The Searing and Fleeting Improvisational World of Grand Union

Dance critic and editor Wendy Perron has published a new volume titled The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. The improvisational dance group Grand Union brought together some key figures within New York’s downtown dance scene—Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis, and Yvonne Rainer—for a six-year period of collective collaboration during which they presented more than fifty improvised performances. Perron writes as an insider, having danced with Trisha Brown in her individual work in the late 1970s and overlapped with other Grand Union members in her long trajectory as a New York–based dancer and choreographer. Perron saw Grand Union perform on a handful of occasions and wrote a review in 1976 of their concert at La MaMa, which she reprints in her book (pp. 125–28). Forty-five years later, she revisits and expands this initial review into a book-length manuscript that endeavours to capture what she loved about and learned from this improvisational ensemble. Written with warmth and fondness, Perron’s book is a meditation on the distinct contribution of Grand Union and the connection she felt to their work. Engaging with dance criticism more than scholarly literature, the debates that Perron takes up are with dance critics who panned Grand Union’s performances, claiming that the group was self-indulgent, boring, narcissistic, and/or ego driven. Against these dismissals, Perron makes a case for Grand Union’s specific approach to dance improvisation and the wider influence of their work on the development of postmodern dance. Perron builds upon one other book about the ensemble, Margaret Hupp Ramsay’s The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (1991), by adding descriptions of video documents and analyzing the content of the group’s performances. Illustrated with many photographs, Perron’s book provides a window into the worlds that Grand Union created within their performances.