Minimalist movement

By Sasha Anawalt

May 2, 2004 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

Fresh winds. New people. New movement. New choreography.”

Those were the opening lines of a review in March 1962 by Jill Johnston, who covered dance and art for New York’s Village Voice from 1959 to 1968. Johnston was extremely personal, often describing the process of how she saw something and allowing herself, in the words of current Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt, to be “devoured by art.” This review alerted her readers to the revolutionary ideas blowing out of a composition course taught by Robert Dunn at choreographer Merce Cunningham’s studio; and in it, Johnston expended most of her brainpower on the radical and eccentric choreography of Yvonne Rainer.

Rainer was Johnston’s gateway into understanding the avant-garde in dance, and the critic held nothing back from her. The review continues with a description of Rainer’s static and repetitious solo “Satie for Two.” It “could be a deadly bore I’ll admit,” Johnston wrote in her appreciation, which she included in her 1971 book, “Marmalade Me,” “but Miss Rainer is quite special and she is doing something in this dance that comes close to what Gertrude Stein was doing in her writing.”

I picked up “Marmalade Me” again the other day after visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968.” Going from room to room in this stupendous show -- with its deceptively simple works by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Anne Truitt and more -- you want to break the museum’s rules and dance on the art, touch it, smell it, run and walk around and under it. The gallery space is integrated with the art, and the art becomes part of the space.

People, you notice, look better in these galleries. And you realize that curator Ann Goldstein has phrased and planned the exhibition like music, like dance. Seeing it, I wanted to find out more about what was going on in the dance world when these works were created, to reacquaint myself with the contributions of Dunn, Cunningham and John Cage and with the rambunctious beginnings of the Judson Dance Theater in lower Manhattan and of “happenings.” I wondered about the choreographers’ influence on the art and the artists’ influence on choreographers, and the influences by composers on all of them.

And reading Johnston made me -- more than ever -- long to see Rainer’s work from that time, along with that of her contemporaries.

Now, this turns out to be possible. The directors and curatorial educators at MOCA, the Getty, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the CalArts REDCAT theater and Beyond Baroque, anticipating a renewed interest in Minimalism’s past, have planned various events from this month through August focusing on the movement’s builders. And no one is getting more play than Rainer, closely followed by a dancer who greatly influenced her, Simone Forti. The two, in fact, are collaborating on a dance program to be presented next Saturday and Sunday at the Getty Center.

‘There was ground to be broken’

In 1960, Rainer was in her mid-20s. She had just finished three years of study with Martha Graham in New York and was about to start with Cunningham -- whose aesthetic was then perceived as elegant and even classical. In other words, she was poised for a well-oiled career on the modern dance concert stage. But then she took Dunn’s composition workshop, met Forti in the same workshop and went on to share a studio loft with Forti and her then husband, the former Abstract Expressionist painter and soon-to-be Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. And everything changed.

“One day in the studio loft,” she recalled recently by phone from San Francisco, “Simone put pieces of paper on the floor and improvised disparate movement, picking up the paper and saying unrelated things like ‘I think I am going to write a letter to Helen.’ And I’ll never forget it, because she brought down the superhuman, godlike endemic presence of the dancer that was all over the place in modern dance with Graham -- who had told me to be more ‘regal’ and even more athletic.

“I realized then that I wanted to have an argument with the pleasure of being looked at. I no longer wanted to exploit my gifts, my athleticism. I wanted to refuse them, to deny the audience the pleasure of a dancer’s charisma and concentrate on putting everyday activity in a formal setting.”

Rainer went on to make dances that she half-jokingly said “invented running.” She shared many of her programs at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village with Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Herko, Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown, David Gordon and Morris, among others. Five of her most talked-about pieces -- including “Trio A: Pressured,” derived from her signature work “Trio A” (1966) -- will be restaged for next weekend’s performances at the Getty.

“I was aware, and I think many of us were, that there was ground to be broken, and we were standing on it,” she said. “We were aware of this, in part, because Bob Dunn initiated us in his workshops by having us listen to Cage. We also talked about [Futurist painter-musician Luigi] Russolo’s ‘Art of Noises’ and [Marcel] Duchamp and Cunningham’s disassociation of music and movement. We knew that what were making -- which some called ‘anti-dance’ -- was connected to this art history. It all came out of Russolo and Duchamp, and it was in the tradition of avant-garde challengers.”

Devised in opposition to Cunningham, though not out of disrespect for him, Rainer’s and the other avant-garde choreographers’ Judson Church performances captured a huge audience until about the time of “Trio A.” “But then we lost it,” Rainer said.

In “Trio A: Pressured,” as in the original, one dancer maintains eye contact with another and averts her face from the audience throughout. It’s possible that part of the reason enthusiasm waned was that the audience felt cut off. “ ‘Trio A’ was the first fully realized expression of a new position,” Johnston wrote in April 1968. Four months later, she summarized further: “Actually, their revolution in its original delirium of a sprawling rebellion, is over. It all happened at Judson Memorial Church from 1962-64.... In retrospect, it was a beautiful mess.”

By 1972, Rainer had repositioned herself as an internationally known experimental filmmaker and an active feminist. She also continued the writing she had begun; she believes one of the main reasons she became so deeply associated with Minimalism -- unlike colleagues who in her view were doing more audacious choreography -- is that she published the thinking behind the movement. She says she might give up moviemaking, but with the events in Los Angeles over the next three months -- foremost among them a major retrospective at LACE, the first of its kind for her -- she remains a potent force on the art scene.

The Getty programs, however, will mark the first time she and Forti will have appeared together since they performed at Yoko Ono’s New York loft in the early ‘60s. They won’t be in each other’s pieces, but in sharing a stage again, this leading progenitor of Minimalism and her friend, a “happenings” pioneer, are sure to be mutually illuminating.

‘We influenced each other’

Forti was born in 1935 in Italy, a year after Rainer was born in San Francisco. She came to Los Angeles with her family in 1939 to escape Mussolini and Hitler.

While in her early 20s, she spent four years studying with modern dance guru Anna Halprin at Halprin’s outdoor studio in Northern California and was forever marked by an intense interest in biology, gravity and the body’s natural propensity for movement.

During a visit to the MOCA exhibition with me last month, Forti rejoiced in the room filled with sculptures by Morris, her first husband. It includes three large white Ls, a beam that creates a triangle on the ceiling and, in one corner, a gorgeous, pale blue pyramid that hovers above the floor. She too wanted to touch them.

“These came out of performance,” she said. “We influenced each other. He’d get on them and tip them -- he really liked startling people.”

As we walked through the show, Forti also spoke of visiting Robert Irwin’s studio and of studying with Tony Smith, who told her not to become a painter. She talked about the “gutsy” artist Eva Hesse, who she said was one of her heroes. She discussed collaborating with Minimalist composer LaMonte Young and the poet Jackson Mac Low.

Many Minimalist composers, sculptors and painters are likely to be evoked in a program featuring five of Forti’s landmark works (for which Morris built the original set pieces) tonight at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, as well as in her performances during the Beyond Text Festival, June 19-20.

Yet even though Forti was one of the early Minimalists and was responsible for inspiring Rainer to develop Minimalism into what would become an important branch of dance, she remains an outsider who established her own branch off Halprin, with links to Trisha Brown. Her work, often improvised, is nature-based and personal. Her explanation of the distance that grew between her and the Minimalists was something I had never heard.

“I didn’t go see anything at Judson much,” she said. “I wasn’t really allowed, because I was by then -- this was 1962 -- part of [her second husband] Bob Whitman’s team and part of the happenings. Happenings were warm and expressive. Judson was cool. We didn’t relate.”

Misconceptions

During Jill Johnston’s watch, the boundaries of “writer” and “critic” and “artists” and “life” began to dissolve.

Her criticism was the opposite of intellectual and impersonal and formal -- all the things, ironically, that Minimalism was thought to be. But then, maybe many people, such as Robert Whitman, were mistaken in thinking the movement “cool.” And maybe the same misconceptions have attached to its cousins, Post-Modernism and Conceptualism.

When Forti walked up to smell the beeswax in Brice Marden’s paintings at MOCA and said, “There’s emotion and some toughness that resonates in a lot of this work to me,” she seemed to confirm that the anti-human, anti-art, anti-dance stance so many have thought Minimalism represented may not be entirely accurate.

Seeing Forti’s and Rainer’s work again will allow us to continue contemplating what role dance and the active, physical body played in Minimalism -- why it is that the pieces at MOCA make you so aware of space and make you want to move, what the connections might be between these art forms and the need to explore space and time. They are sure to remind us of the human hand behind all these endeavors -- and of the importance of responding to them as passionately as their creators toiled.

Yvonne Rainer / Simone Forti

What: Simone Forti performing iconic works

When: Today, 7 p.m.

Where: MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo

Price: $5-$8 (reservations suggested)

Contact: (213) 621-1745

What: An Evening With Yvonne Rainer (including a screening of “Film About a Woman Who” and the Los Angeles premiere of the video “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid”)

When: Monday, 8 p.m.

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

Price: $4-$8

Contact: (213) 237-2800

What: Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002 (a retrospective exhibition)

When: Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 6 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m. Through Aug. 8

Where: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 957-1777

What: An Evening of Dance With Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti

When: Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m.

Where: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood