David Gordon (choreographer) - Early Life and Career

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 1956 – "a scene right out of Hollywood", in his words – led to Gordon joining the company of 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.

These early works included:

• Mama Goes Where Poppa Goes (1960) – his first duet for himself and Setterfield,
• Mannequin Dance (1962),
• Helen's Dance (1962),
• Random Breakfast (1963) – in which Setterfield did a striptease, and Gordon impersonated Milton Berle impersonating Carmen Miranda; and
• Silver Pieces (Fragments) (1964).

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 (after all, obviously no one was bored) 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:

• The Matter (1972) – which utilized volunteer non-dancers who had signed up at a Grand Union concert to participate in Gordon's next project; the piece was re-mounted in 1979, with additions and subtractions as The Matter Plus and Minus, and was later the inspiration for The Matter/2012: Art and Archive
• Times Four (1975),
• Personal Inventory (1976) – in which Gordon and Setterfield each had to improvise 500 different movements, counting them as they went,
• Wordsworth and the Motor (1977),
• Not Necessarily Recognizable Objectives (1977) – for which Gordon won the first Soho Weekly News Soho Arts Award in Avant-Garde Dance,
• What Happened (1978),
• An Audience With the Pope (or This Is Where I Came In) (1979)

and the seminal Chair (1974), 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 Powers 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 utilizes the contents of thrift stores and makes use of mundane materials such as foam core and gaffers tape.

Gordon's hand-made score for One Part of The Matter – an excerpt from The Matter for solo dancer (Setterfield) – 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.