NS: I am Natasha Simon, and I am in the living room of Phyllis Lamhut’s apartment. It’s June 12th[2017] in the afternoon, and I am sitting with Al Wunder and his wife, Lynden.
AW: Lynden Nicholls.
NS: Al is the narrator of this story for the next hour or so, and his story is part of the Nikolais Legacy Oral History Project. What I would like to do before we get into the meat is for you to give us a little thumbnail sketch of who you are.
AW: Who I am. Well, I’m Al Wunder, and I was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, until we moved out to Queens with my family. I classify -- would classify myself at that time, until I started dancing with Nikolais, as a very typical, suburban New York Jew. Suburban New York, much more emphasis than Jew. My parents were not very artistic or cultural-oriented. My father was a very hardworking man.
NS: What did he do?
AW: He owned his own business, which he worked with his father for a while repairing and making soda bottling machinery. He repaired the machines that filled the seltzer bottles.
NS: Seltz-ah.
AW: Seltz-ah, yeah. He also manu-- he designed and manufactured a little -- what do you call a workhorse carbonator, which made soda water that he sold to buyers and candy stores around the neighborhood. Their business was going out of business, because all the big soda bottling things were taken over by Pepsi and Coke, and actually my father -- one of my father’s claim to fame -- didn’t make him any money, but he designed Pepsi Cola’s first bottle cap.
NS: Ah! Bravo.
AW: Yes. So I actually started dancing at Nikolais’s school by accident. [00:05:00] Or, if I really go back --
NS: Literally by accident?
AW: Literally by a series of accidents. When I broke my right leg four different times, and then that, coupled with having a schoolboy crush on this woman, Barbara Walter, who just happened to be one of Murray Louis’s [1926-2016] teenage dancers, advanced dancers.
NS: Were you living -- you were living in Queens at the time?
AW: I was living in Flushing, Queens at the time.
NS: So you traveled to the Lower East Side to study, or how did you find your way there?
AW: Well, my first year there, I actually would drive down there from Flushing. It wasn’t until I started my second year with Nikolais, when I was actually doing the day sessions -- or the -- yeah, first year of day sessions, I was still traveling in by car. And then my second year of doing the day session, I moved to Pitt Street, right around the corner from the Playhouse [Henry Street Playhouse].
NS: So then you became one of the neighborhood denizens?
AW: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Emery Hermans [1931-2004] was living on the -- next door, six-floor walk-up. Mine on the top floor, a fourth-floor walk-up. We never visited each other. [laughter] No, that’s -- yes, so that was great. The thing that --
NS: And can you put your -- as I understand it, this is 1962, 1963?
AW: Let’s see, I graduated from high school in ’61, so ’62 I first started doing the, -- was it the Monday night or Tuesday night technique class? Taught by Albert Reid [1934- ] at the time. I liked it. It was OK. Then I said, OK, I’ll try the Thursday night class as well, and Gladys Bailin [1930- ] was teaching that. And just the first improv I did, where we had a bit more freedom. It really switched my life --
NS: Sent you over the moon.
AW: Sent me over the moon, yeah. Abstract language. Physical language.
NS: Had you a clue, growing up, that that was where you would make a connection at all?
AW: Not at all. Not at all, no. I had no -- I hadn’t heard the term “modern dance” until this friend on my block where I was living started doing classes with José Limón [1908 – 1972], and he said I should do it too.” I told my friend, girlfriend Barbara at the time, she said, “Oh, I’m studying with blah, blah, blah.” I went to see José Limón perform, I went to see Nikolais’s performance. I mean, the decision was already made, but I actually liked Nikolais’s choreography more. But -- so Nikolais actually introduced me into the world of art.
NS: Art?
AW: Arts.
NS: OK. The arts?
AW: The arts. As well as the world of dance. And then, more specific to me, the world of improvisation. Because that’s where I was. I -- you know, I had the physical problem of a weak right leg, but I have never been a really disciplined person, so I didn’t do stretches on my own, only during the classes. I didn’t do the extra work necessary to overcome the weakness of the right leg. So when I -- the more and more I started improvising, that just became the thing that influenced me.
NS: Made you the connection --
AW: Yeah.
NS: -- to, to art or dance was the --
AW: Well, it’s the thing that kept me in Nikolais to keep -- that plus choreography. Really kept me very interested in this class.
NS: Do you remember some of the theory classes? The improvisation classes that people taught? Or what the problems were that you investigated?
AW: Well, one of the first ones would be -- when you would have five people. The first person would go up and do a shape in the room. Second person would go up and add to that shape. And then all -- until all five people were up in a group shape. And then we would start moving from that shape, and let things evolve from that.
I remember – oh this was very interesting. I remember the first, uh -- well this is the first time Nikolais -- see, I was very fortunate, being a male, coming in, starting the daytime class five times a week -- quote unquote “professional class.” I had had about 30 hours of dance technique at that time. [00:10:00] Um, and Nikolais wanted me to be in Totem [1960]. So hardly could dance a lick, you know. And he just -- the first two years where he had a corps de ballet, so to speak. And because I was a male, I was able to get into it without very much dance technique whatsoever. And I remember the first score that he gave us as a group to play around with was, we all would be in a tight group, facing in one direction. Whoever was in front was the leader, and we would all do the same thing. As the person shifted their facing, somebody else would come into the front, and they would become the leader.
What’s really interesting to me is some students that have -- that worked for me, or studied with me for a while, they started their own group, and they did the same thing, called school of fish, and I didn’t teach that. So that had existed somewhere --
NS: In, in the --
AW: -- in the --
NS: -- ultra subconscious.
AW: Yes.
NS: Or unconscious, and --
AW: It’s a very obvious thing for group relationships.
NS: Did that particular moment, which I know many of us have had -- that shift of leader --shifting -- can you talk about what that is like internally for you? As, as a person who’s leading -- and then you’re shifting -- to being the follower -- what does that, in your mind, conjure up?
AW: In my mind -- because I enjoyed it, in my mind, it’s, it’s giving and taking -- number one, willing to take the initiation and lead a group probably was just a little bit more difficult for me than being a follower. Concerned, and especially at that time, concerned and worried. Here’s all these good dancers behind me, and then, um -- and what am I going to do to impress them or get them to follow me? And then that shifted around, and they started to do things. I would get a little bit uptight when they started to do things that I couldn’t physically do. But it’s...
NS: But that’s the breaks of the game?
AW: Yeah, yeah. Just, uh, for me, this group communication. Nonverbal group communication, in its most basic form. And it’s so necessary in terms of developing that listening or watching, and initiating, responding. I liked that. I just liked that immensely.
NS: It appears from what you’re saying, too, that, that the improvisation classes at Henry Street were very fertile ground for that kind of investigation.
AW: Yes, very, very much so. Very much so. And then, of course, as -- the more I learned about Nikolais’s time, shape, space, and motion, then all this wonderful physical language opened up. It just opened up for me. Uh. So I --
NS: So talk about that --
AW: -- quickly realized that I was one of the better improvisers in the group, even though I didn’t have dance training. Because -- the way I surmise it now, I didn’t have an agenda. I didn’t come there to be a dancer. I didn’t come there to impress Nikolais. I came there to do some physical exercise on my right leg, and to impress this girl, Barbara Walter.
NS: But don’t forget that you also came there with an eagerness. Or a receptivity.
AW: Yes, receptivity.
NS: Receptivity to, to what’s there. What’s there to soak in.
AW: Now, and the way I see it, also -- because at that time, it wasn’t as bad as it is now, but I did have a hearing problem. [00:15:00] And because of the broken legs that had put me in body casts for months at a time -- was totally bedridden during my early teenage years -- my social connection with people wasn’t very good.
NS: Mm-hmm.
AW: But for whatever reason, this idea of physical language, dance as a physical language really sunk into me very quickly. So playing with time and shape and space and motion. I wasn’t concerned about looking beautiful. I was concerned about the feeling, the good feelings that emerged from finding this way of communicating with people, not with words, but with movement.
NS: I had occasion, Al, to look through my notes from 1969.
AW: That’s when I taught you?
NS: Yes.
AW: OK.
NS: Yes. And I was looking at various improv classes that say “Al” next to them. And so –
AW: I’m interested in that, too.
NS: And of course, there’s leg articulation.
AW: Right.
NS: Because you were zeroed in on yours, but also on all of ours.
AW: Yeah.
NS: But in the theory end of class, which is always the more telling --
AW: Yeah.
NS: -- in many ways as a teacher -- where a teacher is fascinated, or what they like, what they’re interested in -- I have notes that say we were -- one day, we were going to explore the element of surprise, the unexpected.
AW: This might be the -- what I consider the first score that I really broke away from anything Nik taught me.
NS: Well, you might -- as I read this and hear you and look at what you’ve written, it’s clear that there’s something bubbling up in you that year. And then you’re off to San Francisco, as I understand it.
AW: Right.
NS: But it’s surprise, the unexpected. There’s giving and graining, which is --
AW: OK. Nikolais technique --
NS: Nikolais. But there’s, there’s another one where it’s sound and movement, with directional changes. In several different classes, you would give us a 12-count phrase.
We would have to set up a 12-count phrase in trios, and we were to attune ourselves -- tune ourselves into how the sequences dissolve.
AW: OK.
NS: What happens when a group comes in, another group adds to it, and what happens to your phrase when someone comes in? So at some point, I have a note with a star that says, “Moving without thinking.” So let’s talk about that.
AW: Moving without thinking.
NS: Let’s remember, or try and remember your mindset then, as you were about to leave Nik.
AW: OK, because it would have been right around that year that I did what I consider -- because I don’t remember anything previous to that -- a score that had nothing to do with what I learned from Nikolais. There were 20 people in the class, so I had four quintets. The score was to go up, find a slightly uncomfortable shape, and stay in that shape as long as you possibly can. When you have to move, do a huge, big movement. At that time, the rest of the group -- whoever moves first, the rest of the group has to explode with them. And the shocking thing was that all four of those quintets were brilliant.
NS: What made them brilliant?
AW: The awareness. This ultra-awareness that people were -- had to be in, because they had to be clued into the initial change. They all had to move as a single entity. They don’t know who’s going to do it. They had to be in [00:20:00] a, a stillness long enough for it to actually become difficult, something that they had to break away from. And just that absolute, uh, total awareness that they were into, sort of this animal, wary thing. I’m going to react to anything that happens. And they’re there -- and they’re in that -- so I believe they were in that sense of really looking at each other and reacting to each other. But of course, they also had a lot of the time, shape, space, motion skill set --
NS: As a foundation.
AW: As a foundation. So they were able to develop the improvisation, more along the lines of their use of time, shape, space, motion, as well as the choreography they had been doing.
NS: Let me ask you, do you -- and this is now going back many, many years, so it’s almost, I would say, an unfair question in many respects. But what do you -- do you remember when you started thinking about that problem? I mean, did you lay awake one night and say, “Ah, that’s what I’m going to do tomorrow?”
AW: No, no, no, no, no, no.
NS: It was, as you walked into the studio --
AW: It was while I was sitting there after the technique section, saying, “OK -- what am I going to do now? Oh, let me try this. I want to see what would happen out of this.” So I may have been doing some little things like that. “Let me see what will happen if I do this.” And because that worked so well as things -- as I evolved more and more as a teacher and started to drift away from Nikolais’s more prescribed -- the prescribed things I learned from Nikolais in terms of setting up improv scores. I started trusting -- I’m just going to come to the studio, do this. Let me see what happens.
NS: And you’re still at Henry Street at that point? You’re still studying there? You’re not in San Francisco yet?
AW: No, I’m still studying -- I left the summer -- I did, I did Nikolais’s class up until, uh, June or whenever, 1970. That’s when I went to California.
NS: And Nik was around then, too?
AW: Yes.
NS: Did you -- did all the teachers meet together to talk about the curriculum for the school, or did Nik leave you --
AW: No, no, no. He left us totally on our own. In fact, this is another “interesting little story.”
NS: Absolutely.
AW: I was the apprentice to Phyllis [Phyllis Lamhut, 1933]. Phyllis was my teacher that I apprenticed under. So I spent two years doing an apprentice[ship] with Phyllis, and then I had two years of teaching seven-to-nine-year-olds on my own in the Settlement things on Saturday. And before the next season, whatever ’70 -- whatever year that was, ’63 or ’64, I go into Betty Young’s[1] office and I said – and Nik wasn’t around at that time. He had just left, or I don’t know -- or he was about ready to leave. And I said, “Betty, I’d like to try teaching the adult class night class.” And Betty smiled at me and said, “Oh, I’m glad you said that, because Nik wants you to teach the professional class.” Ah! Ah! Never having taught adults. Still being one of the weakest dancers in the professional classes. And not only that. When I started teaching in September, that was the -- Nik had just traveled around the United States to all the universities, and in came this influx, huge influx. Tripled the number of professional students. Um, all of them very good collegiate dancers. And I’m in a class of 25 people. I had to teach -- about five or six people were walking out by the end. [laughs] I went to Nik, I said, “Nik, I can’t do this. These are professional dancers. They want to —- ” He talked me into continuing -
NS: What did he say?
AW: I forgot the exact words. “Look, don’t worry about it. You’ll be OK.” I mean, my thing was -- I don’t know what -- there was me, Joy Boutilier, and Susan Buirge [1939- and 1940] were the students who became teachers, while he and Murray and Phyllis and --
NS: [00:25:00] Gladys.
AW: -- were all away. There was nobody else to teach, so we were the ones teaching it. So I went back to him a couple of times, still feeling very insecure, but whatever he said to me, he kept me going, and then things started to get better as I got into it. He trusted me. He trusted me for some reason. The reason I got into being in Totem was -- I forgot who told me -- maybe it was somebody else -- said that, “Well, Nikolais was watching you when you were doing Gladys’s Thursday night class.” So obviously I showed something, but didn’t know that I had it in me. That’s all.
NS: But you did.
AW: I did.
NS: Yeah.
AW: Yes, yes, and it was just his faith. Which he had in all his students. He really did, you know. He’d leave them on their own. This was one of the things that became a cornerstone of my teaching, too, is to trust that it’s the students themselves that are their best teachers, and they’ll develop themselves as long as they stay with it.
NS: I think that, more than anything, what I’m discovering in listening to everyone with whom I have talked is that there’s a striking trust that Nik had in, “It’ll come out, don’t worry, it’s there.” You know. “It takes some time. Just dive in.”
AW: OK, another little anecdote. Composition class. I did -- Murray Louis got on my, on my back a little bit. He got -- it was a good thing, because I -- again, I didn’t do all my composition homework. And so he called me up on that one time, and said, “You’ve got to do it.” And then he gave this time study, and I did a piece of choreography on time. Probably the best choreography I have ever done. Murray took a look at it in class, said, “Go down and show it to Nik.” I went down, I showed it to Nik. So it was a really good piece of choreography.
NS: Do you remember any of it?
AW: Oh, I remember almost -- I can almost do it -- no, I can’t. It was called Stool.
NS: Stool?
AW: Yeah. Used a barstool about this high, and I just did various things in and around, up and down, on the stool. One thing I remember was being on my strong leg, my left leg, which was quite strong, and just slowly lowering myself, never speeding up, slowing down, taking about 30 seconds to lower myself down. Picking the stool up, spinning around, falling down, having the stool behind me, and sort of ostensibly dying at the end.
NS: Oh, we all do that, right?
AW: It’s a good thing, huh?
NS: It’s a good way to end the piece, right?
AW: Dying is a good thing. [laughter] I did, I did do it in the 92nd Street Young Choreographers thing [The 92nd Street Y], and the Times [The New York Times] reviewer gave me a good review of that.
NS: Ah! Do you remember the excerpt from it that you --
AW: I might still have it somewhere in my house. Anyway, um --
NS: But he said, “Go show Nik”?
AW: Yes, so I showed Nik. And then I went into Nik’s -- the more advanced choreography, and I was doing -- choreographing a duet, myself and Wanda Pruska. [1938-] I was just doing circles. I was doing everything with circles and rounds, and just coming up with the idea and playing with it. And she looked at me and went, “Where are you coming up with these ideas from?” And I said, “Well, probably the same way that Nikolais comes up with ideas.” She said, “You don’t think you’re as good as Nik, do you?” I said, “Well, why not?” [laughter] She couldn’t understand that, you know. But really, at that point I thought, well, anybody -- you know, how do you know how good you’re going to be until you do something? And I couldn’t understand the concept of anybody doing Nikolais’s classes couldn’t feel, well, I could do just as good or better than Nik. Whatever better, better to mean.
NS: Whatever that means.
AW: That means nothing to me anymore. But yes, the fact that everybody is a genius in their own right. All they have to [00:30:00] do is let it out.
NS: What strikes me, too, in listening to what you’ve just recounted, is the idea that Henry Street, at that time, still, and certainly when you were there earlier, is that it really was this crucible.
AW: Oh, yes.
NS: In which -- and it didn’t matter -- and it had the space to be the crucible. It’s like -- I’m assuming that when Murray said, “Go, go downstairs and show Nik,” that you were in one of the upstairs studios.
AW: Yes, there was --
NS: And Nik was down --
AW: Yeah, there was sort of an advanced choreography, and Nik and Murray were doing the beginning choreographers.
NS: And then Nik was onstage at -- the Playhouse, and so there’s this maelstrom of creativity that’s just all over the place.
AW: Right. Yeah, look, it was wonderful. Nik had you -- you had to be an apprentice teacher. You had to do choreography as well as theory or improv. You had to do teaching, choreography, dancing, and improvising. He wanted -- his was a holistic approach. He wanted the whole person to be involved, not just a dancer. He never -- well, maybe later, later on, he just wanted the dancers, because he didn’t want to go through the time of developing people again from beginning. And, you know, he was never going to get a quartet like he had when I had -- you know, he was never going to do that.
NS: You’re describing the late ’60s, and you’re now on your way out to San Francisco? What, what impelled you westward?
AW: Bob Beswick [1945- ]. Bob Beswick has been a wonderful impetus in my life throughout. But what had happened was, he and Claudia -- Claudia Melrose? [They] were going to teach the workshop, Nikolais workshop, in San Francisco. If I remember correctly, Claudia got sort of a better job doing something else, in some other universe [university?]. Anyway, she dropped out, and Bob asked if I would do it.
NS: With you?
AW: With him. I had really never been outside of New York City. I mean, maybe doing country camps with my parents. Bungalow colonies with my parents.
NS: In the Catskills?
AW: In the Catskills. In the summertime, we’d go out there. But otherwise, never --
NS: You were a city kid.
AW: I was a city kid. I thought, oh well you know, going out to California just to see what it’s like, be cool. I did that. Second day there, I called up my family and my friends and said, “Send my stuff over. I am not coming back.” I just absolutely fell in love with the place. It was much more my style, personality.
NS: Let me ask you, how much of that -- how much of that westward-ho was you -- and this is, again, an unfair question. But how much of it is you, and how much of it is 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971? -- the times were...
AW: A-changing. Times were a-changing.
NS: Times were a-changing, but they were also extraordinarily, motional and energized.
AW: Yes, yeah.
NS: I mean, the molecules in the air were pretty extraordinary.
AW: Possibly. I was not conscious of the hippie movement. I just -- getting there and just sensing the slow -- slowness of the place. Approaching a curb, no matter what street I was on, the cars would stop and let me cross the street. We were there -- you know, the lovely weather during the summertime there is just great. The people doing the workshop -- Bob and I, that was the first time we taught together, and we really clicked as co-teachers. That also helped. But literally the second day I was there, there was something -- so something was in the air. I didn’t know what it was, per se. “I just know, this is the place for me now.”
NS: [00:35:00] So now, in San Francisco, what do you start to explore when you’re there?
AW: My first year there, I set up a studio in San Francisco with stuff. I actually put down a floor on a second-story building, opened up a studio, and I was teaching seven three-hour classes a week. Doing Nikolais’s technique and theory stuff. Again, the students, they were just -- that was the stuff that was really exciting to me, these exciting students. But after about a year things just started to fall apart a little bit. I don’t advertise myself well. I started running out -- I needed to find something else, not just Nikolais’s stuff. There were a couple of unusual scores that I was putting out, again, that wasn’t Nikolais. One of them was -- I put out these words: hyperactive steel wool. Move with the sense of hyperactive steel wool.
NS: Hyperactive steel wool.
AW: Just to see what would come out. I put out another score: duets. Totally ignore each other. Let’s see what comes out. And what came out, that everybody in the class was really enjoying, were these very unusual shapes. Duet shapes. And what was unusual, what was exciting about them -- because you had to ignore this person -- so your energy was more back here. Rather than in front of you, it was sort of to the side or behind you, and that set up this energy around the duet, as well as -- you’re not going to fall into the similarity of shape. You won’t be drawn into that. You won’t be drawn into doing opposites of shape. You’d just be dealing with your own shape, but on this strange level, being aware of the other person. And that’s being seen from the outside.
NS: By other members of the class or --
AW: Yeah, by other members of the class.
NS: -- a performance?
AW: No, not in a performance.
NS: OK, this is in class.
AW: By other members of the class. They, from the outside, were able to see, wow, that looks great; why? Why does that look great? It’s something we haven’t seen before. But there’s some energy about it that was creating this excitement for us as the viewers.
NS: Did you talk -- what you’re also describing is that you would present a problem to the class, and at some point, the performers would resolve the question, the problem, and then would you spend some time talking about it, or did you immediately go into something else, or how did you get --
AW: No, no. We did, we did the, the usual feedback. But I really don’t [laughs] remember – you know, we talked about, “Oh, that stuff looks great” -- but we couldn’t understand why, or we tried to understand, at that time. Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t remember how I was giving feedback. I imagine it would be similar to what Nik gave and Murray gave and Gladys gave in our classes, talking about what they liked, talking about that maybe we should have held onto that a little bit longer, or talking about how to improve something. But I’m not sure. I really don’t remember how I was dealing with feedback at that time. Ultimately, feedback became the most important part of my class.
NS: Well, that’s what -- that would be part of the next discussion.
AW: Before we get into this, as I said, things started to go downhill in terms of class attendance. And I left that studio, but there were two students who were doing classes with me then, Ruth Zaporah [1936- ] -- Ruth Werblin at that time, but she changed her name to Ruth Zaporah -- and Terry Sendgraff [1933-2019]. They were both excellent students, brilliant. And I asked them, “Shall we go into a partnership together?” They were both living on the other side of the bay. So they said yes, and we opened up this [00:40:00] studio, which we called the Berkeley Dance Theater Gymnasium.
NS: Very official-sounding.
AW: Very official -- struggle finding the name, by the way. But how that came about was Terry Sendgraff had a very good training in both modern dance and gymnastics, and Ruth Zaporah, you know, had trained as a dancer, but she had done lots of movement work with actors. So I -- in essence, I was the dance, Terry was the gymnastics, Ruth was the theater person.
NS: And again, if I can interrupt, it’s also context. The times -- almost necessitated that kind of collaboration.
AW: Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. We opened up a studio on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, just over a Chinese restaurant. Again, I had to build walls, and got help from Ruth’s husband to lay a floor down. So we had this sort of strange-shaped studio above a Chinese restaurant. We got students. I would teach some classes, Terry would teach some classes, Ruth would teach some classes. And we would work together and choreograph stuff together. And it was through this collab-- we had some great students. Marvelous students, you know. And it was the time -- It was the times. It was the times.
NS: Tell me why they’re so great.
AW: Because they’re open to do anything. And they weren’t coming to us to learn dance technique, because none of us were teaching dance technique at that time. At that time -- it was then that I decided I’m not going to do Nikolais’s technique anymore. I’ll just start exploring. Start exploring whatever comes to mind. I’ll see what works. We did have a couple of modern dancers that did come, but they were really open to change. We had one guy -- this guy was in the Oakland Ballet, but he was really open to play, and there was one sort of marvelous duet with this ballet dancer and this other guy who was a hurdler, a collegiate hurdler. And the two of them got into a leaping dance contest together. Both of them just elevating like crazy, but with the ballet structure, style and this guy was just freaking out. It was amazing. So we had all this wonderful new energy. We had a mother of four doing classes. We had some visual artists doing classes. There was a real mix. Berkeley was percolating at that time, and everybody was getting away from, from the norm. You know, even here in New York City --
NS: Sure.
AW: -- you had contact happening.
NS: Judson.
AW: Yeah, Judson Church, yeah.[2] So it was – as you say, it was the times. Ruth and Terry and I stayed together, working together, for about three, four years. Ruth wanted to start exploring language as well as movement as part of the improv.
NS: Language, not sound? Or sound? Language?
AW: Language, but sound and language. She liked not just talking straight. She liked doing a combination. Terry had started playing around on the trapeze, and started -- and invented this low-level trapeze dance, which she called motivity.
So the trapezes were in reach, and because she was this gymnast, she could do these marvelous things on the trapeze: get off the trapeze, do dance, back on the trapeze. Brilliant, beautiful stuff. Absolutely exquisite stuff. Ruth was brilliant with language, as well as very, -- she was a brilliant mover. She didn’t do dance technique stuff. She was never good at that, she said.
But she was, uh, absolute, total body in her movement. It spoke. You know. And very good with language. So she was evolving this thing, which ultimately she called Action Theater. You can Google it. There are two Action Theater[3] [00:45:00] teachers here in New York. And so the two of them -- well, first, Ruth left. She wanted to do some work on her own. And then Terry wanted to explore the trapeze stuff. And the both of them were taking students. [laughter] You know, so my, my class --
NS: Suffered?
AW: -- dwindled again. Dwindled again. Dwindled again. And then there was all sorts -- I herniated my disc after about several years in Berkeley, major herniation. Doctor said, “OK, you’ve got two choices. One, we fuse the spine, or two, spend seven -- spend as long as you have to in bed until the symptoms go away.” Seven months before the symptoms went away.
NS: Oh dear.
AW: Eh. [laughs]
NS: -- there is that physical element in our profession --
AW: Yes, there is. There is.
NS: Keeps intruding.
AW: It does. I mean, lots of dancers have problems later on. So I keep looking -- well, what happened was there was this time in Berkeley, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I had an adult newspaper route to make money.
NS: Did it pay the rent?
AW: Yeah, just --
NS: Good.
AW: -- just paid the rent. But I remember one night, I was walking around. It was very early in the morning, 2:00, 3:00 AM in the morning, walking around, really feeling very depressed, thinking, “Oh, I’m going to become a Bowery bum. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And for some strange reason, I said to myself, “Stop this. Stop this negative thinking.” Ruth and Terry have each evolved their very different yet very beautiful styles of performance and teaching. And I -- what am I teaching? What do I have to teach? But they both were in my class. They both evolved through something in my class. I’m not sure what it was. So I came to real-- I come to thought: “Well, it’s because I don’t teach a style.”
And I remember, again, talking with Bob Beswick several years earlier at Henry Street, and I misinterpreted – I’ve got to find out, you know, if Bob doesn’t remember this. But I remember very clearly, he said, “Well, Nikolais’s technique is the whitest technique.”
NS: The rightest?
AW: Whitest. White, color white.
NS: Oh, white. White.
AW: -- technique, compared to Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham. [1894-1991 and 1919-2009]
NS: Did he mean in terms of race, color? Or did he mean --
AW: He might have meant that. He might --
NS: Or did he mean in terms of the purity?
AW: That’s what I took it. That’s the way I read it. That he wasn’t teaching a style, per se. He was teaching enough physical strength, flexibility things, but he wasn’t teaching styles, like Merce Cunningham or Martha Graham. The dancers did not look like them. Gladys doesn’t look like Phyllis. Phyllis doesn’t look like Murray. And --
NS: Beswick doesn’t look like Al. Right.
AW: Yeah, exactly. So I took that as a wonderful compliment, and I said, “Well, that’s what I’m doing.” But there’s --something was in my teaching that helped -- or at least got Terry and Ruth thinking.
NS: I think in tandem with that, if Bob uses the -- if we think of Bob using that term, “white,” that in tandem with that is a generosity.
AW: Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I said, well that’s what I have to offer, this sort of style-less way of teaching. And so that, to me, if I look back on it, though I didn’t realize it at that time, was me giving myself positive feedback. Not what I was doing wrong, but what I was doing right. What was in my teaching that is good.
Again, that positive feedback didn’t generate until a few years later. [00:50:00] But it was the beginning. It was the beginning of: look at what’s good. Look at what you like doing rather than --
NS: So the 2:00 AM epiphany --
AW: Two AM epiphany.
NS: -- is the beginning of the next journey.
AW: The first improvisation in Gladys's class, was the epiphany that changed me from, OK, I’m doing this just as physical therapy, but I’ve got to do something else in my life, to let me try this out five days a week and see what comes.
And then it was not too much later when Lynden came into my life. Yes, Lynden came into my life. In a strange way, Bob was the impetus for that, too.
NS: OK, so, so the key here is Bob.
AW: The key here is very much Bob. It’s really amazing how much he really has influenced me in a way, just because he was there. OK, and let’s see if I can cut the story short. Bob --
NS: You don’t have to.
AW: Well, Bob -- when Nikolais came to Australia, went to Australia to teach, Bob was in his company then. Bob, I think, stayed around afterwards, and he was teaching in various places over Australia. Lynden happened to take a class with him at that time. That’s a little aside. That just -- that wasn’t the direct thing. The direct thing is that, when Bob came back to New York, this woman, Zandie Acton -- he met this woman, Zandie Acton, who was from Australia and wanted to do some studying of modern dance stuff. And so she rode with him on the back of a motorcycle to Madison, Wisconsin. Bob had asked me to go co-teach with him again -- well, not co-teach with him -- to teach a choreography class during the summer school at Madison, Wisconsin.
NS: Nineteen sixty --
AW: No, this was 19--
NS: -- four or five?
AW: No, this was 1971 or ’72. And I did that, and Zandie was there, and Zandie wanted to come out to the West Coast, and I had bought a van to travel back to the West Coast, and so she came with me to the West Coast. She started doing classes with me and Ruth and -- don’t think she did any with Terry. And when her visa was running out, we actually got married so she could stay in the United States. Which she did, for several years. She married this guy, John -- Joe Dolce, who had this one-hit wonder, worldwide famous one-hit wonder, “Shaddap You Face.”
NS: [laughs] Oh.
AW: And then Zandie and another student of mine and Ruth’s -- Zandie moved back to Australia, and this guy [Jimmy Fizdale?] went to visit her, and he fell in love with an Australian woman, stayed there. They invited -- Zandie and Jim invited Terry to go teach a motivity workshop in Australia.
When Terry told me, “Ooh, I’m going to Australia,” I felt this poing go off in my head. I literally felt and heard this poing go off in my head. I knew something was going to happen. Two or three weeks later, Terry comes back and says, “This woman is coming back to study with me for a while. You’re going to fall madly in love with her.” That was Lynden. She told Lynden that, “I know this, this et cetera” --
NS: “This is going to happen. I know it is.”
AW: This is going to happen, yeah. And it happened. So that was it. Again, it’s something -- spur-of-the-moment type thing.
NS: And certainly I don’t think I’m pushing the point to say that it’s important to know when it is that this is happening. That is, it’s all in that time frame -- when we were all so very mobile.
AW: For me it also emphasizes my personality and [00:55:00] frame of mind, and -- which is, in essence, an improviser’s thing, is that you do things spur-of-the-moment. You don’t have to reason things out. You just say, oh, I’ll try that. You do it. And then you react to whatever happens around that. Anyway.
NS: And then very soon thereafter, you moved to Australia?
AW: I went to Australia, yup. I went to Australia first to pass the time, you know, whether Lynden and I could really get along together. And after spending several months doing some teaching there, making drums -- oh, I started making drums. You know about that? Actually, the drum-making came as a result -- because Nikolais, one day, just for one day, I think he needed some percussion instruments at the Playhouse, so he had a drum-making workshop for one day at the Playhouse where he showed us to just soak cow skins in water, find any bowl or something, stretch it out, tack it in, and when it dries out, you’ve got a drum. So, in San Francisco, I needed some drums with my classes, so I started making these little, uh, planter boxes, round planter boxes. I made four different sizes for myself, so I had four different tones. People liked them. They said, “Oh, can -- where’d you get them?” I said, “Oh, I can make them.” So I started making drums as a sideline.
NS: And then you could afford Chinese food at the restaurant after you paid the rent, right? [laughter]
AW: Sort of like that. And most importantly, I met a -- an interspecies musician, a guy who made music with different animals. And he was making these percussion instruments,
All wood, no skin, an Aztec Mayan civilization concept: tongue drums were the generic name. And he showed me, well, you just take a box, cut out any shape you want on top, it’ll give you your tone. That’s it.
NS: Because different shapes that you cut out will give you different tones?
AW: Yeah. Yeah. And so I started making those. And those became -- those were bigger sellers. Then after I hurt my back, I had something to do, that I could do. So the drum-making became my income. And...
NS: -- you’ve moved to Australia.
AW: I moved to Australia with 16 drums. [laughter]
NS: In a big showcase. How did you ever get them across the ocean?
AW: I had them in two big boxes like this, or three big boxes. And I didn’t know that I was supposed to --
NS: Declare them.
AW: And then pay taxes on them, because they were a commercial thing. She [Lynden] -- they had to go get her from the other side of the barrier and bring her in, and she had to cover the money to let these drums come in.
NS: Welcome to Australia. [laughs]
AW: She had also set up a three-month workshop for me to teach, with eight people. And so that was the beginning in Australia.
NS: As someone who’s never been to Australia, tell me what it was like to get off the plane and be in Australia for the next 30 years, or 25 years.
AW: Or thirty-three, I think.
NS: What’s this kid from Queens, whose father sells seltzer, seltzer water right?
AW: My first impression in coming and landing, and seeing these almost bare fields, but spotted with dead trees -- that’s a very interesting landscape to come into. Then the next impression, we stayed -- Lynden was living in a house with two other people, and my first day in Australia, first morning in Australia, I took a walk, and two blocks away was this street called Sydney Road, which -- I looked up the street, and there was a flashback to Grand Street here in Williamsburg. [01:00:00] Mom-and-pop shops all the way as far as you could see it. And I said, oh, wow. [laughs] So I felt at home. Felt at home with that. And the people who were doing the workshop really, again, a wonderful group of people. A few of which who stayed and continued working with me, and who became themselves really good improvisers and teachers of improv. So I had a really good start with that.
NS: And it’s continued that?
AW: It’s -- it had its -- again, there’s -- I needed another shift of focus. In my last couple of years while I was in the States, I was working out -- I developed a warm-up type of technique. I wanted to be able to develop flexibility, strength, balance, and all that, without doing set exercises.
So I worked out this -- what I call the sequence of four, that worked on flexibility, but it all had an improvisational – a scored -- element to it. So for me, stretching became open and close the space between your head and your toes.
NS: Say that again?
AW: Open and close the space between your head and your toes.
Any way you want to. A hang-over element, which is just standing, hang over your legs. Let the whole body weight, upper body weight, just hang. Don’t push it down. Just let it hang. Knees bent. Slowly straighten your knees. Again, don’t force yourself. Let your body rise as much as you can. Just let the hanging body weight be the element that stretches out your hamstrings. Change your leg positions. Bending, straightening, changing your leg positions. Keep that slow, easy, gentle, bending and straightening. Let your body weight just hang. That was one of the -- then I had the, uh, rock and roll.
Rock and roll. Rocking, rocking backwards, forwards, letting your legs go out in second position. So it became -- it wasn’t the counted eight counts over, roll back, what Nikolais’s rolling over --
NS: Sure, rolling over, rolling up.
AW: But it was rolling in all different positions. From Terry’s gymnastic -- you know, we did backward rolls. Sort of came out of that, but then changing leg positions, and again, letting the upper body hang over the legs, come back. So...
NS: So what you’re actually describing is that the way in which you developed your technique is moment to moment, almost.
AW: Yes.
NS: I mean, a very strong sense of, OK, here you are in this moment, here you are in this moment. And it’s not that you have a prescribed arc, or a prescribed picture of what happens. It’s whatever happens that moment because of...
AW: But you’re doing -- there’s enough of a prescription, if that’s a word. There’s enough of -- delineated happening -
that you’re, in a way, forced to acknowledge this is stretching out this. But I’m playing with it. I’m not counting. I’m playing with it. And if I can be --
NS: If you’re playing with it, how does the student --
AW: When I say I’m playing with it, I’m the student.
NS: OK. Oh, you’re the student.
AW: I’m thinking from the student’s point of view. I’m playing with it. I’m aware of what I’m doing. I’m enjoying this particular movement perhaps -- OK, I’ll do it again. And if they sense that it’s helping them in their flexibility -- so for me, it’s like, we watch a little two-year-old play around with their physicality and their body. It was getting back to that, but it had a bit more of a -- this is your flexibility, your legs. [01:05:00] Strengthening your legs, we have up and down. Going down into the floor, coming up --
NS: Sometimes on your, on your good leg, up on a stool, and down.
AW: Yeah, yes. That’s -- sometimes on my bad leg. [groans] “Ugh!” No, so it’s -- yeah. So I had evolved that and I brought that, and I started doing that in Australia, my classes. So there was still a sort of technical element that I wanted people to deal with. But after a year of teaching -- first teaching in Australia, the same thing sort of happened that happened to me in San Francisco. My class numbers started to go down.
NS: What to do?
AW: What to do, what to do? It was at that time, OK, that Lynden and I -- in order for me to stay in Australia, to get permanent residency, I had to marry her. We fought tooth and nail against it. [laughter] We both hated the idea, but this is the way that I had to stay. And so we --
NS: Sometimes the state just intrudes on our lives.
AW: I know, I know. It’s disgusting. [laughs] And so we wanted to -- well, I also had to go back to the United States, because that wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking that I was going to leave there for good. But now that the decision was made, so we decided we’ll get married in the States, and we both said, “What’s the most weirdest way we can get married? We don’t want to do this marriage ceremony.” We got married at City Hall here, a three-minute ceremony. And Lynden wore a jumpsuit, colorful jumpsuit. I had a sort of cowboy shirt and dungarees that I wore.
NS: And there was Bob Beswick?
AW: Bob Beswick came with his wife Mickey [Mickey McLaughlin] at that time. My father, my stepmother, my aunt, and my sister. Then we were staying at my father’s house, and we were all gathering, and Lynden and I were there in our wedding dress. My aunt said, “Aren’t you going to change?” “No, this is our wedding stuff.” So anyway, we got married, went back to States. When we moved -- went back to Melbourne – Zandie Acton, that woman -- she had a dance studio. She had created two -- a live-in studio in this factory that she and her family had bought. And so there was a space open there, and Lynden and I moved into that space. And it was there that I said, no more technique.
Let’s just do improvisation as a performing element. Don’t worry about the technique. So I dropped that teaching technique through improvisation, and just started to deal with -- improvisation as a performing element. As a performative thing in and of itself.
NS: So the roots of -- I mean that’s a great arc that you’ve made now from appearing at Henry Street for physical therapy -- becoming totally enamored and falling in love with the idea of play and improvisation, and -- but it’s within the context of a discipline -- and technique. Flying out to California, because that’s what one did. Not flying, but I mean, just exploring.
AW: Yes.
NS: And then you land in Australia, and to hell with technique; I’m going to -- I’m going to be the improvisator.
AW: Well, again, Ruth Zaporah and Terry Sendgraff [were] the impetus for that. They’re also, in a way, uh -- I learned things from them. I learned some gymnastics from Terry, and I did some of Ruth’s classes, which helped me with developing what I call my own theatrical language. And because they had really gotten into performing improv. I was holding back, waiting for who knows what. Oh, one other thing. I should go back to -- just backtrack to Henry Street. Somewhere [01:10:00] around my last two years at Henry Street -- so that would be 1968 -- I started to realize I was enjoying the classroom improvs that were going on more than --enjoying Nik’s choreography. It wasn’t -- I don’t think they were any better then. It’s just my sense of enjoyment was seeing things happen from nothing. See that moment of spark -- you know, sparkling inventiveness that everybody was recognizing at the time. So, on some level, though it was sort of semi-conscious or unconscious at that time, I said, this is where I ultimate -- really what I want to end up doing. Why can’t we improvise as a performance? Do a total improvised performance.
NS: How much do you think that that -- the idea of improvisational -- performative improvisation, or improvisational performatives -- I mean, however you want to --
AW: Improvised performance.
NS: Improvised performances. How much of that do you think comes --— from [long pause] where does it come from? Because you’re building on your whole -- it’s experiential, and at the same time, it’s existential, because it’s of the moment. But it happens because of all that’s happened before.
AW: Yes, yes. Well, that’s...
NS: Which includes technique.
AW: Including technique, yes.
NS: And gymnastics and language and --
AW: Yes, yes, yes, yes. For an improvisation to be – see, for me, the idea was to create an improvised performance that looked like a choreographed piece. That had those elements.
NS: That’s a real tension-producer.
AW: Yes, yes. I mean, that was the idea behind it, to -- to have a -- to be a viable piece of theater. That’s accessible to people and that people enjoy watching, that’s not just experimenting with something, OK. So there has to be skill levels involved. It takes a lot of skill level to create that. And that includes whatever skills you’re working on. So to me, I have -- oh, I have these four areas of entertainment that’s in my book. Four ways of entertaining, through humor, expertise, physical or emotional risk-taking, being beautiful or profound. Now, you think about Nikolais’s time, shape, space, and motion. Here I have four elements. This is the biggest thing I learned from Nikolais, or the thing that most sticks in my classes, that people can see in my class of Nikolais. All my scores have three or four elements that are basic to something that people can play around with and then develop. Yeah.
NS: Here’s another question for you. Given that all of our lives -- because I’m very struck in the positive feedback section, when you talk about, in your book -- the way in which we learn language and how to walk, and that it’s all new. You’re building on something completely new. But you’re, you’re working with not two-year-olds. You’re working with 25-year-olds, or 47-year-olds, or whomever. So how much of what you end up providing is to undo, and how much of it is to do?
AW: Well --
NS: If you understand what I’m trying to say.
AW: I understand exactly what you’re saying. Yes, to me, that’s the most -- that’s one of my first reasons for dealing with positive feed-- putting out positive feedback, was I wanted people not to be concerned about whether they’re doing something right or wrong. Not to worry about how to do something. Not to worry about [01:15:00] what is the teacher asking for? The concept was that if both the students had to give feedback about what they did, in terms of an improv performance, and the audience people had to give feedback about what they saw that they liked, not whether -- not about the performance itself, but elements - elements within the performance, something within the performance. So let’s say you did a little score of opening and closing the space between yourself and the walls.
NS: OK.
AW: Choose one moment that you really enjoyed. Try to describe what you were physically doing at that moment that made that enjoyable. Then why did you like that particular happening? The audience, people watching, they’re not talking about -- I don’t want them talking about the performance itself. What element, what did they perceive, what did they see? One moment that they saw that they liked. What did you see? What did you actually perceive at that moment? What were they doing, physically? What made you smile?
NS: Those are all really, really wonderful questions. What kinds of answers do you get from an audience when you set up this --
AW: Uh, yeah, well, that’s, that’s the other thing. [laughs] As I say, for me, the initial thing was, if they didn’t talk about what they didn’t like, or they didn’t talk about how they could improve something, they just talked about what happened in that moment that they liked, the idea behind that was to set up a strong, positive judge, rather than a negative or even constructive judge. To me, the most important tool for the improviser is the confidence to be impulsive.
NS: Confi-- can I underscore that one?
AW: Yes.
NS: The confidence to be impulsive.
AW: Confidence to be impulsive. And that worked. The positive feedback really began to work.
NS: How so?
AW: That people started to be less concerned. I mean, there’s some people that drop out because they think that that’s sugarcoating. But I realized very, very quickly that there’s a tremendous learning tool, and that -- and that’s where I started to get specific about, talk about, the physicality you were involved in when you were enjoying something. What was your speed? What was your physicality? Was it an open physicality, a closed physicality? What were you looking at? What did you see? All these things are possibilities of enjoyment.
NS: And then what happens?
AW: Then they start -- well, they start developing a language. This is a language that you talk about. There are two types of feedback people did. There’s the feedback they did in the classroom scores. Mostly they were duet things. So again, open and close the space between yourself, your partner. After doing five minutes of that, what particular movement did you like that came out of that? Uh. And the hardest thing was the limit -- people to limit themselves to talk about one thing.
NS: Oh!
AW: You know, they just --
NS: As opposed to many things?
AW: They just -- “Oh, yeah, you know, I loved the -- I loved” -- and then they get specific about it. “I loved the” -- people would say, “I loved our interaction together.” Doesn’t say anything about what -- they did love the interaction, but what moment of interaction? What were they doing at that moment? That’s what I wanted them to start developing. So people eventually start developing the sense of, “Oh, I like moving fast more than I like moving slow.” Or, “I like moving slow more than I like moving fast.” So this becomes -- to me, I had people be on the lookout for what I call their personal power sources. What are your personal power sources? Do you have a body part that you find you move from more often than not? [01:20:00] Do you find that you’re more of a fast person or a slow person? There was one person whose positive feedback was the use of his eyebrows. He was always using his eyebrows and this was a thing that people could see from the audience. He didn’t see from -- he didn’t realize it from himself, but -- but once that was pointed out to him then he realizes, “Ah, there’s it.” So -- and then, what is it about that that he personally – he could understand why he enjoys that, which is most likely, you know, I would imagine, “Oh, I feel these characters emerge as I do this,” or, “I love the emotional change from this to that.”
People start developing a language for themselves. This is me, this is the stuff that I want to develop, because it’s stuff that I enjoy doing. And interestingly, that doesn’t create a limitation. It opens up. If you’re a person who really likes to move fast, that becomes your home base.
And as you move slowly against that, you feel the relative change. And that has a feeling -- a motional -- as well as an emotional -- feeling for you. Whereas if you didn’t recognize -- if you have no recognition that fast is your home base, the changes of dynamics wouldn’t mean that much to you.
NS: Well, but the key there -- I mean, and you are talking about a real key, which is the change in dynamics is that in that exploration what you’re aiming at is the real creative tensions.
AW: Hmm. Yup. Yeah, exactly.
NS: Which is what makes --
AW: Like theater.
NS: -- art. And theater.
AW: Makes for theater. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And because it was now dealing with not only movement, but dealing with sound and dealing with words, so people had to say, “Well, am I more of a mover than a talker? If I am a talker, am I -- do I -- is there any movement in my talking? What is the movement” -- you know, starting to get a real sense of where the strengths are, and acknowledging, well, that’s what I’m going to develop. So just like Nikolais recognized where his strength was. He developed those. He didn’t develop somebody else’s technique. He developed his technique. That’s what the whole positive feedback was all about. You develop -- you take responsibility for your own development. From the audience, the idea -- the whole idea of the audience feedback is, what did you enjoy seeing?
Not whether it was good or not. What did you enjoy seeing?
NS: When you set up one of these events do you send out an email blast? Do you send out flyers? Do you gather people in the town square and say, “Come ye, come ye to a” --
AW: [sings] Come all ye faithful. No. [laughs]
NS: How do you -- and then who comes to it, and who’s -- is there a proscenium? Is it in the round? How do you shape the event?
AW: Ah, mostly they happen in the studio, or did back in the ’70s in Berkeley. There was a hotbed of improvisation happening. It wasn’t just a Berkeley Dance Theater Gymnasium. There were several other entities doing equal, equal exploration and different ways of improvising. So it was done in studios. At that time, before computers really started happening, we cut and pasted stuff, and we made flyers, printed flyers, hung them out. It’s a word-of-mouth thing. Berkeley, in the ’70s, it hasn’t been matched in terms of the amount of people interested both in doing classes, teaching classes, becoming audience members. I would say there was a wellspring of about 300, 400 people who would go to different performances or do different classes, of different entities.
NS: But now, if we jump to the here and now --
AW: The here and now.
NS: -- and you’re in Australia doing -- exploring this, because now it’s something that you’re interested in as a sentient human being, do you -- is it word-of-mouth? Is it events -
AW: Well, now I’m in a little town called Ballarat. It’s a town of 100,000 people. The arts in Ballarat has really [01:25:00] sort of exploded -- the arts scene has exploded in the last 10 years. Lynden has been very instrumental in helping that to explode. She’s a photographer, but she also is this wonderful ideas person. Creates very unusual, theatrical ideas that she presents in the streets. She’s also a Facebook aficionado. Facebook is one of the best ways, at the moment, to put out ideas. I’m no longer teaching. I might teach one day a week, [a] workshop every once in a while from now on, but I haven’t taught in a couple of years. But I am working with these two women, and just added two more musicians to a group that we call Jam’n JAR.
NS: Jam’n JAR?
AW: “JAR” is Julianne, Al, and Robyn. The “Jam’n” we started -- we just wanted to add something. “JAR” just didn’t seem to work, so we said “Jam’n.”
NS: Jam’n JAR.
AW: But now that we have two musicians, they’re the jam, jammers, and we’re the JAR. So we’ve been performing -- we’ve done several performances in the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery a couple of times. Again, it’s a community of artists who know each other, so they’ll come and -- it’s a word-of-mouth thing, and people who are interested in improvisation and, and watching us grow as performers.
NS: The musicians, are, are they percussion, or is it violin, or...?
AW: One’s a singer. The other [is] basically pianist, but they both play guitars a bit. They do percussion stuff. They make sound. So they’re, they’re multi-talented musicians.
NS: And I suspect you are not without sound either.
AW: I am not without sound either. But I don’t play my Hum Drum with them. Which is good, good. When I first started working with Julianne and Robyn, I did a lot of hum-drumming with them. I said, this is stopping me from doing my other stuff. So I put that aside, and so when I’m with them, I just move, do a lot of moving and talking, and we create -- we create performances that ultimately have some kind of theme.
NS: Theme?
AW: The theme comes out as part of --
NS: Can you give -- can you give some examples of theme?
AW: Uh, there was one --
NS: Thematic exploration.
AW: [laughter] What did I say to Robyn at the beginning of one? I said something -- either I said, “No, I don’t want to marry you” or “I don’t really love you.” That was the first words that came out at the beginning of the improv, and so then a whole 30, 35 minutes came out around love and marriage, and just evolved with that. That sort of thing. So that -- that’s sort of what happens sometimes. Um, yeah.
NS: Let’s stop.
AW: OK.
NS: We’ve done...
AW: Quite, quite a bit, yes.
NS: Quite a bit. And, and I think we were at a, a closing --
AW: We are. Let me just add --
NS: Sure.
AW: -- one more thing, because, in Australia -- like, Terry and Ruth came out while I was teaching in San Francisco, but that came out purely almost by accident. But because that came out, and because I had that epiphany that what I teach is style-less, in Australia I started this positive feedback element, and the whole idea was now I’m going to really try and understand how do I get people to come out like Ruth and Terry did. You know, what do I have to do as a teacher? The positive feedback was the major source to bring out. So, in Australia, there’s been several people that have come out that are really now doing quite well. This guy, John Britton [1964- ], who travels around the world, teaching, -- he calls it the DUENDE.[4] It’s what he teaches. India, Portugal, [01:30:00] the United States, Great Britain. He’s from England. And so he has his thing that he’s doing.
And there’s an Andrew Morris, who did many years of work with me, and he now lives in Paris, and he travels around teaching his particular brand of improvised theater. There’s “Born in a Taxi”, who’s a wonderful trio doing totally improvised stuff and they get these wonderful reviews. They do a lot of children’s-oriented shows now. They do corporate happenings, but they’re also marvelous at just doing totally open improv stuff. And there’s a couple of other people, but those are the major people that are sort of, quote unquote, “making it big” in the improv field, which is still a very, very tiny...
NS: Little part, but still it’s a vital and vibrant core, really, of people who -- were -- are quite excited and exciting.
AW: Europe seems to be a hotbed for improvisation. Yeah, they really go for it in a much stronger way than here in the States, or even in Australia.
NS: Interesting. I wonder why that is.
AW: I don’t know. Because I taught in, in Munich and Berlin and Zurich, and again, the people are really -- and I’ve gone to improv-- improvised performances other people are -- performing, too, what’s happening there. Yes, they, they seem to be a lot more open to that sort of thing.
NS: If you wanted to transpose it in another way, you could say that there’s a sort of appetite for unscripted events.
AW: Yes, there is. There is. And also, there’s -- I think even now, the modern dance happenings is including more theatrical elements than the pure movement element that was happening even with Nikolais, the pure movement stuff. There’s -- but --
NS: But it’s a big arc, and it comes around and around --
AW: It does, it does.
NS: -- and around. And I think to sort of put the envelope out there, is that it’s no accident that all of what you’ve described happens, has happened out of crucibles like Henry Street, where there is that sense of explor-- this desire for exploration.
AW: True, true. Absolutely. I mean, take a look at all the other people coming out of Nikolais, what you’re doing, this legacy thing. Just amazing.
NS: Yeah.
AW: You know. The amount, the amount of people he has influenced --
NS: Is pretty --
AW: -- who --
NS: -- big.
AW: Yes. I might have been one of the more divergent people, I don’t know.
NS: Well, you ended up in Australia. [laughs]
AW: Yeah, but, you know, I sometimes think, what would Nikolais think of what I’m doing? Hmmm.
NS: I think he would love it.
AW: I -- on some level, yes.
NS: Yes.
AW: But also, you know, aesthetically, it wouldn't be his thing. But --
NS: But he wouldn't -- it wouldn't matter to him.
AW: No, it wouldn't matter to him.
NS: Right.
AW: Because I think he would appreciate the integrity of what has come out, even though it’s not classically oriented like he is...
END OF INTERVIEW
[1]Growing up on the lower east side Young was a member of one of the Henry Street Settlement’s many clubs. She eventually became the school administrator and co-director of the Playhouse with Nikolais. For further information see Helen Hall, Unfinished Business (New York: Macmillan, 1971) and Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, The House on Henry Street (New York: New York University Press, 2020).
[2] Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964, was a collective of dancers, composers, and visual artists who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City. For further information see Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 305-337 and Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson’s Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
[3] Action Theater, founded in the San Francisco Bay Area, is an improvisational performance technique developed by Zaporah. See Ruth Zaporah, Action Theater: the Improvisation of Presence (Berkeley: North Atlantic Press, 1995).
[4] Representing an international collaboration of performers dedicated to ensemble principles, Britton is also the Founder and Director of The DUENDE School of Ensemble Physical Theatre.
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