David Gordon (choreographer)


David Gordon is an American dancer, choreographer, writer, and theatrical director prominent in the world of postmodern dance and performance. Based in New York City, Gordon's work has been seen in major performance venues across the United States, Europe, South America and Japan, and has appeared on television on PBS's Great Performances and Alive TV, and the BBC and Channel 4 in Great Britain.
Twice a Guggenheim Fellow, Gordon has been a panelist of the dance program panels of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, and chairman of the former. He is a member of the Actors Studio, and a founder of the Center for Creative Research.
Gordon is married to Valda Setterfield, a dancer and actress born in England, who was for 10 years a featured soloist with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. She appears regularly in Gordon's work, and has been referred to as his "muse". Their son, playwright, actor, and theatrical director Ain Gordon, has collaborated with Gordon on a number of projects.

Style and process

Like most postmodernists in dance, Gordon employs pedestrian movement in his work, but he is notable for his frequent use of spoken dialogue, even in "dance" pieces, as well as his Brechtian rejection of illusion coupled with an interest in theatricality. He is quoted as saying "I to use mundane means to a magical end." A contrarian by nature, Gordon creates works which are founded on structural clarity, which he then undercuts: "I always find some way to screw up a fabulously straightforward structure," Gordon has said, "I can't seem to avoid that."
Another of Gordon's hallmarks is his fondness for recycling previously used materials, both choreographic and physical. According to critic Arlene Croce: "Gordon is a collagist. Many of his dances and set pieces... can be lifted out of context and combined with new material to make a new impression." This is particularly true with his use of gestures, which when seen in one context can appear meaningless or arbitrary, but which will pick up meaning and appear as deliberate when, for instance, accompanied by music or text. According to Gordon:
Movement is ambiguous until you place it against some background.... I use a great many repetitions with variations to make the ambiguities of movement apparent. Exploring the alternate possible meanings of gesture is one of my major concerns.

Gordon's pieces frequently reference films and other aspects of popular culture, and are often autobiographical, or at least apparently so, with the distinction between true facts and fictionalized autobiography deliberately obscured. His pieces often employ humor, sometimes in self-deprecation, and he has been called one of the few "comic spirits" produced by the postmodern dance movement.

Early life and career

Gordon, a native of New York City, was born on July 14, 1936 to Samuel and Rose Gordon. He grew up on the Lower East Side and in Coney Island and graduated from Seward Park High School. Afterwards, he received a BFA from Brooklyn College, where he studied English and art, joined the modern dance club, and, at the insistence of a friend, auditioned for and got the lead role of the witch boy in the college's production of Dark of the Moon.
Just out of school, a chance meeting in Washington Square Park in 1957 - "a scene right out of Hollywood", in his words - led to Gordon joining the dance company of choreographer James Waring, where he met Setterfield, who had recently followed her friend David Vaughan from England. Taking the composition class given by Judith and Robert Dunn led to becoming a founding artist of the Judson Dance Theater concerts at the Judson Church, which began in 1962 and continued through 1966. Gordon made solos and duets for himself and Setterfield, which he showed at the Living Theatre and the Paula Cooper Gallery, among other downtown venues. They also participated in the "First New York Theater Rally" organized by Waring at the 81st Street Theater, a seminal cross-fertilization event which mixed a new generation of dancer/choreographers such as Gordon, Carolyn Brown, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer and the visual artists who were involved in creating the Happening, such as Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine.
Gordon's early works included:
Gordon and Setterfield were described during this period as "amiable saboteurs... the stylistic skill of old music-hall comedians... a wickedly perceptive wit."
In 1966, vociferously negative audience response to his solo piece Walks and Digressions - Gordon wrote that "he audience booed, hissed, clapped, stamped their feet, and walked out across the performance space while I was working" - caused him to stop making dances for five years.
The review was devastating, and I wasn't clever enough to understand or use the possible notoriety attached to that performance in a positive career move. I had discovered that publicly performing my own work placed me in an exceedingly vulnerable position emotionally and physically, and I wanted none of it. I believe now that I was basically uncommitted to my work and unable to take responsibility publicly for my decisions. I had worked mainly for the positive response of my peers and of an audience, not gearing my work towards that response but expecting it as the dividends of having worked. When the audience and my peers turned on me, I picked up my marbles and went home. I just decided to stop making work.

He continued to perform, as a member of Yvonne Rainer's company, and, from 1970 to 1976, as a founding member of the improvisational dance group, The Grand Union, which evolved out of Rainer's company and included Rainer, Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Nancy Lewis and Steve Paxton, among others.
Gordon credits these early experiences with laying the groundwork for his artistic process:
Jimmy was an education for me, as he was for most people who came in contact with him.... taught me about art and developed my taste, but I didn't begin to understand about making work until later with Yvonne Rainer. From her I found out what it is to be an artist - a person who makes choices and stands behind them. Then, from working with Trisha Brown in the Grand Union, I learned how to edit, how to boil a thing down to its essence. Jimmy's approach was much more whimsical. His way of working led you - or led me at any rate - to accept any idea as valid simply because I'd thought of it. I thought of it and I kept it, and what came next was what I thought of next. I don't believe Jimmy meant to absolve me of all responsibility for my work, but I got the impression that wild intuitive guessing was all I had to do to make art. I never threw anything away. I remember distinctly Jimmy's saying, "If you don't like it now, you can get to like it. If you can't get to like it, who says you have to like it?" The point of it was to demystify art and free the artist from the limitations of his own taste. There was a great sense of liberation that stemmed from John Cage's championing of this philosophy, and Jimmy, among others, was establishing alternatives to the kind of teaching that had dominated modern-dance composition up until then.

In 1971 Gordon returned to making dances when Rainer put him in charge of her classes while she went to India, from which came the material which became Sleepwalking, first performed at Oberlin College and then in New York. Gordon formed the Pick Up Performance Company that year - incorporated in 1978 as a non-profit organization - to support and administer his work in live performance and media. His work during this period included:
and the seminal Chair, a duet for Gordon and Setterfield in which they perform with metal folding chairs, the use of which became a signature of his work. Critic Deborah Jowitt wrote of his works during this period that "process and polish were linked in pretty paradoxes."
By this time Gordon and Setterfield had a developed a reputation as "the dance world's most intriguing couple. Ideal mates, ideal opposites, yin and yang, male and female, total communication." Also during this period and into the 1980s, Gordon, a natural contrarian, did not call himself a "choreographer", but billed his pieces as being "constructed" by him. Although he has collaborated with visual artists and designers such as Power Boothe, Red Grooms and Santo Loquasto, Gordon has often, usually without being credited for it, designed the costumes, decor and props for his pieces. In doing so, he frequently utilizes the contents of thrift stores and makes use of mundane materials such as cardboard, foam core, and gaffers tape, as well as commercially produced items such as clothing racks and rolling ladders.
Gordon's hand-made score for One Part of The Matter - an excerpt from The Matter for solo dancer - which consisted of cut-outs of poses culled from photographs by Eadweard Muybridge taped to sheets of paper, is in the drawings collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The score came about because Setterfield was on tour with the Cunningham company, and Gordon sent her the poses so she could memorize them in her hotel room. When she returned, they worked together on the transitions between the poses. Since then, Setterfield has performed One Part of the Matter in many venues around the world.

1980s

In 1980, Gordon gave up his job creating window displays, which for 18 years had supported both his work and his family - his son Ain was born in 1962 - to work full-time as a performer and choreographer. He also appeared in two seminal documentaries about postmodern dance, Beyond the Mainstream: The Postmoderns, part of the PBS Dance in America series, and Michael Blackwood's Making Dances, which focused on seven choreographers: Brown, Lucinda Childs, Gordon, Douglas Dunn, Kenneth King, Meredith Monk and Sara Rudner.
In the 1980s, his Pick-Up Company toured throughout the United States, performing both intimate pieces such as:
as well as larger-scale works, including:
and the mammoth United States, which was co-commissioned by 26 presenters in 16 states and has so many sections which exist in different but related versions that they have never all been performed together. Many of Gordon's pieces from this period had their premiere at David White's Dance Theater Workshop.
Gordon also made work for other companies during this time, including:
He also made Field, Chair and Mountain and Murder for American Ballet Theatre under Mikhail Barishnikov. Murder later became part of David Gordon's Made in U.S.A., a television program commissioned by WNET and Great Performances in 1987 as part of the Dance in America series. Gordon received a Primetime Emmy Award for the program.
For the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, Gordon choreographed Act III, the dance section, of The Photographer, a multi-media piece about Eadweard Muybridge with music by Philip Glass, in which he incorporated Setterfield's earlier solo One Part of the Matter. Also, he directed Renard, a one-act chamber opera-ballet by Igor Stravinsky, for the Spoleto Festival USA in 1986.

1990s

The Mysteries and What's So Funny?, in which Marcel Duchamp - played by Setterfield - is the central figure around which all the action swirls, received a Bessie and an Obie Award. It was written, directed and choreographed by Gordon with music again by Philip Glass and visual design by Red Grooms. The script was published in Grove New American Theater. Gordon then collaborated with his son, playwright Ain Gordon, on The Family Business, which premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City in February 1994, received an Obie Award, and was presented at New York Theatre Workshop and at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1995. The cast for The Family Business consisted of both Gordons, father and son, and Setterfield.
In 1994, for the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the American Music Theatre Festival in Philadelphia, Gordon directed and choreographed an original musical, Shlemiel the First, adapted by Robert Brustein, from the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and set to traditional klezmer music with new lyrics by Arnold Weinstein. Subsequent productions have been seen at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles - for which Gordon won Drama-Logue Awards for his direction and choreography in 1997 - and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. The show also toured throughout Florida and in Stamford, Connecticut, and was re-mounted in 2010 at Montclair State University's Alexander Kasser Theatre by Peak Performances. This production was re-mounted by Theatre for a New Audience in Manhattan, New York City in late 2011, at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, in association with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.
Gordon received a National Theatre Artist Residency Grant, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by Theatre Communications Group, to work with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where he directed and choreographed The Firebugs by Max Frisch for their mainstage in 1995.
Ain and David Gordon collaborated again on the book and direction for Punch & Judy Get Divorced, with music by Edward Barnes and lyrics by Arnold Weinstein, which premiered at AMTF in 1996 and was subsequently presented by ART. The piece began in 1991 as a one-act television program made for KTCA for their PBS series Alive TV, and had a second life as a dance piece, set to music by Carl Stalling, for Barishnikov's White Oak Dance Project in 1992. In 1999, the Gordons worked together once more, this time on a musical about women directors in the early days of motion pictures, The First Picture Show, with music by Jeanine Tesori, for ACT in San Francisco and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

2000s and 2010s

Other productions Gordon has created as writer, director and choreographer include Autobiography of a Liar, FAMILY$DEATH@ART.COMedy - for which he received his third Bessie Award - and Private Lives of Dancers, all originally presented at Danspace in New York. In 2000, he was commissioned by ACT to write an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, with music by Gina Leishman, called Some Kind of Wind in the Willows. This production was workshopped but was never produced. In that same year, he assembled and directed for Baryshnikov's White Oak Project a retrospective program of postmodern dance, PAST/Forward, which included pieces by Gordon, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown.
In 2004, Gordon made Dancing Henry Five, which utilized William Walton's music for Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V, as well as dialogue from the film and recorded dramatic recitations of the text by Christopher Plummer and others. This production received an American Masterpiece Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Dance Program, and has been seen in New York; the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis; the University of Kansas; the University of Maryland; Lexington, Kentucky; and ODC/Dance in San Francisco. In 2011 it was revived and performed at Montclair State University in New Jersey, Columbia College in Chicago and the University of Albany, New York.
Gordon has also adapted, directed and choreographed a number of classic theatre works:
In October 2012, Gordon mounted for Danspace Project The Matter/2012: Art and Archive, based on his early work The Matter, and including versions of Mannequin and Chair. The piece was part of the series Platform 2012: Judson Now, connected to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first Judson Dance Theater performances, and was called by The New York Times "a breathtaking evening of dance that pays homage to his early days."
In April 2013, Gordon was named as one of twenty artists who received a Doris Duke Artist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, an unrestricted multi-year award of $225,000 plus additional amounts for audience development and "personal reserves or creative exploration during what are commonly retirement years for most Americans".
In 2016, Gordon's archives were accepted for donation by the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The donation was marked by a series of workshop performances called LIVE ARCHIVEOGRAPHY, presented at the library's Bruno Walter Auditorium, as well as an installation, David Gordon ARCHIVEOGRAPHY - Under Construction in the library's Vincent Astor Gallery from December 6, 2016 to April 6, 2017. In The New York Times, Gia Kouurlas referred to the exhibit as "a manic and magical installation". Gordon's commentary on his life and work is chronicled on his archive website, access to which makes up part of the installation. A third version of LIVE ARCHIVEOGRAPHY, subtitled "Coupledom or Twice-Cooked Pork and Re-fried Beans", was subsequently presented at the ODC Theater in May 2017 in San Francisco, and at The Kitchen in New York City in June, presented by Lumberyard.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted in 2018 a retrospective exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, which included another version of The Matter, called The Matter at MoMA / 2018.

Reception

Gordon's work has been generally well received by the critics and the public, although his piece Field, Chair and Mountain for American Ballet Theater, his first ballet, was reportedly booed at its premiere at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, D.C. in 1985. The critical response was more generous, calling it "remarkable", "irreverent and clever", "a mesmerizing exploration of partnering", and "one of the most beautiful and distinctive in ABT's current repertory", and praising Gordon's "deadpan humor and... obvious nostalgic affection for things romantic", and his "energy and wit". However, Arlene Croce in The New Yorker said that the ballet was "the kind of folly that advances to the limit of frivolity on the strength of passion," and in The New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff wrote that "Despite original aspects, "Field, Chair and Mountain" does not add up to anything beyond its isolated parts. Mr. Gordon's ideas seem dressed up in opera-house trappings that hang like ill-fitting clothes".
Twenty years later, Gordon, who had not previously considered himself to be a political artist, created Dancing Henry Five in response to the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. It also received mostly positive critical response. It was called "a bare-bones production that created a powerful epic mood" by John Rockwell, who compared it favorably to a production at Lincoln Center. Other critics praised its "humor and deft movement", its "masterful blend of charm and sting", and called it "stunning and provocative", while describing the movement in the dance-theater piece as "stripped down and democratic". "It takes a witty craftsman of dance theater like Gordon to turn a heroically jingoistic play into a wry but fervent plea for peace", wrote one critic about the most recent revival of the piece, while another wrote that "The means are simple, the dancing far from virtuoso; the thought and meanings are complex."
However, several years prior to the success of Dancing Henry Five, Gordon collaborated with Ain Gordon and composer Jeanine Tesori on the stage musical The First Picture Show, about female directors in the early days of the movie business, which starred Estelle Parsons and Ellen Greene. The piece was extensively workshopped and performed in San Francisco, at the American Conservatory Theater, and in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum, which had commissioned the piece. After the success of Shlemiel the First in L.A. several years before, expectations were high for the new musical, but the critical reception was not overly positive - the critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote: "This tantalizing if unformed project has too vital a subject, or subjects, for mere nostalgia. Occasionally wonderful and never dull, 'The First Picture Show' lacks a certain urgency in its storytelling." - and the production had no commercial transfer after its subscription run. Some years later, in response to a question about whether his career had ever "hit the wall", Gordon said: "I died in L.A.", but acknowledges that he then "came back to New York and began again, choreographing for my own company." One of the results of starting over was Dancing Henry Five.

Analysis and interpretation

Throughout his career, critics have encapsulated Gordon and his work: