The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder

H.R. Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351587976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder takes readers on a journey through the life history, creative genealogies and unique working processes of one of the master teachers of Euro-American postmodern movement-based improvisational performance who has, until now, received scant critical attention.

The book offers a long overdue examination of the significant impact made by an important figure on grassroots movement-based improvisational performance in 1960s/1970s America and in Australia from the 1980s onwards. It revisits the work of groundbreaking New York choreographer Alwin Nikolais, with whom Wunder trained and for whom he later taught in the 1960s; covers collaborations with founders of 'Action Theater' Ruth Zaporah and 'Motivity Aerial Dance' Terry Sendgraff as part of the explosion of improvisation in San Francisco in the 1970s and tracks the consolidation of a unique pedagogy that would see hundreds of students learn how to map their performative creativity in Melbourne from the 1980s onwards. It conducts a fascinating investigation into the wellsprings of Wunder's approach to improvised performance as an end in itself, covering teaching innovations such as his use of the Hum Drum, positive feedback, personal power sources and articulators. It includes valuable contributions from a number of ex-students and established Australian artists in dance, music and visual art who share the profound impact Wunder has made on their creative practices.

This book will be a valuable resource to movement/dance improvisation students and teachers at undergraduate and postgraduate level and independent artists drawn to movement improvisation as performance.

Part I

I wonder

1 Creative genealogies

A snapshot of an unfocused 1950s New York teenager with a dodgy leg

Born on 16 October 1943, Wunder grew up on Maujer Street, Brooklyn, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play baseball on Ebbets Field. He later moved to 197th Street, Flushing Queens, spending summer evenings dancing the ‘Phily Lindy’, the Cha Cha and the Mambo to the latest pop music in his friends’ basements; going to the movies, ten-pin bowling or roller-skating and eating pizza and Chinese (Wunder, 2006: 3). Interpolated into this quintessentially ‘ordinary’ American upbringing, Wunder gained the dubious distinction of breaking his right leg on four different occasions between the ages of eight and 14. A childhood shinbone fracture was followed by a thrice-broken femur – the first break making the thighbone more susceptible to the second and third breaks as it didn’t heal at the correct angle.¹ Between the ages of 12 and 15, he was totally bed-ridden for almost a year, resulting in an extremely weakened right leg. The accumulation of years of enforced immobility and inactivity no doubt exacerbated the ‘boredom of a fifteen year old who hung around home annoying his mother with the slothful meandering of an unfocused 1950s New York teenager’ (1). These years would also go on to become an influential vector in his later pedagogical innovations and socio-political stance, one in which each student’s physical dis/abilities would become the wellspring of their creative development. As renowned Australian improviser and ex-student Andrew Morrish says in his introduction to Wunder’s book, he ‘felt physically accepted, rather than shaped’ when first studying with him (i).

During the spring term of his senior year in 1961, a friend suggested that Wunder attend a ‘modern dance’ class, as a form of a) having fun and b) physical therapy. This friend was taking classes with Mexican-born dancer/choreographer José Limón (1908–1972).² Before committing to a Limón class, however, Wunder heard about another set of classes being run in Lower Manhattan by Murray Louis (1926–2016), a lead dancer and long-time collaborator with Alwin Nikolais.³ Wunder was heavily swayed by the fact that he learnt about these alternative classes from a girlfriend whom he had ‘worshipped for four years’ (6). It should be noted that there was also another aesthetic interest infusing Wunder’s decision to start classes with Nikolais, as around this time he saw productions of Nikolais’ Totem (1960) and Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949), the former’s quintessentially eye-catching shape-making igniting his imagination and enthusiasm.

Wunder’s first exposure to a Nikolais performance led him to a regular involvement in a weekly hour and a half of dance technique class at the Nikolais school, but neither were particularly influential in terms of propelling him towards a career in dance. At this point, he was studying Geology, French, Biology and Creative Writing at New York University and his dance classes remained a form of physical therapy. He enjoyed the Nikolais technique ‘well enough’ and reports that it did seem to strengthen his right leg (4).

Figure 1.1 Al Wunder in Cecil Street Studio

Source: Photograph by Lynden Nicholls.

It began with a class

This pragmatic but non-passionate engagement with the Nikolais technique was catapulted into a qualitatively different sphere when Wunder decided to take on a three-hour ‘technique and theory class’ in addition to the technique class he was already doing. In the theory component ‘they did something called improvisation’ (5).

In a characteristically sparse utterance, Wunder captures the seismic shift in his interests and future working focus when he encountered the ‘theory’ part of class for the first time on a Thursday evening in February 1962. He says that he ‘did a two-minute long improvisation and it totally changed my life’ (5). He goes on:

I was hooked immediately, addicted to something I didn’t understand. All I knew was the immense joy and power I felt. I had to have another hit. In fact I had to have many hits….

(5)

Echoing Judson Dance Theater member Barbara Dilley’s ebullient remembrance of the ‘wild taste of spontaneous delight’ and ‘surge of creative revelation’ that occurred for her when beginning to perform improvisation in the 1960s, Wunder had, it seemed, found ‘the mother lode’ of his creative power (Dilley in Zaporah, 1995: xvi). With characteristic impulsiveness – ‘very little agonizing over the practicalities of higher education and economic reality’ as he puts it (2006: 5) – he quit university and began taking the professional day classes with Nikolais:

This was five days a week of technique and theory. This was five days a week of improvising…. This was heaven.

(Wunder, 2006: 5)

After such a transformative discovery, it is perhaps not surprising that Nikolais stands as Wunder’s acknowledged mentor. His dedication in The Wonder of Improvisation pays tribute to the ‘genius, warmth and inspiration’ of the radical artist best recognised, in the words of dance and theatre critic Joseph Mazo, as ‘the P.T. Barnum, the Tom Swift, The Yellow Submarine of dance’ (Mazo, 2000: 241, original italics). The role of improvisation within Nikolais’ wider analytical and investigative aesthetic and pedagogy will be examined later in this chapter but first it is useful to sketch some biographical detail.

Alwin Nikolais

Born at midnight on 25 November 1910 in Southington, Connecticut, Nikolais began piano lessons at the age of five. He developed into a highly competent pianist and organist; later accompanying silent films in various locations including Westport, Connecticut (Gilmore in Gitelman and Martin, 2007: 133). The appearance of talkies later necessitated a shift to teaching piano and accompanying dance classes, but his job as a silent movie accompanist had developed his skills as an improviser, honing his ability to ‘match music with action’ (Nikolais and Louis, 2005: ix). Musicologist Rob Gilmore points out that this early practice of ‘selecting and improvising music as accompaniment to moving images’ was ‘uncannily prophetic’ of the work for which he would later become known (Gilmore, 2007: 134).

Nikolais accidentally stepped into a dance lineage that stemmed from Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) and Hanya Holm (1893–1992) to Mary Wigman (1886–1973), when he saw Wigman perform at the Schubert Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut. It was actually the use of percussion instruments with which the dancers accompanied themselves in the performance that sparked his interest, prompting him to contact another of Wigman’s students, Truda Kaschmann – a teacher of the Wigman School in Hartford – in order to enquire about studying percussion with her.⁴

In interview with James Day for CUNY TV in November 1974, Nikolais recounts the moment when his pivotal encounter with Wigman’s work occurred:

And somehow or other, sitting in the balcony at the Schubert Theatre… when the lights went down I almost had a premonition that something wonderful was going to happen… I remember afterwards that I didn’t breathe I think through the whole first number… this sold me… it was a kind of accompaniment then which she used which was sound. It was not music in the violin/piano sense but was sound, percussion sounds that were made off-stage and this intrigued me… and so I found a woman who taught the Wigman dance and studied with her. I really went to study percussion. I said, ‘Can you teach me how to play percussion?’ She said, ‘Well yes, but you’ll have to learn to dance’ so I said, ‘Well, very well I’ll learn to dance’.

(CUNY TV, 1974)

He did learn to dance, and he also learnt to play percussion. Years later in the manner of Wigman and Holm, his classes would be accompanied by percussion sounds; primarily drums. In a move then also replicated by Wunder, it was the dance teachers themselves who played the instruments in class.

Between 1937 and 1940, Nikolais participated in the Bennington College Summer School of the Dance where the teachers included Holm as well as American modern dance masters Martha Graham, Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey.⁵ Holm’s emphasis on developing the dynamic and spatial properties of movement exerted a profound influence on Nikolais (Siegel in Gitelman and Martin, 2007: 46); after an interruption to his training necessitated by WWII, he moved to New York in order to continue studying and teaching with her.⁶ ‘Because of my congeniality to the German method’, he writes, ‘I dropped all other study and devoted myself to Hanya’ (Nikolais in Gitelman and Martin, 2007: 192).

Henry Street

Nikolais writes that 1948 ‘was without a doubt the most significant year because it proved to be a new beginning for me’ (Nikolais in Gitelman and Martin, 2007: 193). Via his connection with Holm, he got a phone call from Grace Spofford, the director of the Music School and Playhouse of the Henry Street Settlement, an organization devoted to social work situated on New York City’s Lower East Side.⁷ According to Nikolais, this was ‘one of the shabbiest and most dangerous sections of New York City’ (193). Spofford asked him to start a dance department at the Playhouse, an opportunity which he embraced.

By the time Wunder began studying with him in 1961, Nikolais had transformed the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse into ‘a beautiful little theatre’ with a ‘lovely foyer’ and 350 seats which were ‘deep-cushioned and covered in red velvet’ (2006: 9). Revitalising the Playhouse into what dance critic Clive Barnes would describe in 1967 as ‘the elegant, little Henry Street Playhouse which still shows its admirable resistance to conformity by remaining at 336 Grand Street’ (Barnes in 2007: 205), Nikolais established the Playhouse Dance Company – later renamed the Nikolais Dance Theatre. He ran professional classes, instigated drama and dance classes for children and developed a children’s theatre.⁸ Wunder recalls that every Saturday ‘over six hundred children aged between five and eighteen would come from all over New York City and descend on Grand and Henry Streets’ (2006: 9). During the first two of those eight years, Wunder taught some of the hundreds of effervescent children, ‘using Nikolais’ technique and improvisation’ (9).

A quick spell in Nikolais’ company

Unbeknownst to Wunder, the first year of taking professional classes saw him keenly watched by his mentor (2006: 7). I like to think that despite or because of his weakened right leg there must have been something quite extraordinary in Wunder’s quality as a dancer. He tells me, though, that Nikolais simply needed men and ‘with less than fifty hours of dance training’ under his belt (6–7) he found himself in Nikolais’ dance company, working on a piece that would later have its premier as Imago, subtitled The City Curious (1963). Wunder danced as part of the 15-strong corps and four principals in this piece.⁹ He then also danced in Sanctum which premiered on 20 February 1964 at the Henry Street Playhouse.¹⁰ After these productions, Nikolais downsized his company, needing only ten dancers and Wunder wasn’t one of them. As Nikolais’ reputation began to develop internationally, necessitating longer overseas tours, Wunder took the opportunity to enquire of Betty Young, the executive director of the Playhouse, whether he might teach one of the adult-beginners’ dance classes instead of the children. He recounts the surprising moment when Young informed him that Nikolais wanted him to teach some of the professional classes; classes that would be full of ‘hot-shot dancers from all over the United States who had seen Nikolais’ company perform during its national tour the previous year’ (2006: 10). These talented dancers would also have taken a master class with Nikolais, so their expectations of the professional-level classes would have been extremely high. They didn’t know that they would be taught by Wunder instead of Nikolais, nor that they would be the first adults Wunder would ever teach.

With characteristic openness and honesty, Wunder recounts that five out of the 20 students whom he taught in his first professional-level class ‘walked out’. ‘Not the best beginning, not the best beginning at all’ he ruefully notes (10). He was frequently dissuaded from quitting by Nikolais, who either had immense faith in his novice teacher and/or was expedient enough to recognize that having taken all the other experienced dancer/teachers with him on tour, he really needed Wunder to help two other students, Susan Buirge and Joy Butilier, run the professional classes in his company’s absence. Wunder stuck with it. Indeed, completely immersed in the creative maelstrom of his environs, Wunder stayed at Nikolais’ school for eight years, investigating ‘modern dance technique, choreography, stage lighting, electronic music composition and drum making’ as well as being ‘an apprentice teacher’ (personal correspondence, 14 October 2017).

Figure 1.2 Al Wunder in Cosmic Circus, circa 1967/69, Henry Street

Source: Photographer unknown.

Teaching improvisation

A crucial break-through in Wunder’s identity and direction as a professional-level teacher came in 1967 when, as he puts it, ‘I taught something I hadn’t learnt from Nikolais’ (2006: 11) – a set of parameters for a group improvisation.

The idea ‘came out of nowhere’ and epitomised what would later become one of the hallmarks of his instructing style – ‘improvised teaching of improvisation’ (11).

Dividing the group into quintets, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: I wonder
• PART II: Pedagogical foundations
• PART III: Structures
• PART IV: Lived experience
• Appendix
• References
• Index