First Words on Word Words: Recovering Social Critique

Word Words was a dance choreographed by Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton in the context of downtown New York City's interdisciplinary arts milieu of the early 1960s. It was performed only once, as the third work at the Judson Dance Theater's A Concert of Dance #3, the first in a set of two back-to-back dance concerts held in late January 1963 in the Judson Memorial Church's gym, according to dance historian Sally Banes's detailed chronology of the Judson concerts (Banes Reference Banes1993, 82–83). The accompanying “music” for the dance was a separate piece titled Music for Word Words that was a “prelude” to Concert #4 the next night, followed by the “first” performance in Concert #4, Paxton's dance English (Banes Reference Banes1993, 85).

In terms of the tone of the work and the nature of the performers’ movement, Word Words might have seemed a typical example of the type of Judson Dance Theater work that Banes has termed “analytic” (Banes Reference Banes1987, xx–xxii). Analytic dance “was a style and approach that was consistent with the values of minimalist sculpture,” Banes writes, and it was distinctly modernist in its “separation of formal elements, the abstraction of forms, and the elimination of external references as subjects” (xv).Footnote ¹ In accounts of Judson work overall, this kind of dance has overshadowed Judson artists’ more outré production, partly due to the prominence and persuasive legacies of analytic choreographer-performers Rainer and colleague Trisha Brown. Rainer in particular is known for her “NO Manifesto” of 1965, eschewing emotion, glamour, and camp (Rainer Reference Rainer1974c), and instead favoring a deadpan, paced delivery that aimed to render a dancer an impersonal agent: a “neutral ‘doer,’” as Rainer has put it (Reference Rainer and Battcock1968, 267). Word Words, a ten-minute dance, consisted of one movement sequence executed by Rainer, repeated by Paxton, and then danced again together, all in a matter-of-fact way (Rainer Reference Rainer1974a, 293).

As it was performed once and only attended by a handful of arts insiders, accounts are limited (Rainer Reference Rainer1974a, 293). Paxton's contributions to the single, recapitulated movement sequence were “complex,” Banes indicates, reflecting Paxton's time with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, while Rainer's consisted of “twisting poses and very tiny, repetitive gestures” (Reference Banes1993, 89). In photographs published of this work, Rainer and Paxton stand next to each other or lie on their sides in identical postures, maintaining impassive expressions while looking straight ahead (Perron and Rainer Reference Perron and Rainer2014; Rainer Reference Rainer1974a, 293; Sayre Reference Sayre1989, 119). As was the case for many such Judson works, Word Words was performed in silence, accompanied only by the sounds made by Rainer and Paxton as they stepped or contacted the floor.

Though this little dance may at first glance seem unremarkable, I want to argue for its radicalness, given the details of its context at a time in New York's experimental dance and visual art when, as I will shortly explain, “desubjectivization,” or a deliberately inexpressive modality of making, was ascendant, camp aesthetics were still underground, and gender roles were fundamentally binarized. One such detail, upon which I will focus in this essay, was the work's costuming: G-strings and pasties (small patches or decorations covering female performers’ nipples), the legal minimum for performers to be considered clothed and thereby not breaking laws of the period concerning public “indecency.” While there was certainly an element of pragmatism involved in this choice, I suggest it was also provocative, and indicative of another side of Judson work influenced by camp performance. Before clarifying what I mean by “camp,” especially in performance by women, I wish to state my core argument in this article. Word Words may have appeared at face value to further the formalist reading of much Judson work, championing a modernist abstraction and reductivism of movement qua movement. However, it also brought into question the otherwise unassailable matter of gender roles, even managing for a moment to de-essentialize the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances deploying camp to send up (female) gender representations, such as those of Rainer, Brown, and Judson colleague Valda Setterfield. While Banes includes such works in her comprehensive discussions, she does not fully explore their implications, seeing play with gender representation as a formal strategy: as quotation, as a reuse of popular culture references, as for Pop Art (Banes Reference Banes1993, 129), and as an undermining of older notions of form and composition by mocking “traditional” dance (125, for example).

Ramsay Burt reasserts the formalist reading of Banes's landmark texts of Reference Banes1987 and Reference Banes1993, returning to it in his Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (Burt Reference Burt2006). Burt even aims to cement the association of Judson dance with canonical, mid-1960s minimalism to explain why dance of the 1960s aspired to strategies like those of visual art, a move paralleling Banes's position that is not entirely historically accurate. Such readings indicate a relatively uncritical association of the achievements of this period's dance with minimalism. It is necessary for this view to cede to a more detailed examination of specific works to recognize that such dance did not necessarily forsake social critique in aid of pursuing a modernist-formalist argument in order to dethrone modern dance, as I will show. Word Words held the potential for a radical critique of gender avant la lettre, and this potential has been obscured by minimalist readings.

To retrieve critical possibilities for a reexamination of the historical past with implications for present-day understanding, I suggest that one of Burt's most valuable contributions in Performative Traces is his examination of the reason why performances featuring personal or kitsch elements by David Gordon and Fred Herko, male artists in the Judson circle, were regarded as self-indulgent and narcissistic. Burt argues that these works were denigrated because they did not formally toe the minimalist line, that is, they were not “cool” or impersonal enough. He also points out that such works by Gordon and Herko were seen as too closely linked to a hidden gay sexuality. If minimalism, or, more accurately, the earlier trend toward desubjectivization, as I will explain later, had rejected (male, heterosexual) interiority as such, then one's non-heterosexuality was seen as too “private” for expression in dance or visual art (Burt Reference Burt2006, 105). In its recuperative aims and concern with precisely this aesthetic in Judson work, my article also follows Leslie Satin's important discussion of James Waring's dance and camp (Satin Reference Satin and Banes2003).

In order to proceed, it is necessary to consider the meaning of camp in this discussion. Queer theorist Moe Meyer defines camp as parody that is decidedly political and performative because it is related to the performance of identity, after Judith Butler, and it always “embodies a queer cultural critique” (M. Meyer Reference Meyer and Meyer1994, 1–2). Meyer sees queer as describing both a gay or lesbian perspective, and as that which offers an “ontological critique,” challenging “dominant labeling philosophies” (1–2). Importantly, as it produces queer identity, camp is able to interrogate the “apparatus of representation” itself (5). For Meyer, camp is parodic in literary and cultural theorist Linda Hutcheon's (Reference Hutcheon1985, Reference Hutcheon1988) sense of parody, as an intertextual process that can offer a new cultural critique.Footnote ² I also draw on film and performance theorist Pamela Robertson's interest in Meyer's focus on the political dimensions of camp. Like Meyer, Robertson recognizes camp as an intertextual, critical repurposing that mounts an ontological critique, and as productive of identity, a kind of “operation.” Robertson also looks to Andrew Ross's (Reference Ross1989) concern with camp's recognition of “the artifice of images” to recover camp for feminism (Robertson Reference Robertson1996, 6).Footnote ³

Robertson recuperates camp from 1980s–1990s feminist criticism, which saw camp as a fundamentally male discourse that effaces or denigrates women's speaking position (Davy Reference Davy1989 and Reference Davy, Reinelt and Roach2007, for example).Footnote ⁴ According to Robertson, this view of camp ignores camp's concern with the very construction of representations, and thus its critical potential concerning “gender and sex roles” (Robertson Reference Robertson1996, 6). For Robertson, camp used in women's performance can interrogate representations, a political use of the very artifice of images. I discuss the deployment of camp by Rainer, Brown, and Setterfield as political in this sense, as interrogating representations, though they were not pursuing this logic further to assert there is no “essential femininity,” as such, beneath these representations, which is the endgame Robertson identifies. However, I argue that Rainer and Paxton accomplished just that in Word Words.

I ask what early, unrecognized work Word Words may have undertaken to critique gender roles, and indeed to reveal gender itself as constructed. I am concerned with women performers’ use of camp and “feminine” images at a time when they also sought to “minimize” expressivity and gender in order to be a neutral “doer.” As such, my discussion focuses on Rainer's role in this dance, though I indicate implications of their shared approach for Paxton. To theorize this work, I discuss Rainer's performance as a form of male impersonation and look to Jack Halberstam's discussion of drag kinging. Here, I note dance scholar Helen Thomas's remarks on dance's particular potential “to disrupt or transgress the dominant social order,” not least because dance offers a fruitful means for reflection on bodies as they are conceptualized in culture and in relation to representational economies (Thomas Reference Thomas2003, 3, 173).

I consider that this dance plays with gender display and is thus indebted to approaches from camp and female impersonation performances of the early 1960s, subcultural forms that were nonetheless available in Judson Dance Theater circles. These other approaches certainly went against the grain of the new, cool visual art, and, indeed, Rainer's own dance by the mid-1960s, works like her landmark Trio A (1966).Footnote ⁵ Word Words was a transitional work in Rainer's oeuvre, made while she choreographed her first evening-length dance, Terrain (1963). Both of those works retained some of the “eccentric” aspects of her early dances, arguably inflected by camp style through Waring. Paxton worked with everyday movement and objects, but also used “unusual items … everyday things made fantastic” (Banes Reference Banes1987, 61), an interest with affinities to Rainer's. Camp, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, was precisely what allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were no longer possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A.

Like dance historian Erin Brannigan, I note “the largely unacknowledged influence of dance on past and recent developments in the visual arts” (Reference Brannigan2015, 6). Brannigan observes that choreographer-performers like Rainer and Simone Forti “identified first and foremost as dancers,” rather than coming to performance from visual art (Reference Brannigan2015, 6). Their practices emerged from sources including Cunningham and dance innovator Ann (later, Anna) Halprin, and not minimalism, as such (Brannigan Reference Brannigan2015, 9). Certainly, Rainer and Forti brought those influences to 1960s visual art in still unacknowledged ways. In a recent essay that contextualizes Rainer's strategies of intermediality within downtown New York City's experimental arts milieu, Brannigan identifies the necessity to “writ[e] choreography back into this influential and medial period in art history” (Brannigan Reference Brannigan and Rosenberg2016, 519; italics in original). Brannigan also notes the significant influence of John Cage's ideas (Reference Brannigan and Rosenberg2016, 519), a necessary starting point in recalibrating dance and visual art of the early 1960s. My discussion here, reevaluating an early dance of Rainer's and Paxton's, seeks to contribute to this restoration of a more complex picture of this period, one not simply unfolding solely through the story of minimalism.

The Literal and the Social

The guiding concept for Word Words was that the two performers would appear the “same,” in response to the “snobbish attitude” at an uptown dance group's auditions that the downtown dancers had attended, as Banes (Reference Banes1993, 88) remarks. Paxton explained that a member of the selection panel had said, “those people at Judson all look alike to me” (Paxton, quoted in unpublished interview, cited in Banes Reference Banes1993, 88). As in his dance English (1963), Paxton wanted Rainer and himself to look as much alike as possible in Word Words. In English, Paxton had dancers appearing and moving in near-identical fashion, “soap[ing] out our distinguishing facial characteristics, and enter[ing] the Judson gym in a lock-step column, some of us walking backwards and some forwards,” according to Rainer (Reference Rainer2006, 242). Such “neutrality” and stylistic equivalence strongly diverged from the narrativity of ballet and modern dance, which preserved a framework of specific characters typically acting out a romantic story line. Of their costumes for Word Words, Rainer stated,

Although the stated aim of Word Words was “sameness,” the work's costumes referenced striptease, a popular entertainment performed by women for a male audience. By all accounts, regardless of costuming, Word Words ably succeeded. Its repetitions and evenhanded presentation, nearly all that is known from the historical record, convincingly rendered the work “neuter” to one critic (Johnston Reference Johnston1963), and another stated that “the nudity didn't matter” (Hughes Reference Hughes1963).

How did Word Words so thoroughly render Rainer's role like that of Paxton's stylistically and rhetorically, despite its obvious visual provocations not to see her as the “same”? Discussions of gender in Word Words and in Rainer's Trio A see these two works as effectively “overwriting” female gender (Sayre Reference Sayre1989, 119; Burt Reference Burt and Lepecki2004, 36–37; Franko Reference Franko and Desmond1997, 298; Albright Reference Albright1997, 20), in order to deliver the “neutral.” Neutrality, as an authoritative speaking position, was coded as masculine, as feminist theorists and art historians have shown concerning this period.Footnote ⁶ Neutrality was one important effect of a powerful rhetoric of the “literal” aligned with period tendencies in visual art.

Information on the nature of the dance's movement can be gleaned from three existing photographs of this work. One taken by Al Giese shows Rainer and Paxton standing side by side, facing in the same direction, possibly at a slight angle to the audience (Perron and Rainer, Reference Perron and Rainer2014). They both stand straight, feet slightly apart, so that stomachs seem drawn in and ribs are slightly protruding. Their hands are placed on their heads, and their expressions are blank. In one by Henry Genn, they both recline on their left sides, resting on bent left arms with torsos slightly elevated and their heads level with the audience, their expressions impassive, looking ahead; their right arms are parallel with the floor and bent at elbow and wrist to form a “Z” shape, echoing the bend at the knee of their raised right legs (Rainer Reference Rainer1974a, 293; Sayre Reference Sayre1989, 119). In another, by photographer Robert McElroy, who was known to document performance in the Greenwich Village milieu, they stand with hips facing right and their upper bodies almost facing the camera. Right legs are lifted to waist height and bent so that thighs are parallel with the floor and the lines of their shoulders; their straightened left arms rest against the knee or lower thigh, with the hand relaxed (Rainer Reference Rainer1974a; Sayre Reference Sayre1989, 118).

Critic Jill Johnston described the dance in a Village Voice review the following month: “they both performed with total clarity and self-possession” (Reference Johnston1963). Paxton and Rainer each “rested against the wall” when the other danced, and the repeated “solo” was “about thirteen phrases” long (Johnston Reference Johnston1963). Allen Hughes, writing for the New York Times Western Edition, seemed to ignore the movement altogether, except to note its three iterations. He stated that the dance appeared “sedate” and “dignified” (Hughes Reference Hughes1963).

The audience was not upset by the near-nudity; in fact, it did not even seem to distract them. Hughes remarked, “This was, in effect, a dance in the nude, and its purpose was evidently to show that after the first surprise, nudity makes no difference at all” (Hughes Reference Hughes1963). “At the end,” he added, “the preformers [sic] might as well have been wearing fur coats for all the difference their lack of apparel made” (Reference Hughes1963). Johnston stated that “if the shock at first distracted you from the dance, the novelty wore off soon enough and you were left with two bodies (you could watch the bodies, too) in a dance that was classically pure and not terribly interesting” (Johnston Reference Johnston1963). She continued, “If the length of the dance and the absence of contact (neuter, sexually) were meant to offset the nudity, I didn't mind. But I wouldn't have minded some relationship either” (Reference Johnston1963). Johnston observed that a sexual or relational charge was evoked at the same time as it was “offset” by the work's foregrounding of the literal, “neuter” body. It is this persistence of a gendered or sexualized element despite the work's rhetoric of literalness that is of relevance here.

Word Words has been discussed as offering the same argument concerning literalness, and also gender, as has been articulated in the art and dance literature for Trio A. Henry Sayre observes that Word Words staged a “return” of the body enmeshed in gender to activity, as a neutralizing and enabling strategy: Word Words effectively achieved a “chastening of the body,” a “collapsing of sexual difference” (Reference Sayre1989, 118–19). For Burt, Rainer's emphasis upon the literal body in her Trio A, evidencing the same matter-of-fact tone as the earlier Word Words, renders the performer of Trio A a “neutral ‘doer’” (Rainer Reference Rainer and Battcock1968, 267), a move that “radically deconstruct[s] … normative modes of dance performance” that privilege a relation of voyeurism and narcissism between audience and performer (Burt Reference Burt and Lepecki2004, 36–37). Thomas discusses the dance literature's analysis of Trio A in terms of the gaze, referring to Peggy Phelan's Reference Phelan and Rainer1999 discussion of Rainer's displacement of the voyeurism of “dance spectacle,” and with regard to the impact of Laura Mulvey's theory of the (male) gaze on feminist dance theory as a whole (Thomas Reference Thomas2013, 25, referencing Phelan Reference Phelan and Rainer1999, 6). For Ann Cooper Albright, the sheer materiality of Rainer's body in Trio A served to “demystify the female dancing body and refuse the traditional position of the dancers as an object of desire by making visible what was previously elided by showing the process of dancing, the effort, decision making, even its awkwardness” (Reference Albright1997, 20). Mark Franko states that, in Trio A, “[a] performative and gender political dimension enters the work precisely at its most ‘analytical’ juncture: that is, in its literalist focus on objecthood as bodiness” (Reference Franko and Desmond1997, 298). It is the very literalness of the dancer's body in Trio A that serves to confound gender.

In both works, therefore, performance scholars recognize the literal as enmeshed with gender and the gaze, and that the literal in fact negotiates the social. In clarifying literalism, Franko refers to the association of Rainer's mid-1960s dance with the discourse for minimalism that developed during the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s.

In 1968, Rainer published a persuasive essay distancing the new dance from modern dance and associating it with the minimalist object, a positive turn on aspects that critic Michael Fried had derided in a polemic of the same year (Rainer Reference Rainer and Battcock1968; Fried Reference Fried and Battcock1968).Footnote ⁷ The new sculpture, concerned with human scale, modular sequencing, “literalness,” “non-referential forms,” and “factory fabrication,” was just as antithetical to the previous paradigm for visual art, abstract expressionism, as the “new dance” was to modern dance (Rainer Reference Rainer and Battcock1968, 263).Footnote ⁸ In the 1970s, art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss described minimalist sculpture's “public,” strictly externalized nature as linked to its literalness. Minimalism had rejected interiority, the “private,” emotive, “psychological” domain characteristic of the abstract-expressionist aesthetic of expressive allusion to the artist's self (Krauss Reference Krauss1973, 48; Reference Krauss and Krauss1977a, 262, 270). It had embraced only what one could see: a concrete, literal, “public” materiality. This attribute then became the primary descriptor for minimalist sculpture and dance.

However, if dance embraced strategies rendering the body a literal object, it did so paradoxically, ambivalently. Subjectivity remained a crucial element at the same time as a dance's rhetoric was one of literalness as an enabling condition. If literalness has associated dance with minimalism, dance's necessary enmeshment with the terms of the social indicate the minimalist perspective as in fact myopic, despite its strategic utility. More recent discussions of Rainer's 1960s dance, such as art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty's analysis of Trio A as a dialectic of the live and representation that offers insights into 1960s media culture (Reference Lambert-Beatty2008) and her qualification of “minimalist” dance as not entirely minimalist (Lambert Reference Lambert and Goldstein2004), or Ryan Platt's qualifying of Trio A’s “ambulatory” performance in relation to “everyday” affects (Reference Platt2014), seek more nuanced explanations.

Historically, in their concern with forms of literalism and distancing from the expressive, dance and minimalist visual art (plus experimental music composition, and also Fluxus and Pop in the visual art context) were attending to an earlier tendency. Aesthetic strategies of a broader desubjectivization had characterized progressive visual art from the early 1950s (Buchloh Reference Buchloh, Buchloh and Rodenbeck1999, 7, 9), and also some dance in relation to Cage and Cunningham's longstanding collaborative practice, and, later, via Robert Dunn's instrumental composition class. Radically revising established ideas in music composition and championing “theatre,” a notion of expanded performance that he had articulated by 1961 (Joseph Reference Joseph2007, 59), Cage's chance procedures and indeterminacy were equally foundational for experimental music composition, visual art, and dance. The late 1950s witnessed a renewed interest in Marcel Duchamp's Dadaist gesture among visual artists and dancers (J. Meyer Reference Meyer2001, 97; Robinson Reference Robinson and Fischer2005; Buchloh et al. Reference Buchloh, Krauss, de Duve, Bois, Buskirk and Alberro1994). Dance and visual art in fact catalyzed each other in this richly interdisciplinary milieu, given impetus through Cage and Dada. As well, Anna Halprin, who influenced Forti, and also Rainer, Brown, and, arguably, Robert Morris, was concerned with a quasi-scientific, anatomical approach to dance movement, explored through improvisation (J. Ross Reference Ross2000, Reference Ross2007; Morse Reference Morse2016). Though less remarked upon, Halprin's teachings in dance also influenced New York's visual art (Crow Reference Crow1996, 123–24; Mattison Reference Mattison2003, 179; Morse Reference Morse2016). Rather than simply reacting to canonical, mid-to-late-1960s minimalism, dance participated in this broader project of desubjectivization across the arts (Morse Reference Morse2016).

The period concern with desubjectivization, rejecting content reflecting the private or “personal,” also included a disparagement of the “feminine,” which was equated with emotion and interiority. In 1963, when Word Words was made, “the Sixties” was still a few years off: even if Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published that year, second-wave feminism in the United States did not gather momentum until later in the decade. In the early 1960s, much as had obtained during the postwar period, a woman artist's work was received in relation to her gender. For a woman artist to reference private content or emotion was to compound the risk (Brennan Reference Brennan2004; Jones Reference Jones1996; Pollock Reference Pollock, Orton and Pollock1996). For women working in dance, which not only has been feminized in its history, but relies upon the moving body as the artist's “medium,” the problem of gender and representation was particularly acute, hence Rainer's strategy of literalism to “counter” female gender in Trio A. As is well known, Rainer had to move to filmmaking in order to explore emotion. Just as James Meyer (Reference Meyer2009) has considered the value of desubjectivization through minimalist procedures for women visual artists, Burt and others have noted related strategies by women in dance (Burt Reference Burt2006; Rose Reference Rose and Battcock1968; Copeland Reference Copeland1982, 49–50; Dempster Reference Dempster, Goellner and Murphy1995).

Word Words, then, might have foregrounded literal bodies to achieve several aims simultaneously: to critique the earlier, expressive approach—that of modern dance—as other Judson pieces did; to flag alignment with the tendency toward desubjectivization, and thus demonstrate its currency and relevance within the paradigmatic visual art context; to participate, through silence and repetitive movement, in a modernist exploration of the anatomical body, after Halprin, while referencing Cunningham's movement-for-its-own-sake; and to assert that these bodies/objects should be taken seriously in the public domain of meaning, in which Krauss would locate minimalist practice.

If Word Words trialed literalism prior to Trio A, I argue that it similarly offered social critique. Word Words went one step further than Trio A did in obviating gender: it could question gender more fundamentally, as a system, precisely because it did not reject the camp influences on Rainer's early dances of her New York milieu, which she sought to move past by the time of Parts of Some Sextets (1965), her well-known “NO Manifesto,” and Trio A. In the next section, I discuss the Judson dancers’ strategic use of camp before considering Word Words through female impersonation and kinging.

Striptease, Camp, and Judson's Women Performers

Rainer framed the wearing of pasties and G-strings as the legal minimum required for performers to be considered clothed. While this was no doubt true, pasties and G-strings were well-known signs for striptease, an American institution that, derived from burlesque theater, had its heyday in the 1930s and became seedy by the 1950s. By the early 1960s, striptease was a quaint, if risqué, relic.Footnote ⁹ It was even considered nostalgically funny, celebrated in 1960s spectaculars such as Best of Burlesque and the off-Broadway spoof This Was Burlesque, which was so popular it moved to Broadway in 1965 for another 124 performances before touring (Shteir Reference Shteir2004, 311–12). Pasties and G-strings were garments developed in 1930s stripping practice, and G-strings in particular were, as historian and theater scholar Rachel Shteir comments, an industry staple of that era (Reference Shteir2004, 201), and thus a well-known sign. Word Words’s costumes referenced striptease, a visual cue that in another context would not have suggested a “chastened” body removed from “sexual difference” (Sayre Reference Sayre1989, 118–19). By presenting bodies marked in relation to striptease as the means for the work, Word Words invited response with regard to a glaring precondition meant to be ignored in order to “see” it. After all, sameness might have been indicated just as well with identical shirts and pants, a more common Judson costume.

Rainer not only alluded to striptease in Word Words, but in a performance soon after it, and again the following year. Choreographer-dancer James Waring was one important source of camp for Judson as a style choice, and that was the framework within which Rainer, Brown, and Judson colleague Valda Setterfield approached striptease. They referenced striptease, now kitsch, to critique accepted dance conventions as being outdated, and as ridiculously contrived and sexualized as striptease.

Waring's dances were concerned “with stylization, with exaggeration, with androgyny, with extravagance, with looking beyond the bounds of ‘high culture’ for artistic pleasure,” the qualities that Susan Sontag (Reference Sontag and Sontag1966) had seen in camp, as dance historian Leslie Satin remarks (Reference Satin and Banes2003, 67). Although Rainer was grateful to Waring for his encouragement and support in the early 1960s when she started her career in the New York context, she ultimately felt his approach was incompatible with her own (Rainer Reference Rainer1974b, 6; Satin Reference Satin and Banes2003, 54). Rainer later remarked that she did not appreciate Waring then because she “was put off by the mixture of camp and balleticism in his work” (Reference Rainer2006, 205).Footnote ¹⁰

In April 1963, a few months after Word Words, Rainer performed Terrain at the Judson Church. While Terrain’s parts contained the eccentric movement that featured in Rainer's early 1960s dances, for example, exaggerated facial gestures and a “death run” in the “Death Solo” section (Rainer Reference Rainer1974d, 34), Terrain also included the rule-directed movement that her 1965 dance Parts of Some Sextets would employ, as in Terrain’s “Diagonal” section (Rainer Reference Rainer1974d, 14–15). Terrain included a part titled “Duet,” performed by Rainer and Brown, in which they “wore black tights and Hollywood Vassarette brassieres” (Banes Reference Banes1993, 112). In this duet, Rainer performed a ballet adagio while “Trisha performed movements related to romantic ballet postures, focusing on the head, shoulders, and arms, alternating or combining with movement from burlesque that focused on the pelvis and lower back” (Rainer Reference Rainer1974d, 16). Brown's “hip-thrusting burlesque number” was followed by still poses that Rainer describes as “cheesecake,” referencing the popular pinup genre (Rainer Reference Rainer1974d, 16). While Rainer and Brown used costuming and gesture exaggerating ballet or burlesque to disrupt expectations of acceptable dance composition and content, as per Banes's formalist argument (see also Lambert-Beatty Reference Lambert-Beatty2008, 137–38), Banes misses that this move was also a representational critique. As for other works by Judson women that used camp to critique sexualized representations of femininity, the point was also to displace an older, unfashionably “expressive” representation of women.

Terrain was a halfway point in Rainer's 1960s dance between the “crazy subway lady impersonations” and “loony bin” material of her early work, as Rainer has put it, and the task-like movement of her later Sextets and Trio A (Rainer Reference Rainer1974c, 51). With such phrases, Rainer was referring to moments of exaggeration, unusual gesture, humor, and absurdity in the early dances, like The Bells (1961), in which she “twiddl[ed] the fingers in front of the face” (Banes Reference Banes1987, 42), and Three Seascapes (Reference Banes1962), which famously involved a screaming fit. Word Words, which Rainer made and performed with Paxton during her development of Terrain (Banes Reference Banes1993, 107),Footnote ¹¹ conveyed the same mixing of these two modalities that Terrain features. Word Words’s striptease-like costume and its “twisting poses and very tiny, repetitive gestures,” vestiges of Rainer's “eccentric” movement choices, like The Bells’s twiddling fingers, were coupled with a matter-of-fact, austere tone (Banes Reference Banes1993, 89).

Word Words’s movements may have also incorporated variants of quotidian gestures, which Paxton was deploying at this time. Word Words involved placing hands on heads while standing with legs apart, and Z-shaped, bent arms while bodies reclined. Paxton had not shown an interest in camp as a style—camp as exaggeration, outrageousness, and extravagance, camp borrowing from popular culture. Rather, like most of his Judson colleagues, he explored repetition and an everyday movement vocabulary in English and in other 1960s works, such as Proxy (1961) and Satisfyin Lover (1967), based upon walking. Paxton's works of the 1960s may have used quotidian movement and manipulation of ordinary objects, but they also featured unconventional inclusions and themes, and distortions of scale: the use of animals (in the 1964 works title lost tokyo and Jag ville görna telefonera, for example); references to the social, via politics and sickness; and large-scale inflatable shapes, like the room-sized, plastic inflatable Paxton used in Music for Word Words (Banes Reference Banes1987, 62–63). Both Paxton's and Rainer's interests are evident in Word Words: Paxton's everyday movement and sometimes surprising use of objects dovetailed with Rainer's negotiation of the idiosyncratic, exaggerated, and absurd alongside the cool.

In May 1963, the month after Terrain, Valda Setterfield, perhaps taking her cue from Word Words and Terrain, did a strip in a section of fellow Judson Dance Theater performer David Gordon's piece Random Breakfast in the Judson group's fifth concert. In this section of the dance, titled “The Strip,” Setterfield slowly circled, removing gloves and a long, buttoned gown (which was Waring's), along with antiquated undergarments including “bloomers” and those worn by more conventional women, such as garter belt and stockings and a “long-line brassiere,” according to Gordon, who remarks that the audience found the work hilarious (Gordon, quoted in Banes Reference Banes1993, 123). Rainer similarly used such loaded signs in a performance the next year: she had not discarded Waring's camp sensibility just yet. Rainer mentions the “lead brassiere” constructed by Robert Morris for her performance in Dick Higgins's December 1964 “opera” Hrusalk’ (Rainer Reference Rainer2006, 260–61), which may have been made from lead, as Morris was using lead in early sculptures, including Litanies (1963). Artist friends were asked to participate by choosing a costume, character, and activity. Rainer called her character a “Low Element” who would “hoist herself on her own petard,” a twist on Shakespeare, occasioning Rainer's explosive springing off the floor (Rainer Reference Rainer2006, 260–61; Hansen Reference Hansen1965, 77). Her character was a lowdown, disreputable woman (and lead is a “base” metal) who was done in by her own efforts to (literally) raise herself up. A photo by photographer Peter Moore, documenting many such performances, shows Rainer on her toes with arms extended, in T-shirt topped by the lead bra, loose pants, socks, and sneakers (Hansen Reference Hansen1965, 77).

Banes discusses Terrain and Concert #5, including Random Breakfast, as using “found gesture” and mining “popular genres and Hollywood myths” (Banes Reference Banes1993, 129–30). Judson performance shared contemporary visual art's affinity for the detritus of urban life and materials outside traditional mediums. Referencing outdated cultural forms would certainly have subverted modern dance's conventions, as per Banes's formalist account (Banes Reference Banes1993, 125, 129, for example). But camp's repurposing could also enable a kind of social-critical parody, as in Rainer's and Brown's “Duet,” and Setterfield's humorous strip. Even if these works did not fully pursue the logic of “feminist camp,” as Robertson has called it, to reveal gender as itself constructed (Robertson Reference Robertson1996), they used camp to mount a social critique of extant gender representation. Working from Andrew Ross's (Reference Ross1989) discussion of camp's relation to commodity culture, Robertson states that just as camp retrieves and recycles commodities that have become passé, it also “recodes” them “according to contemporary tastes and needs,” a “productive anachronism” (Reference Robertson1996, 142). Setterfield's strip productively deployed anachronistic models for women's comportment (and even contemporary conservative models), as did Rainer in her choices for Hrusalk’. Underneath the lead bra, Rainer wore a baggy T-shirt and pants, the typical non-sexualized, non-gender-specific costume of the new dance. Even if these camp performances by women did not question the gender system as such, they all gestured to a contemporary and progressive performance persona for women literally beneath an exaggeratedly feminized representation.

Even recent pop-culture and high-culture icons aged rapidly during the unprecedented expansion of consumer culture, popular media, and the art market during the late 1950s and 1960s that fed the fashion and interior design industries (J. Meyer Reference Meyer2001, 28–30, for example). Art historians see 1960s visual art as responding to these very conditions (J. Meyer Reference Meyer2001; Jones Reference Jones1996; Lambert-Beatty Reference Lambert-Beatty2008; Lee Reference Lee2004). If camp mines the end stages of the commodity life cycle of advanced consumer cultures (Robertson Reference Robertson1996; A. Ross Reference Ross1989, 151, for example), Judson artists had at their disposal an unmatched proliferation of discarded symbols of an era that had barely passed, or still overlapped with the new. Cultural artifacts now circulated as images in the synchronous present of popular print media and television. Camp had access to this newly expanded, wider representational economy that traded in images rather than things, per se. What camp could therefore offer to Rainer and Paxton for Word Words was precisely the freeing-up of representations and the possibility of their critical redeployment.

I have suggested that the choice of striptease-like costuming, when there were many other ways to suggest sameness in Word Words, coupled with the persistence of her eccentric movement vocabulary in early works including Word Words and Terrain, signaled Rainer's early interest in camp as a style, via figures like Waring. I argue that this approach not only opened up material for Rainer's early dances, it also exposed her and Paxton to camp as an operation trading in representations. As Franko (Reference Franko and Desmond1997) observes, Rainer was an astute critic and purveyor of representations. As both Franko (Reference Franko and Desmond1997, 295–97) and Lambert-Beatty (Reference Lambert-Beatty2008) discuss, Trio A succeeded by exploiting the gap between signified and signifier, between the “real” and its representation.Footnote ¹²

Working this gap between one's feminized costume, or representation, and one's identity or “real” body “underneath” was also the logic of female impersonation in the 1960s. This is not that odd a connection to forge. Inspired by camp performance by figures like Waring, Gordon, and Herko, who also moved in the Judson circle, as Burt (Reference Burt2006, 93–105) details, when Judson's women artists performed an amplified “femininity,” like Rainer and Brown in Vassarette lingerie, Rainer in the lead bra, or Setterfield stripping off the velvet gown, they were performing a kind of female impersonation. As I have explained, they were concerned to contrast that representation with a vision of a more relevant, progressive female performer beneath.

As in Gordon's own performance in two other sections of Random Breakfast (1963), in which he wore drag and gestured to popular entertainers Carmen Miranda and Judy Garland, both of whom were “popular figures within metropolitan gay iconography” of the day (Burt Reference Burt2006, 101–2), female impersonation, or at least its referencing in such works, would have been accessible to Judson artists. Female impersonation would certainly have been more visible than male impersonation. As Halberstam discusses, while forms of camp performance, including female impersonation, were available then, there were no real venues for drag king performance in the United States until the 1990s (Reference Halberstam1998, 234).Footnote ¹³ Since any non-heteronormative preferences of women artists were much more opaque than those of male colleagues in the downtown arts community, as Rainer comments (Reference Rainer2006, 207), drag king performance may well have been considerably more “underground” than was camp style and performance. Even camp performance by men in this milieu, like Gordon and Herko, was risky, regarded negatively because it was too close to one's undisclosed gay sexuality and therefore too “private” (Burt Reference Burt2006, 105). However, women could camp up the “feminine,” as did Rainer, Brown, and Setterfield, precisely because they were not revealing anything that was too personal or private, but instead were seen to present exaggerated versions of their own, presumably essential, femininity. In these works, though, there was no attempt to critique gender itself, and, in this, Word Words was unusual.

Female Impersonation, Male Impersonation, and Kinging

Female impersonation was an edgy and titillating entertainment when it was performed for a mainstream audience, according to anthropologist Esther Newton's Mother Camp (1972), an early study of mid-1960s female impersonation shows for gay and straight audiences in US cities. Both Halberstam (Reference Halberstam and Newton2000, x) and Judith Butler (Reference Butler, Abelove, Barale and Halperin1993, 312) note the influence of Newton's work upon their own. Halberstam mentions that Butler found Mother Camp instructive concerning the enactment of gender in drag. As such, I read Halberstam's (Reference Halberstam1998, Reference Halberstam2005) discussions of gender impersonation in relation to Newton's, and I draw on the former's work because it is still considered of significant relevance within the literature on gender performance.

The larger post–World War Two era was characterized by highly polarized gender definitions, according to art historian Marcia Brennan, considering gender in relation to the art of the period (Reference Brennan2004, 24). The “gay world” of the mid-1960s, within which Newton locates female impersonation acts of the period, relied heavily upon an identically polarized conception, the “principle [sic] opposition” of “masculine-feminine” (1979, 100–102). The female impersonators Newton interviewed emphasize their creation of an “illusion” of femininity, referring to an entirely visualized gender identity (101). Discussing drag, Butler states that “naturalized knowledge” of someone's gender arises from the presumptive visual field, “‘seeing’” clothing and how it is worn, or even the actual body (2007, xxiii–xxiv). The attraction of female impersonation for straight audiences of the mid-1960s lay in the overlay of apparent gender with what the audience thought it knew of the performer's gender (Robertson Reference Robertson1996, 11). The performance played upon splits between the seen and the hidden, much as Rainer had recognized a gap between the energy shown by the performer in Trio A and the energy the performer actually expended (Reference Rainer and Battcock1968, 266). However, the female impersonator used “feminine” clothing, the performance was based on “oppositional play … between ‘appearance,’ which is female, and ‘reality,’ or ‘essence,’ which is male” (Newton Reference Newton1979, 100–101; see also Robertson Reference Robertson1996, 11). A “standard” progression during a mid-1960s performance might have the performer “pull out one ‘breast’ and show it to the audience,” pull off one's wig, drop the voice an octave, or strip, revealing a flat chest, all gestures directed to the performer's anatomy to reveal his male “essence” (Newton Reference Newton1979, 66, 101; see also Coleman Reference Coleman1997, 85). This schema of appearance versus one's gender “reality” lying underneath has in fact persisted well past the 1960s. As Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood remark, the “root of th[e] conceptualization is the explicit recognition that the individual publicly performing femininity and being a woman is also simultaneously acknowledged to be a man and not a woman. An inevitable tension arises when one can successfully be what one is not, nor is ever supposed to be” (Reference Schacht and Underwood2004, 4; italics in original).

In Word Words, the visual “truth” of the performers’ movement and bodies was given from the very beginning: the plenitude of the literal that has been discussed in the literature aligning the new dance with the literalist rhetoric around minimalism. The work appeared to offer complete visibility, both of its own processes, given its three repetitions of the movement sequence, enhancing the legibility of the movements, and of the “near-nude” bodies performing it that were rendered the same stylistically. Even the “music accompaniment,” actually itself a performance, was staged in the next night's event so that it would not complicate the work's apparent message of literalness. Commentators on the work thought they saw a convincingly austere work about neutrality, clarity, and formal sameness. But Word Words, the title itself suggesting multiplication, worked through a paradox of gender.

Rainer adopted the signifying status of Paxton, who performed the same moves as she did. They danced in “exact unison” in the work's final sequence (Banes Reference Banes1993, 89). Paxton would have been read without too much difficulty as biologically male and rhetorically neutral. Rainer's presence communicated something like this: I have nothing to hide; I am biologically a woman, but for the purposes of this performance, I too am rhetorically neutral, the same as Paxton, a position coded as male. As is known, feminist critical theory has indicated that the universally human and the male have been conflated in Western thought, and that this universal position, in law and society, becomes the declarative and authoritative position.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the literal body was also the split body of impersonation, decidedly signifying as the neutral/masculine while, for Rainer, all the time presenting the sexed, female anatomical body as the “essence underneath.” Rather than dramatically tearing off the wig to reveal that the female impersonator is “really” a man, what the audience got from the beginning was a rhetorical form of male impersonation that transparently displayed its very operations. Just as female impersonation did, Rainer and Paxton drove a wedge between presumed, essential gender, that is to say gender associated with sex determined at birth (cisgender), and the gender that one might present as an image or rhetorical figure.

I will pursue this question a little anachronistically now, following the logic of the period's binary gender formulations in a visualized social field. I suggest that, in hindsight, Rainer's performance as half of the duo of Word Words might suggest what Halberstam has called a “kinging” effect (Reference Halberstam1998, 238): an effect not merely localized to Rainer's role, but impacting upon Paxton's.

One strategy to which Halberstam attends in discussion of kinging is that of “doubling,” during which two drag kings may dress and/or perform similarly to “emphasize the realness of the drag masculinity”: slightly imperfect replication, s/he notes, enhances the effect especially when “white masculinity” is the target, thereby demonstrating its constructedness (Reference Halberstam2005, 132–33). Rainer was rhetorically putting on the literal, neutral body, an assumption of a self-evident, declarative authority coded masculine at the time. Seeing the work through the lens of kinging— and given Rainer's interest in the relation of real to representation—it is possible to recognize Rainer as the imperfect, doubled representation of Paxton's masculinity.

Another kinging strategy Halberstam identifies in some mainstream films s/he describes as “king comedies,” of note here, is a parodying s/he calls “indexical representation” that, like doubling, reveals the precariousness of masculinity, its very status as a representation. It “reminds viewers … that they are watching or viewing a representation of a representation” (Reference Halberstam2005, 133). Halberstam cites an example in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) in which Vanessa, Austin Powers's sidekick, played by Elizabeth Hurley, sits in the foreground of the frame while Mike Myers's Austin Powers walks around naked in the background. Vanessa, “oblivious to his presence,” “holds up various objects (a sausage, a magnifying glass, a pen) that simultaneously conceal and prosthetically extend his penis” (2005, 133) and also question Austin's “potency,” as one of the items is, indeed, a magnifying lens. In this scene, Halberstam indicates, “the naked body of the male is both on display and under construction,” suggesting that, like a drag king act of striptease that exposes “not the female body but the dildo,” “masculinity and indeed maleness are no less constructed” (133).

Paxton, as a biological man, therefore becomes the supplement to Rainer's unstable representation of masculinity, the reassuring index that shores up the representation. But if the logic of the supplement in kinging also reveals the masculine as contingent, constructed, perhaps Paxton's masculinity is that which requires supplementation. The logic of doubling, supplementing an image with another image, would suggest that Paxton's masculinity is also ambiguously marked as a representation, and is thus denaturalized. It is possible to read several layers in Paxton's performance. Paxton could be seen as, in effect, performing an act of female impersonation as a quotation of female impersonation (coupled with a visible biological maleness, as for much female impersonation historically) in a work that seeks to make a statement about literalism. The work would effectively affirm masculinity, yet, its very operations could only destabilize it. A kind of kinging effect, that is, a bringing to light of the contingent nature of masculinity, is wrought.

The two are thus seen to offer only representations of masculinity, which in turn become mere mirror reflections of each other, giving the lie, even for the ten minutes of the performance, to the gender essentialism upon which the aesthetic and social discourses of the day were surely predicated. As Butler states, drag does not imitate gender because gender is a “natural” and true category, synonymous with biological sex; rather, doing so “dramatize[s] the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established” (Reference Butler2007, xxxi).Footnote ¹⁵ The literalness of Rainer's body separates it from the femininity that her costume and near-nudity reference while, at the same time, masculinity, and gender as a stable and essential system, are concomitantly questioned.

Looking at works by Rainer, Brown, and Setterfield, it is clear that works by Judson's women artists that engaged in gender parody sought to use outdated representations of women not only to undercut the formal conventions of ballet and modern dance, but to utilize camp's parodic power. Yet they were not able to mount a more thoroughgoing critique of gender. With the exception of some inroads by dance scholars such as Burt (Reference Burt2006) on gay aesthetics, and Rainer's (Reference Rainer and Sachs2003) comments concerning minimalism's unacknowledged reliance upon its emotive and “personal” flipside, along with similar observations by James Meyer and Lambert-Beatty on “minimalist” dance (J. Meyer Reference Meyer2009; Lambert Reference Lambert and Goldstein2004), the question of gender remains to be more fully discussed in the Judson literature.

Judith Kegan Gardiner critiques Halberstam's notion of gender as “tied to earlier gender binaries” and as ambiguously vesting power in masculinity, even as Halberstam's work has made a “fundamental impact on queer studies” and his/her feminist aims toward androgyny and egalitarianism are seen by many as salutary (Gardiner Reference Gardiner2012, 608, 620–21). Gardiner observes that more recent feminist studies of gender indicate that “natural and social realms” guiding gender identity are “interdependent,” that “biological factors [a]re always socially interpreted, shaped, and experienced,” and that current studies recognize gender identity as “individualized, yet always socially influenced and contextualized” (Gardiner Reference Gardiner2013, 124). If Halberstam's formulation of gender retains a binarism, I suggest it is nonetheless congruent with that of the period I treat here, the early 1960s, when this binarism was unquestioned. Word Words achieved much more than could be granted at the time. Simply querying what the black box of “masculinity” may contain constituted a surprisingly radical approach at a time of rigid gender dichotomy and male privilege. The most radical move of Words Words may well have been its productive unmaking of both “femininity” and “masculinity,” its very questioning of the work those categories performed at the time.