Gordon Rules

MCE

Thomas Connors

To get smart," instructs dancerchoreographer David Gordon,

add an s and m to art. '' And to get art? According to Gordon, this type of offthe-wall wordplay is one way to go about it. For twenty-five years he has juggled speech and movement, life and art, turning them inside out until dance becomes an extension of life as it is lived. He can take the most common prattlings and the simplest gestures and make us jump at the clarity of his new order. Then, with a slyly placed pun, he'll knock the wind out of his own creation. It's almost as though he coaxes us into seeing the emperor's new clothes and then insists that the fit is all wrong.

Back in the early sixties, Gordon happened upon the Judson Dance Theater, that audacious gathering of innovators who showed us there was life beyond Balanchine and Graham. He was around when Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, et al. toppled Terpsichore, but, unlike them, he was more an innocent bystander than a rebel. "I didn't have the sophistication," he recalls, "to know that I was in the middle of a revolution."

From the start, Gordon has thought aloud onstage. Drawing on everything from "Second Hand Rose" to Hamlet's famous soliloquy—not to mention his own quizzical musings—he has employed words to question the experience of art and the operations of his own work. But today his style is becoming less verbal. "Now everybody is talking," he says, "and at the moment, I don't seem to want to say anything."

In 1966 Gordon ceased choreographing. "I didn't understand the need, the compulsion," he explains. But in 1971 he found himself "back in the business of making work." Right now, that business is booming. Recently, commissions from two ballet companies "fell

into my lap," as he puts it. American Ballet Theatre, currently in residence at the Metropolitan Opera House, has been performing his Field, Chair and Mountain across the country since December. Dance Theatre of Harlem will present the premiere of Informal Mix during its engagement at City Center in June. And this month David Gordon/Pick Up Co. appears at New York's Joyce Theater, with two new works on the bill.

Despite all this activity, Gordon remains unfazed. Day in and day out, he is immersed in the task at hand. "I don't think one makes rules about the way one works," he says. "One discovers that one has rules and, upon discovering them, attempts to break them." □