Mikhail Baryshnikov and White Oak Dance Project deserve accolades for dreaming up PASTForward, an astute and uncondescending look at how the seeds planted in the 1960s continue to forest our dance landscape. Dancers are unaccountably nervous about acknowledging their history, let alone performing it. Basing a whole evening on work that attacked the conventions of dance and dance production is courageous now, maybe even quixotic.

It’s as awkward to define the scope of PASTForward as it is to pin down its inspiration, the Judson Dance Theater. Even Judson’s chroniclers don’t quite agree on who belonged to it or exactly when it functioned. The initial workshops and performances took place in New York at the Merce Cunningham studio and the Judson Memorial Church between 1961 and 1964. But “Judson” is a frame of mind that stretches from John Cage through the first Judson dancers and their subsequent exploits and on to attitudes about choreographing and performing right now. Just last Monday, for instance, Boston dancer Marjorie Morgan and three colleagues presented an evening of videos, performance, and discussion based on the structured improvisation work of Deborah Hay, who’s still teaching, writing, and choreographing new dance in Austin.

Hay was one of the original Judson dancemakers on the White Oak programs, which the Celebrity Series presented at the Shubert Theatre last weekend. The others were Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Simon Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and David Gordon. That’s a particular cluster of friends and concerns, not the whole enchilada, but I was happy to have even part of the history so interestingly and persuasively told.

With Baryshnikov as artistic director and David Gordon as writer/director, the show comprised Charles Atlas’s documentary film of archival performances and talk, reconstructed early Judson dances and related works made as recently as 2000, and two pieces and two improvisations performed by a large group of local volunteers. What came across most about the Judson ćsthetic was the way it focused attention on pedestrian movement. Ordinary bodies, and ordinary activity, were put on display where they’d never been meant to go, with the intention of opening our eyes to the rich variety and even theatricality all around us.

Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) was the most extreme example on the program. Some 50 persons — men, women, and youngsters including a little girl and a toddler — walk across the space. That’s all. As many as 42 (or 84) performers in six groups work to a score specifying the number of steps each performer takes, when he or she enters, and the exact timing of pauses and exits. There are a couple of indeterminate instructions, like “falling gradually behind.” One or two persons are to sit for a certain number of seconds in one of three chairs. The piece lasts six minutes.

You might not think this would be very interesting, but once you see what the pattern is, you realize that the stage is full of differences. Not just of gender, age, and clothing styles but of body types and the way people hold themselves and focus ahead, and the way they take a step and transfer their weight, and whether their arms swing or their shoulders are stiff, and whether they look pleased or worried or eager or calm.

Judson made the acceptable dance vocabulary immensely bigger by reducing the stimulus: with almost nothing to look at, there’s suddenly so much more. Anyone could be a performer in this kind of work. Hot disputes raged at the time, of course, as to whether this was dance or not. Paxton probably didn’t care what you called it, but David Gordon got to the crux of the matter in 1979 with The Matter. Reducing the choreography even further, to a simple walking line-up, Gordon flagrantly set the whole procession to the music from the opening scene of the Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadčre. Ballet is in the eye of the beholder.

In the White Oak performance of The Matter, while the volunteers slowly streamed across the front of the stage, you could glimpse Baryshnikov briskly carrying big objects into the space behind them, and Keith Sabado way upstage, frozen in the act of pushing a broom around. By the end, Baryshnikov had built a big sculpture out of boxes and backstage bric-ŕ-brac. Just as the procession and the music ended, the volunteers swarmed back and took all the objects off into the wings with them, leaving the space swept clean.

Sabado’s broom dance was one of many pieces where performers interrupted a sequence of movement in freeze frame, to give the audience time to study what would ordinarily be overlooked in the flow of events. In Paxton’s Flat (1964), Baryshnikov paced in a circle, sat in a chair, methodically removed his jacket, shirt, pants, shoes, and socks, then put them on again, stopping repeatedly in mid motion without losing his intensity.

Although intensity is just as interesting to concentrate on as anything else a performer does, this was one attribute the Judson dancers stayed away from. They cultivated a kind of indifference — call it objectivity, disengagement, alienation. The kind of attitude that invites the audience’s adoration, together with the evidence of skill imprinted on a dancer’s body, was to be resisted if dance had any hope of being reformed. There were plenty of other walking dances and even standing-still or lying-down dances in the ’60s and ’70s, but the Judson ćsthetic often cloaked its didacticism in fun and theatricality. What it rejected for the longest time was dance technique. But there were alternatives. You could borrow movement from sports, movies, fashion shows, animals. You could set up a simple task that would require the performers’ own solutions, like Simone Forti’s Scramble (1970), where several of the volunteers crowded together in the space of an elevator but had to keep moving in what Forti calls “a steady state activity.”

Naturally, an improvisational piece like Scramble, or Forti’s Huddle (1961), where one person at a time climbed over the collective shape of eight or 10 other people, would be different every time it was performed. In 1966 Yvonne Rainer made up a sequence of non-dance but not simple movements that were always performed in the same order. This was Trio A, which became almost the trademark dance of the Judson era. Trio A was meant to be done by modern dancers, ballet dancers, non-dancers, fat dancers, pregnant dancers, people who were learning it, people who had forgotten it, sometimes two or three doing it at the same time.

For White Oak, Rainer set three variations: “Trio A Backwards,” for Rosalynde LeBlanc and Emmanučle Phuon, who made it a canon because they worked at different speeds; “Trio A Facing,” for Raquel Aedo, with Michael Lomeka running around simply trying to keep the front of his body lined up with hers; and “Trio A Forwards,” for those four plus Emily Coates and Keith Sabado, all together but with small individual interpretations.

Although Trio A was not improvised, Rainer worked in both set and indeterminate formats. She liked improbable but suggestive props, like pillows and mattresses, and talking that was unrelated to the moving. In White Oak’s version of Talking Solo (1963), Lomeka danced while reciting Vladimir Nabokov’s description of how butterflies are born. LeBlanc did a variation of his dance and didn’t talk.

For others in the Judson group, unexpected juxtapositioning of movement with props, words, music, and media brought forth acres of absurdist and dada entertainment. Emily Coates performed Lucinda Childs’s Carnation (1964), a deadpan appropriation of mismatched objects that began with her putting a lettuce dryer upside down on her head. Live video projected onto the backdrop made her obsessive manipulation of sponges and hair curlers visible to the audience as she sat at a table.

Maybe any group of artists working closely as the Judson dancers did will come up with themes in common — folding chairs, John Philip Sousa, and the bizarre implications of clothing made frequent appearances on the White Oak program. Trisha Brown’s Homemade (1965) even converted an 8mm projector into a kind of backpack, which Baryshnikov toted around as he did a duet with himself. Brown made some phenomenal experiments with perception, and in Homemade, a film of the same dance becomes a crazily tilting, disappearing partner as Baryshnikov’s back-projected image dances off the walls.

PASTForward offered much more to think about, but it still didn’t exhaust the provocations and revelations of Judson. What I missed most was a feeling of physicality and risk. White Oak moved with the cool intentionality of cats, like all contemporary dancers, but the Judson ethic fostered a different kind of attentiveness to the body. We might have glimpsed that if they’d shown Trisha Brown’s Leaning Duets or Falling Duets, for instance, where people leaned and fell and looked sensual, beautiful, human.

When Judson reduced performers to working with the uninscribed body, wonderful things could happen. Lucinda Childs’s high-energy, post-minimal Concerto (1993) closed the White Oak program. At first the dancers looked familiar, leaping, turning, and criss-crossing the space non-stop. But after nine minutes, they tired. Their precision and their invincibility deteriorated. They looked more real. The audience went wild.

Issue Date: May 24-31, 2001