empty face:

We danced along trying not to add anything to the movement that we didn't know what to do with because we didn't know what context we

were performing in. When you're out there in front of an audience you want to do your best and you want to do the movement as well as you can, and it is hardnot to want to somehow use that performer'stradition of what the human soul is doing in the body-the recognition of human glances, the expressions,the actualmuscles of the face that are actually

working while you're dancing. (Paxton in Rosenburg 1996)

Paxton suggestedthatthe lack of these signsin the performanceof Cunningham's work left some people emotionally in a void: "Once you remove the human elements, once you remove the human messagesto other humans from a dance work you don't know how to investit with emotion and there is a greatquandary how to perform it." That, Paxton suggested, was the puzzle that Cunningham set for his dancersto solve.

This puzzle is one that Paxton appearsto have continued to investigatein his own pieces and thatYvonne Rainer and TrishaBrown have alsotaken up. In her

discussion of her 1965 piece Partsof SomeSextetsRainer gave a list of aspectsof theatricalperformance that she wanted to eliminate from her work, which has

subsequentlybeen taken as a manifesto.As well as saying "No to spectacle,"this list also includes "no to involvement of performer or spectator"and "no to se- duction of spectatorby the wiles of the performer" (Rainer I974:5I). Writing about her piece TrioA, which she firstperformedtogetherwith Paxton andDavid Gordon in JanuaryI966, her solution to the "problem"of performance was to choreographthe dancers'faces so that their gaze was alwaysactively involved in

looking at particularpoints within the performancespace thatwere usuallyaway from the audience. Throughout her careerTrishaBrown hasalsobeen concerned to redefine the ways in which the dancer addressesher audience. Perhapsthe most striking piece that has arisen out of this investigationwas her I994 solo If YouCouldn'tSeeMe, which Brown danced with her back to the audience. In an

Facing upstage,you aren'tblinking uncomfortablyin the light of our avid eye. You know you cannot know or concern yourself with how you may

58 RamsayBurt

look to us, and so try to deflect us. With that issue aside and privacy assured, you seem to relax and reallyput out. Lordy,how you dance. Pure, assured,full-bodied, wild and fully self-knowing. We are not watchersbut onlookers. You are not our focus exactly but a medium mediating between us and something, some unknowable or unthinkablevision in the

upstage volume or, something beyond [...]. (1995:94)

In Paxton's account the spectators'avid eyes tried to invade the dancer'sprivacy. Brown's device of not facing the audience allowed her to redirect energy that she would otherwise have had to divert into a reactiveprocessof deflecting

worked in a similarway, deflecting the spectator'sgaze and thus permitting Pax- ton to concentrate on his dancing.

There was another level on which the mask contributed its own effect to the

performance of GoldbergVariations,and thatwas through drying out. As Deborah Jowitt has described it: "Paxton'sface plasteredwith thick, shiny pinkish white makeup that, caught in the creasesand bony ridges, make his face appearto be cracking" (1987). Paxton himself likened the dried clay to a skull and to an old desert road. These two images, taken together with the fact that the piece was largely developed and first performed in the American southwest, conjures up for me paintingsby Georgia O'Keeffe of sun-bleached animalskullsset in a vivid desert landscape.Paxton spoke of his tactile experience of having clay drying on his face and graduallybecoming tighter and tighter. "I'm sure it affected the audience to have that dryness at the end, this desiccation that has happened." And he added: "The dancer is by that time quite desiccated himself." A skull is conventionally an image of mortality.This is not however to say that the clay

half-maskbecame a skull, nor to suggest that it directly representedmortalityin the way, for example, that the central figure of Death representsthis in Kurt Jooss'sballet The GreenTable(1932). In his 1976 EventforTelevision,Merce Cun- ningham tells his viewers that there are no symbols in his work, just relax and enjoy. Cunningham's words echo something John Cage had spoken about in a preperformancetalk back in 1956 when he said that Cunningham's work told no stories and contained no psychological problems.He could almost have been

Variationswhen he added: "The movement is the movement describing Goldberg

of the body. It is here that Mr. Cunningham focuses his choreographicattention, not on the facial muscles" (1966:95).

Paxton, Rainer, and Brown all choreographed works whose cool, detached abstractionwas akin to similarqualitiesin Cunningham's work. There arehowever other levels of meaning in these dance performancesthan those Cage spec- ifies. While GoldbergVariationshas no overt symbols of the kind that operate within The GreenTable,there are semiprivateand self-reflexive levels on which the piece signifies-just as there are similar private levels, for example, in the work ofJasperJohns,who was himselfa close associateof CunninghamandCage.

deliberatelylocated within culturaland theatricalcontexts through Paxton's use of the mask and by his referencesto Bach and Gould.

time he was listening to a record he had first heard over a quarterof a century earlier,rediscovering embodied memories of the ballet training he had undertaken at that time, and returningto an artisticdevice-the mask-which he had used at the beginning of his careeras a makerof dances.When he spoke of being desiccated after 45 minutes of dancing and of needing the sprightlinessof the young Glenn Gould to help him in the second half of the piece, he was surely indicating his awarenessof differencesbetween his self in 1986 and the young,

StevePaxton 59

more sprightly dancer he had been a quarterof a century earlier.The two recordings of the Bach themselves register the impact of time on a gifted artist. Gould in 1982 gave a much darker,more introspectiveinterpretationthatis slower and longer, while his 1955 recording betrays an almost casual brilliance in its

dazzling speed and percussiveprecision. In 2001 both recordings are still commercially available,nearly 20 years after Gould's death in 1982 from a stroke (a few days after his 5oth birthday). So Gould was no longer alive when Paxton

as a live, improvised performance, then Gould was a paradoxicalfigure to cite. Gould himself abandonedlive performancein 1964 at the age of 31 aftera short career as an international superstarof the concert stage. As well as writing and making programsfor CanadianBroadcastingCorporation, he devoted the restof his life to recording music, never recording the same piece twice with the exception of The GoldbergVariations,with which his recording careerboth started

and finished. Controversially,Gould championed the superiority of recording over live performance. He arguedthat the ability to "taketwo" and try different approachesto passagesfrom which he could later select, makes "the performer very like the composer, really,because it gives him editorial afterthought" (in Page 1987:287). Paxton, as improviser of his own pieces, also blurs the roles of performer and composer-but at the opposite end of the continuum between fluid and fixed. Paxton has said that his interest in improvising to Bach's music began when he discoveredthat Bach was a great improviser.However, although so much of Bach's music has survived, it, like Gould's recordings, is set and permanent, giving no indication of how Bach used to improvise (2001).

Gould's belief that recorded music would ultimately supersede live perfor- mance poses questions about the social function of performance. Edward Said, in a fascinatingdiscussion of Gould's career,8applies a frameworkadaptedfrom Adorno to consider the social function of musical performance. According to Said, Adorno believed that musical modernism "by its rigor and distance from the everydayworld of listenersand perhapseven performers[...] cast a devastat- ingly critical light upon the degraded and therefore meaningless world" (I992:I3-

I4). Because art, in Adorno's view, no longer has a social function, he believed that artisticmodernism had a criticalpotential to revealthe otherwise hidden fact of the meaninglessnessof modern life under capitalism.Said's argument is that great 20th-century performerslike Toscanini and Gould also had the power to

reveal this ideologically mystified lack of meaning by making the act of perfor- mance itself "an extreme occasion, something beyond the everyday,something

irreduciblyand temporallynot repeatable,something whose core is preciselywhat can be experienced only under relativelysevereand unyielding conditions" (17- I8). He concludes:

By its radicalforce, Gould's careerin fine has supplied us with a largely

but not completely new concept of what performanceis all about, which, like most things in musical elaboration-because it is still ideologically and commercially linked to the past and present society-is neither a total disruptionnor a total transformationof customarypractice. (34)

Said'saccount of Gould's performancessuggestsways of interpretingsome of the paradoxicalelements of Paxton's use of Gould's recordings. If Paxton has

sought to develop a new concept of what performance is all about in the way Said suggeststhat Gould did, his dance performances,like Gould's performances and recordings, might also be said to constitute a partialratherthan total trans-

60 RamsayBurt

formation of customary practice. It is this aspiration,perhaps,that led Paxton to perceive an affinitybetween his work and Gould's.

If, following Said, Gould confirmed the social irrelevanceof the event of live performanceby assertingits inadequacywhen comparedwith recording,Paxton

problematized the value system through which dance is conventionallyjudged by assertingthat any aesthetic value can only be found in the uniqueness of the performanceevent itself. However insofarasPaxton, along with other colleagues whose careersbegan at Judson Memorial Church, has sought to create a new social context for performance, Said's Marxist reading seems an inappropriate way in which to analyze this. The American new dance of the I96os and '70s did not use rigorous difficultiesand distancingdevices to estrangeaudiencesand thus provoke a demystifying realizationof the lack of meaning within contem- porarylife. Paxton's avantgardeuse of pedestrianmovement in the I96os and in the I970s his adoption of improvisation-in particularhis contribution to the

development of contact improvisation-betrays an aspirationto breakdown the barriersbetween art and life ratherthan hyperbolically exaggerate the distance between them.

Paxton over the years has been an articulateadvocate of new dance. He has given a number of extremely informative interviews about improvisation. He

of time and energy to teaching. On many levels, he believes that the function of art is, in part, to heal. He started doing ballet barre exercises to cure his bad posture, and says that immersing himself in a great piece of Bach's music is ex- tremely beneficial. He has also been involved in dance projectswith wheelchair usersand with people who have visual impairment. In these ways his position is the opposite of that of the pessimistic,Adorno-esque modernist. What is at stake, however, is not whether Paxton has been successful in creating a new social context for art, but the ways in which this libertarianaspirationwas expressed

moving and new possibilitiesfor sensitivitywithin the body.

To answerthis question, I want to consider one more observationPaxton made

of the Angel of History with which this essaybegan. In the recorded interview he gave at the American Dance Festival,Paxton saidthat in his entire career,one

with which he feels most satisfied.When I askedhim about this he qualifiedthe comment by suggestingthatat the time of thatinterview he was stillin the middle

few moments of unthought movement where I could feel the differencebetween my mind and my body and my body had taken over and was dancing." These

would become rubber sometimes around those kinds of events." This, I suggest, is a much more revealing statement than it might perhaps appear.What I understandPaxton to be describing here is not so much an euphoric sensation of seeming omnipotence, but a moment when consciousness has been suspended or overriddenso that "what the body remembers"-the unconsciousnessof em-

having to react to censorious preconceptions about how the body is supposedto

memory, into the realm of invisibilityand the unconscious where it eludes regu- lation and control" (1993:148). Paxton, I suggest, is very much awareof this and

StevePaxton 6I

iationsdraws on Paxton's maturity and experience to bring into play a highly developed sensitivity and refined awarenessnot only of the differentiatedsensations from muscles and skeleton but also about the way other elements within

the performance,such as the mask, do affect the audience. However,just asJohn Cage reassureddance goers that Cunningham's work did not deal with psychological problems, I want to confirm here that GoldbergVariationsdid not use expressionisticmovement to externalize repressed,psychological material.What

I am suggesting, nevertheless,is that it is necessaryto acknowledge the extent to which both conscious and unconscious processesare at work when one watches

to these.

Conventional frameworks for making aesthetic judgments, at their most miserly and mean-spirited, can only value the extent to which the dancer's performance reproduces an original from the past without loosing any of its authentic and original transcendental value-value that it derives from the artistas author.

I have already noted Marcia Siegel's observation that Paxton seemed to be

interpretationPaxton generated a set of structures,devices, and conditions for a piece called GoldbergVariations,although these did not amount to a plan for what to do during particularvariations. What Paxton generated was therefore fluid and open but had sufficient coherence and a strong enough sense of identity for GoldbergVariationsto be recognizable as a piece.9 When Paxton then gave per-

pendent entity for the duration of the performance, trying as much as possible to allow it to act as the motor that generated meanings on a number of levels, some of which I have tried to identify above. It is here at last that I shall claim to have found a suitable candidatefor the role of Angel of History. While this may not be what Benjamin envisaged, the Angel I have sought is one who can save the liveness of dance performance without turning it into an illustrated corpse. If dance historians,as I arguedearlier,arenot innocent enough to become Angels, neither, I fear, can dance artists,even if, like Paxton, they try to detach themselves from their actions, though it is this which has given me a clue.

My candidatefor the role of Angel is the independent entity that is the piece itself. To explain why, and what use this might be, I need to briefly recap the problems associatedwith writing about liveness. Conventional frameworksfor

making aestheticjudgments, at their most miserly and mean-spirited, can only value the extent to which the dancer'sperformancereproducesan original from the pastwithout loosing any of its authentic and original transcendentalvaluevalue that it derives from the artistas author. Spectatorsand critics who seek the

are seeking a unified and universalhuman subject whose agency can explain the work. By seeking such an explanation they may blind themselves to the present, live event in order to reassurethemselves that a perhapsimaginary moment in the past is being preserved.The alternative,as the art historian GriseldaPollock

proposes,is to analyze"the text for its complex inscription of historicallyspecific and non-cogent, non-unified processesof subjectivity"(I995:5o). I have argued

Steve Paxton 63

References

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Barthes,Roland

1977 London:Fontana.

Image/Music/Text.

Bear,Lisa

1975 "StevePaxton:Likethe FamousTree."Avalanche

(Summer):26-30.

Benjamin,Walter

1970 Illuminations.London: Fontana.

Cage,John

I966 Silence. Boston: MIT Press.

AmericanModernDance,vol. 15. Producedand directedby DouglasRosenburg, ADF Video, Madison,WI. Videocassette.

1996 "TrishaBrown." Speakingof Dance:Conversationswith Masters Contemporary of

AmericanModernDance,vol. 14. Producedand directedby DouglasRosenburg, 66 min., ADF Video, Madison,WI. Videocassette.

64 Ramsay Burt

in the United Kingdom. His publicationsincludeThe Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (Routledge, 1995) and Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, "Race," and Nation in Early Modern Dance (Routledge, 1998). In 1999 he was Visiting Professorat the Department of PerformanceStudies, Tisch School of the Arts/ NYU. He is Founding Editor of Discourses in Dance.