Everybody’s Guide to Gus Solomons jr’s Dances for Alternative Spaces

I was flattered and intrigued when asked by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to participate in their scholar's program to explore their collections and write an essay about architecture and dance, since those are, respectively, my primary areas of training and practice. I have never been a good reader or a diligent researcher. I consider myself pragmatic and empirical but not scholarly. Almost all my knowledge is experiential and extrapolated from information I learn solving crossword puzzles and through miscellaneous listening. I'm infatuated with the precision of meaning that words and the rules of grammar-which I learned in fifth grade-make possible. So, I enjoy writing, and probably due to my problems with comprehension, I tend to write clearly. But my writing thus far has confined itself mainly to previewing and reviewing dance performance, the occasional dancer profile, and a lecture or two.

For me, the act of writing is like choreographing: figuring out how to arrange the parts (steps or words) to express exactly the sentiment I intend or to ask the questions I'm posing. It's consistent with my propensity for making all kinds of things, which I've been doing since age seven. Even if there are instructions, I learn by trial and error.

To quote Martha Graham in her 1957 film A Dancer's World: "the terror and the challenge" of engaging in scholarly research was—if not altogether irresistible—long overdue.

Subject

With a Bachelor of Architecture from MIT in 1961 and a career-long interest in staging dance in alternative spaces, I thought it might be interesting and informative for me to write about site-specific work, since that was always a particular choreographic interest of mine. An Internet search for "Dancing in Buildings" led me only to "Dancing Buildings," which included the Dancing House in Prague, a 1996 funhouse of a design by Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry, in which a stone tower cuddles up to a glass one, symbolizing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The Signature Towers, so-called Dancing Towers, in Dubai, designed by Zaha Hadid, is an unlikely skyscraper with three masses that undulate and interweave as they rise skyward, each from its own base. Also planned for Dubai is Italian architect David Chase's rotating, eighty-story building, in which the floors will rotate individually, giving the building a dynamic, constantly changing silhouette-dancing indeed.

Since the Jerome Robbins Dance Division is the place to look for dancers and dances, I decided to search for site-specific dance works. I began first searching for myself finding 176 items, including 139 moving image works as well as my own papers, donated to the library in 1994.

A keyword search in the Library's catalog using "site-specific" found 555 items, among which are site-specific art, installation, and performance. The more specific keyword "site-specific dance" found 124 items, including books, videocassettes, and DVDs. I later learned that the Dance Division actually uses a local subject "site-specific performance" in its cataloging. Using that subject, I found 85 items. Subsequently, I decided it might be interesting to find out what I could about my own site-specific dances in the library-their casts and collaborators, etc. My history of doing site work dates from 1968, shortly after I had to leave the Merce Cunningham Dance Company due to an injured back. But at thirty, injuries heal quickly, so by late that summer my spinal compression had abated; I could dance again. And I was invited to Boston, my hometown, to create a video-dance. I made City/Motion/Space/Game, which was both a dual-screen video and site-specific to boot. The Dance Division has a recording of this produced by Boston's WGBH-TV.

Site-Specific Performance

When my company and I began doing dances outside of theaters, I called them "environmental" dances. That is, they were performed in alternative kinds of locations that were not conventional concert dance venues. Not all those works were site-specific. Some of them could be described as site non-specific: that is, they could be adapted to various locations rather than requiring a single, specific place. Among the more recent site choreographers, these are among my favorites. Stephan Koplowitz, formerly based in New York City and now in California, is noted for extensive site works, but uses the term "site-adaptive" to describe his work, that is, pieces that can respond to various different kinds of spaces, using similar or identical movement materials, like his Grand Step Project (2004-ongoing), which was designed for any wide public staircase. Among the 59 items on Koplowitz to be found in the Library's catalog, I discovered a DVD recording of Koplowitz participating in a site-specific event at New York City's Grand Central Station. Other participants were the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, juggler Michael Moschen, highwire artist Philippe Petit, and Paul Thompson/Troop Three. A documentary on the creation and performance of Grand Central Dances is available for viewing at the Dance Division.

In addition, Koplowitz created a site-specific work for the reopening of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, videotaped in performance at the Lincoln Center Plaza of The New York Public Library, New York, N.Y., on October 8 and 9, 2001 .

Such site-adaptive pieces in my own catalog are PocketCard Process and AudiencePlay Process (1974), and Hits and Runs (1977), of which there are no photographic or video records extant. But unlike Koplowitz's large-scale pieces for casts of dozens or more, mine were mostly made for just the six to eight dancers in my own company.

Site-dance and filmmaker Noemie Lafrance's work turns her sites into settings for cinematic narratives. Noir (2004) took place in a parking garage on New York's Lower East Side. The audience sat in parked cars, listening to the sound track on the car radio, as what could be a gangster film from the 1940s unfolded before them in the building. High society clashed with mobsters, desperate chases, bodies stashed in trunks, secrets and mystery galore. A documentary of this work, with commentary by Lafrance is in the Dance Division's moving image archive.

San Franciscan Joanna Haigood, with her Zaccho Dance Theater, has since 1980 been investigating site-adaptive and aerial dance that blend culture with movement. Her 1993 Butterfly Dreams in collaboration with sculptor Cho Mu was a walk-through installation that explored evolution, using the stages of a butterfly as metaphor. It was performed at Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts, Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden in Minnesota, and New York's Roosevelt Island in the East River, where I saw it. An author search shows that the Library has seven items on Haigood, including a public program at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in which Ms. Haigood discusses this work. Other participants in this program included Meredith Monk and Elizabeth Streb.

Another significant creator of site-specific works is Marilyn Wood. The Dance Division did an extensive Oral History interview with her in which she discusses creating works in urban plazas, including the Seagram Building in New York City.

New York City is a magnet for site-specific performances including three videorecordings for works created at Wave Hill in the Bronx by Sara Pearson/Patrik Widrig, Marta Renzi, and Jean-Pierre Perreault.

Other notable creators, among many, who have investigated site-adaptive and -specific work include the Japanese Butoh company, Sankai Juku, whose Shiloba has its dancers hanging upside down from building facades. (In 1985, the piece resulted in the death of founding member Yoshiyuki Takada, when his rope broke.) A keyword search using "Sankai Juku shows the Dance Division has 95 items concerning this company.

Elizabeth Streb: her company invaded various sites in London with her Action Mechanics prior to the 2012 Summer Olympics. The Dance Division has 151 items in its catalog relating to this artist; this includes 64 videorecordings.

And the forerunner to all of these, Trisha Brown's 1970, self-explanatory Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. The Dance Division has over 500 items for Brown including a videorecording of this work.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division

Using the extensive resources of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, I was able to locate a quantity of factual details about my own site-specific dances-casts and program information, contracts and letters of agreement, budgets, reviews, etc.-in my own collection. In 1994, to spare some of my papers from destruction or loss due to apartment purging, I had donated several file boxes full of memorabilia to the Dance Division. Processed by the Library, my materials had been organized into sixteen boxes of file folders.

Of course, using my own work as the subject of my research made my task simpler, because I'm familiar with the dances I've made, but trickier, in separating the actual materials in the collection from my recollections. I discovered that much of what was in the folders triggered memories that led me deeper into the processes and rationales of the construction of the dances. I was surprised at how flawed my memory was about much of my own creative output

For example, the program notes for Brilll-o (1973) reminded me that as much as I swore allegiance to "movement as the medium"-type abstraction, I had given the sections of this piece titles that implied narrative: "Act I, Scene 1-Party Encounter, Sunday Evening," "Scene 3-Ages Later in the Day, Next Door," "Act II, Scene 3-Brother, Blacksheep," "Scene 5-Late Friday Night Freaks," Act III, Scene 1-Flash. Back, etc." These subtitles sprang from my enjoyment of wordplay, as well as my propensity for commenting on other conventional structures, in this case, a three-act theatrical drama.

The Research

I used the online guide to my company's records and papers, call number (S)*MGZMD 214, a list of the files in the sixteen boxes of material, which is filed in alphabetical, not chronological, order. My site-specific dances span the years 1968 to 2007. This from my own memory, they are, chronologically:

1. City/Motion/Space/Game for WGBH-TV, Boston, MA, 1968
2. Quad—during a multi-day workshop at UCLA 1970
3. Lobby Event #1 (4-day) at M.I.T. Bldg. VII, Cambridge, MA 5/1972
4. Lobby Event #2 (5-day) (Paul Earls)*, MIT Bldg. VII, 11/1972
5. Lobby Event #3 (3-day) at Loeb Student Center lobby, NYU, 12/1972
6. Masse in Trinity Church sanctuary, NYC 1972
7. Decimal Banana in New School for Social Research Garden, 1973
8. Ad Hoc Transit in the atrium of CalArts, Valencia, CA 10/1976
9. Gallery Event #1 in CalArts atrium, Valencia, CA 11/1976
10. Hits and Runs on various streets and plazas in downtown NYC 1977
11. Steps #1 at the New Jersey State Museum Plaza, Trenton, 7/1980
12. Chryptych at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, NYC, 1986
13. Red Squalls on the North Plaza, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, 8/1993
14. Red Squalls II on the North Plaza, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, 8/1997
15. CROWD—Rotch Architecture Library at MIT, 2002
16. Random Funny Walks-South Plaza, L. C. Out of Doors, 8/2000

The boxes in the archive contain information on paper, but much of the work was made in the days before video recording was routine, and some of the recordings that were made were in obsolete formats that have not survived time, so the details of the movement are lost, except for some cursory notes and notations on steno pads and scraps of paper, which will be part of my next donation to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Perhaps my-or someone's-future research at the Library.

I searched through several of the sixteen boxes in the collection for information that might be relevant to the site pieces above. In Box 8, for instance, folder 1 is labeled "1974-76" with no further information about what's in it. Folder 5 in that box is "Performances 69-86," folder 6 is "Associated concerts, '73," and folder 12 is "Press, '76-77." Box 9 contains several files of information sheets from performances The Solomons Company/Dance did while working with the group management firm Theatre Arts Concepts, sheets listing logistical information about the engagements.

In Box 10, File 13 is labeled "Sidewalk Dance Company"-a commission-"Solomons Company, 1975-85," and programs, "'91-94." The boxes are stored off site, which meant requesting them from the library's storage facilities in New Jersey, from where they would usually arrive the next day.

My donation also included videos in various, now-obsolete formats. My videos at that time were copied onto then current formats which, in the passage of time, were no longer stable. Many of the videotapes I thought I might want to watch were labeled in the catalog as "Preservation," meaning they were in the process of being transferred from U-matic formats to digital. But the staff assured me that it would be possible to view at least some of them in their present state.

Box 8, folder 1 contained only copies of dance audits I had written for the New York State Council on the Arts from 1974-1976-no help in my search for site-specific dances. And Box 8, folder 6 held the contract and financial details pertaining to the Solomons Company/Dance's 1973 performances at American Theater Lab (later to become Dance Theater Workshop and now New York Live Arts.) ATL had paid a commissioning fee of $200 total: $100 for choreography; $75 for dancers' fees, and $25 for production expenses. The rental fee for the space was $25 per evening.

The program for that season consisted of Brilll-o, a dance in three acts, two intermissions, performed by Santa Aloi, Ruedi Brack, Laura Brittain, Randall Faxon, Peter Woodin, and me, with original music by Paul Earls, lighting by Barry Suttin, and décor by Eva Tsug (the pseudonym I used as costume and set designer for my early dances). The section titles mostly represented wordplay, inspired by fleeting images suggested by motion or juxtapositions, since the piece comprised pure movement. In the folder are copies of the program notes.

The On-Site Dances

1. City/Motion/Space/Game

In August of 1968, producer Rick Hauserasked me if I'd like to make a dance piece for video. I leaped at the opportunity, because I was curious to see how three-dimensional dance, hot in McLuhan's terms, could be effectively translated to cool, two-dimensional television. Working with composer John Morris, writer Mary Feldhaus-Weber, and director Peter Downey, I was allowed complete creative freedom by Hauser, who enabled my vision, however impractical some elements of it may have been at the state of the art of TV back then.

The element so vital to dance performance is space, area: side to side, near and far, which live stage performance allows. The watchers' eyes must scan the space; they cannot take in the whole picture in one eyeful, as they can with the relatively minuscule TV screen. So, I decided that the piece should be broadcast simultaneously on two screens, which meant two channels. WGBH-TV had both a VHF and a UHF channel, so that would be possible. It turned out that synchronizing the broadcasts would not prove so simple as pushing two buttons at the same time.

I wanted the dancing to occur in four different types of city spaces-hard-edged urban geometric, planned amorphous urban, randomly amorphous, and refined, dance-friendly. The spaces chosen were, respectively, the Prudential Center, the Boston Public Garden, a junkyard, and the TV studio. My recorded narration, culled from hours of recording and editing by Feldhaus-Weber, provides an audio backdrop to the movement.

I describe my philosophy of how I watch dance and suggest how one might best view the piece. I suggest that you "see what you are interested in looking at at any given moment" and not feel you are missing what you do not see. The movement alternates between more pedestrian activity and dance phrases outdoors, and highly technical dance vocabulary in the studio. The viewers' eyes must scan between the TV sets, whether side by side or stacked, to experience the tapestry of overlapping images.

In 1968, color TV cameras resembled small sports cars in size and weight, so the logistics of on-location shooting were complex. In order to create visual transformations-having my sweatshirt change color in mid-run, for example-both my path through the plaza and the amount of sunshine had to match in each take, so the transformation would look seamless. You couldn't digitally manipulate, as you can nowadays. In the junkyard, where the unwieldy TV cameras dared not go, we took a series of still photos and animated them together like cartoon animation to simulate movement.

I designed editing tricks, like having every other inch of tape removed to resemble a stop-motion version of a sequence that you had just seen whole. But what I did not realize was that unlike audiotape, with which you could literally cut and splice, videotape had to be electronically, not physically, edited. Technicians used to doing, say, three edits in a half-hour show were faced with over seventy-five edits in this twenty-two minute show. I heard no grumbling; producer Hauser made it happen. The overtime costs were, I hope, justified by the show's success and its winning an award from National Educational Television (now PBS) for outstanding achievement.

Watching the copy of the video at the library brought back a flood of memories of waiting for the clouds to roll by between takes at the Prudential Center, so the light would match in different takes; of my falling into the duck pond during one take in the Boston Public Gardens; of having to convince the cameramen that it was okay, if they were seen on camera during the section in the TV studio, because the rules of the game in that section required that both cameras stay on me and the director had to switch cameras whenever I crossed into a different floor area taped on the floor, whatever else was going on. The Dance Divison has a DVD version of this two-part television program.

2. Quad

This was a piece I had made in 1970 for a student workshop at UCLA, where in 1964 I had taught my first four-week, daily technique summer course. The piece was created in two days and performed in an outdoor courtyard at the rear of the dance building, watched by the audience from a balcony above. Obviously, the movement was not complex, but the large number of participants made more complex spatial patterns possible.

3, 4. MIT Lobby Events

Box 14, Folder 1, contains correspondence concerning 1972 performances by Solomons Company/Dance in the atrium lobby of Building VII on the Massachusetts Avenue side of the main building of MIT, my alma mater, in Cambridge, MA. Building VII, coincidentally, was where the Architecture Department's drafting rooms were located, on the fourth floor, where I had toiled for five-plus years earning my degree.

As one of their projects, the architects that year had designed and constructed a series of platforms at various heights within the seventy-foot high rotunda, connected by stairways and bridges and accessible from various of the three tiers of balconies that surrounded the rotunda. They were intended for people to sit and study, eat lunch, people-watch, and just hang out.

We did two iterations of the project, one in May-a three-day event-and another of four days, in late November:, November 28 and 29 and December 1 at noon and November 30 at 5 p.m.

The six Solomons Company/Dance members, clad in white workmen's coveralls, explored the space up, down, and across, subverting its customary usage and forcing people to experience the space differently. The dancers interacted with the lunch-eating, physics-studying users of the space, climbing around, beside, over, and under them, making them passive participants in the action.

During the four-day version, faculty members, including renowned photographer Minor White, and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker recorded the noontime episodes. Then, on the penultimate day, at five in the evening, when the pedestrian flow was much heavier, a more formal installment occurred on a stage set up on the lobby floor, when the pedestrian flow was much heavier. On a screen behind the live dancing played filmed clips and photos of the week's prior episodes, while the dancers, now in sleek dance attire, performed a concertized version of the movement themes they'd been manipulating all week on the midair structures.

The viewers seemed puzzled and amused by the choreographic antics. The faculty, architects, and our hosts were pleased and excited to see their installation become an unexpected performance venue.

5. Lobby Event, NYU Loeb Student Center

This event, done in November of 1972, scattered the dancers throughout the public circulation spaces on the main floor of the center. The building was located on the corner of Laguardia Place and Washington Square South; NYU's Kimmel Student Center and Skirball Auditorium has now replaced it on the site. On the heels of the MIT events, the movement activities and dance phrases wove through the public areas on the main floor, catching the attention-or not-of the students passing through en route to their classes or from lunch. For them, it was unexpected but not anomalous, its being New York.

6. Masse

In Box 8, Folder 7, I hit more pay dirt with letters of agreement for the performances of Masse, commissioned for something called Jesus Week in 1972. It was performed in the sanctuaries of Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street on April 25 at 5:15p.m., April 26 at 12:45p.m., and again on May 3 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the evening. Since there was no video or film made of this piece, seeing the letter of agreement in the file reminded me that there had been performances at both Trinity Church and at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the latter of which I had forgotten.

The company's fee was $1,000. Trinity Church organist, Larry King, played an improvisational score on the big pipe organs in both churches to accompany the dance. The company dancers at that time were Santa Aloi, Laura Brittain, Randall Faxon, Dianne McIntyre, Ruedi Brack, Ernie Pysher, and me.

Trinity Episcopal Church is a beautiful Gothic revival by Richard Upjohn, finished in 1846. I don't recall any of the specific movement we did, but the concept was to utilize the entire sanctuary as our dance floor, starting down the center aisle, spilling into the side aisles, and finishing at the altar. The intention was to permeate the space like a kinetic cloud. I have no recollection of the subsequent performance at St. John the Divine, the world's largest cathedral, but I'm sure the six of us dancers were less pervasive of the spatial volume than we had been downtown.

Box 9 contains programs of concerts I attended, either as audience or auditor for New York State Council on the Arts.

Box 10 has fact sheets from the company's management in 1974, Directional Concepts, an early group management organization for modern dancers. There's a financial balance sheet for each of the company's engagements, which were more numerous than I recalled.

7. Decimal Banana

During a summer residency at California State University at Long Beach in July 1973, I had made a dance for the students, which I named Decimal Plum (Decimal, because the structure of the dance had been based on numerical progressions, and Plum, because the costumes were purple). The following fall, for the annual ChoreoConcerts series, in which I participated for several years, I decided to do my dance in the interior garden of the venue. The concerts were held in auditorium of the New School for Social Research and produced by Laura Forman. Conceptually, the dance had nothing to do with Decimal Plum, except that it was the next dance I made and the costumes were yellow.

The dance comprised phrases and activities that suited the terrain of the enclosed garden. It was in no way narrative but rather sculptural, like a kinetic installation, which lasted for ten or fifteen minutes, before the audience entered the theater for the rest of the show. Like much of my work at that time, Decimal Banana aimed to stretch the conventions of concert dance by moving it out of the theater proper and exhibiting movement as its own message in a different kind of presentation space-a gallery-as had the dances of the 1960's Judson Dance Theater and those of my mentor and primary choreographic influence Merce Cunningham.

[aside] It was at a previous installment of the ChoreoConcert series in 1968 that I had devised "Two Reeler." Since I had to be out of town on the performance date, I created two audiotapes to be played simultaneously from opposite sides of the stage. One audio track contained musical accompaniment, and the other gave the audience instructions that were things they might do while watching a real dance-press you feet into the floor; lean forward; sway from side to side in rhythm; etc.

8, 9. Ad Hoc Transit and Gallery Event #1

I could locate no information about these two pieces in the Dance Division holdings. They were both made while I was on the faculty of California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) from 1976-78. But they recalled the MIT lobby events, although they were less interactive with viewers. The CalArts building had a central "square" that was an architectural attempt to knit the sprawling main building, which was mostly a web of long, desolate hallways, to the acting, dance, painting and sculpture studios. Inside the large rooms light, color, and activity buzzed, but oh, those endless corridors! Company members at that time were Ruedi Brack, Donald Byrd, Katherine Gallagher, Jack Gates, Nanna Nilson, Judith Ren-Lay, Carl Thomsen, and our production manager Ruis Woertendyke. A special recording sessions was made of Ad Hoc Transit at American Theatre Laboratory, in February 1977.

10. Hits and Runs

In Box 13, folder 10, is a trove of documentation about the Solomons Company/ Dance's Marymount Manhattan College Summer Residency in 1977, which focused on dancing onsite, in locations not intended for performance: city sidewalks and building plazas. The four-week schedule contains technique classes and workshops, taught by me and company members to students who could earn academic credit for the course.

Hits and Runs, as the roving performance was titled, would invade a plaza and perform a series of movement tasks, then move on to the next space, before the security squad had mobilized to eject us. Back then, no one thought of securing permission or permits; we were a guerrilla band of roving Terpsichoreans, hitting and running.

There's also a small sheet of paper with the movement sequence for our episode in Abingdon Square on July 16 neatly typed out, as follows:

Company Students

Audience Assault Street Walk
Hitch Runs
Warm-up & Opening Run Wall Poses
(as is, then in unison, counting aloud) (singly, then spread out)
Pivot Game 'A' Pivot Game 'B'
11s & 12s
Unison Phrase Unison Phrase
(all are turning; whistle blows; all run to fence, sit, and applaud)

Box 13 also contains copies of student evaluations, which I'm happy to say were quite positive, and correspondence with the administration over a delay in our payment until final grades had been submitted—and vice versa. They wanted grades before paying the company, and we wanted payment before submitting grades. The situation was finally resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Hits and Runs was a further development of two action structures I had made in October of 1974, ShufflePlay Process and AudiencePlay Process, which both premiered at Alfred University in New York State, during the company's engagement there.

At the start of each performance of Shuffleplay Process, the dancers were dealt playing cards, which each contained four actions they were to perform with each other and/or on audience members. Instructions were gender specific (M and W) and included tasks like:

M move 5 people W hug 1 M carry 2 W kick in circle
2 jump phrase 1 count 9 3 count 11 4 dervish turn
archaic set bronco zigzag run lie for 10 seconds
leap in circle locomote leap across 3 falls

The numbers under the M (Man) or W (Woman) indicate how many times they must repeat the actions on their card. Some of the actions were pre-choreographed, so all the dancers did the identical "jump phrase" or "archaic set" or "bronco," whenever it came up, so the audience would see certain dance-like actions rippling through the cast at different times-or unpredictably in unison, and they were to use their creative imaginations to fulfill the non-dance tasks differently each time. This piece could be performed with or without a captive audience, indoors or out.

AudiencePlay Process involved audience participation, and was done in non-theater settings. Here, the cards instructed such things as:

CHAIN KNOT-people join hands in a circle and twist into a tight knot.
3-WAY MIRROR-face 3 people; do continuous poses as they mirror you.
FOLLOW LEADER-(mainly locomotive)
CONTACT ADAGIO—3 people maintain hold of a different one of your body parts throughout your phrase.
ADD-A-PHRASE-teach a simple phrase, 1 movement at a time: do #1, they do #1; do #2, they do #1+2; do #3, they do #1+2+3, etc. up to 5 moves, then all do whole phrase 5 times.

[aside] The GUT STOMP LOTTERY kill, which premiered in 1972 at the Cubiculo-an intimate black box theater in the west 50s-was not site-specific but did involve indeterminacy. The dancers onstage were dealt hands of playing cards with their action and phrases, printed on them, one per card. As in a card game, they could arrange the cards in any order to determine their own sequence to do them. Hence their relationships to the other dancers were unpredictable in each performance, forcing them to be keenly alert to their colleagues, moment to moment.

And in a similar spirit of indeterminacy, live radios on the game table accompanied the dance, tuned either to static between stations or to random music. Also, in another part of the stage, downstage right as I recall, were also piles of cards with instructions for dancers to produce vocal sounds: counting, listing items in various categories etc., to add to the aural stimuli for audience to relate to onstage action.

As I was a devotee of formalism, the content of my dances assiduously avoided overt emotionality or narrative. "The message is the medium," wrote the provocative Canadian philosopher of communication theory Marshall MacLuhan, and like that of my chief esthetic influence Merce Cunningham, my medium was movement. Unlike Cunningham, however, my instincts for invention or editing fell far short of his genius. Most of my dances were perceived as interesting intellectual conceptions, but tended to perplex audiences, rather than move them or touch them.

Our press reviews were often in the vein of this one written by Julinda Lewis in 1979: "All the dances are abstract, having no storyline, no dramatic intent other than that evoked by the movement itself. The dancing has a linear quality geometric and distant, resulting in a flung-apart and often humorous collection of movement that as a whole is, unfortunately, not always as interesting as the separate parts."

11. Steps #1

In the spring of 1980, I had made NŌZ, a punk musical, which seemed like an artistic necessity at the time. It premiered at the Riverside Dance Festival at Riverside Church in New York City. In the 1970s, my dances had alternated between the purely formal: Decimal Banana (1973), one of my site-specific exercises, cat (1973), a solo made during a residency at York University in Toronto, Steady Work (1975), danced by the company in silence, reinforced by periodic interludes of deafening sound, Statements of Nameless Root, I and II (1975, 1976), the first, a solo in six short sections and the second, a company piece for six dancers, set to a score I "composed" from tape recorder feedback.

And the more emotionally evocative: Yesterday (1973), set to poems by Ethan Ayer; Brilll-o (1973) to commissioned music by Paul Earls, the sections of which were meant to have narrative implications; Bone-Jam (1977), in which the dancers shed clothing with each successive section from trench coats to skivvies; Signals (1978), a dialog between me and composer Mio Morales, who played his electric guitar live, onstage; and make me no boxes to out me in… (1979), a company work, featuring and in tribute to Judith Ren-Lay, one of my most talented and loyal dancers.

After NŌZ's immersion into punk style and my having the dancers sing original lyrics, I needed a palate cleanser. So as an antidote, I went back to basics: walking in geometric spatial patterns to rhythmic pulses. That was the beginning of a decade-plus series of "Steps" dances. This, the first of them, I made specifically to be performed in sneakers and sweatshirts on a plaza in front of New Jersey's capitol, as part of a summer series of public entertainments. Steps #1 had live percussion accompaniment.

The last of the Steps series, Steps #14: Are You Going With Me?, was created for dance students at Hunter College in 1989. It took its subtitle from the Pat Metheny music that furnished its musical pulse. But only Steps #1 could be called site-nonspecific or site-adaptive, as it was made on paper, rehearsed in a studio, and could have been staged in any open outdoor space.

12. Chryptych

This is a 1986 dance that could be called site-specific, because it was designed to use the entire sanctuary of St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, from the balcony loft to the seating risers at the sides of the room to the front vestibule. I seated the audience on the altar end, if not the first, then one of the first times the church had been set up that way for a dance concert.

Since the building is a precious landmark, there was a great deal of discussion with the Buildings Department prior to opening because, according to them, the balcony was not sanctioned for dancing, only walking. We had to demonstrate to them that the opening section, to be "danced" up there, contained no jumping or other impact moves that might compromise the structure or exceed the load limit.

My intention in creating the dance was to permeate the entire interior of the sanctuary with movement and to achieve all possible combinations of dancers-solos, duets, trios, quartets, etc.-and partnerships between and among them. A cast of ten-six company members and four guest dancers-allowed for a multitude of possibilities and required some simultaneity of groupings to achieve the objective. The title Chryptych referenced the religious function of the building and also, cryptically, the nondisclosure of my intention to achieve that full complement of combinations-especially since I was loath to subject that objective to too close scrutiny. This is the only site-specific dance I made for a paying audience.

13, 14. Red Squalls and Red Squalls II

In several summers past, Solomons Company/Dance had participated in the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, dancing on a stage set up on the plaza adjacent to the fountain, since renamed the Josie Robertson Plaza. In 1993, Jenneth Webster, the festival's producer, commissioned the company for a site-specific dance for the North Plaza, around the reflecting pool. This seemed an apt location, because its stony, urban character was particularly unforgiving, mitigated only by amorphous Henry Moore sculpture in the reflecting pool and, near the entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on the west side, the Alexander Calder stabile.

Before the 2012 renovation of Lincoln Center by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which softened the aspect of the surfaces in the space with a grove of trees and a tilted lawn, the façades of Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the Lincoln Center Theaters framed the plaza on three sides, and the north side wall had a staircase at its eastern corner, leading up to an elevated plaza bridging Sixty-fifth Street in front of the Juilliard School.

Architect Scott De Vere and I had been collaborating on concert dance installations since 1988, and our mutual understanding that architecture was articulated by the flow of traffic through it made this an ideal project for us to tackle together. Toby Twining had been my musical collaborator since 1988 as well. What fused our connection was the desire to have both sound and movement emanating from human bodies without the intervention of hardware-musical instruments.

Twining had composed a cappellascores for my 1990 Men's Piece, as well as Site Line (1989) and Opus Pocus (1991), both of which featured installations by De Vere. Unfortunately, our second performance that day was rained out, and Twining's score couldn't be heard properly, due to technical difficulties with the sound system. That project was the last of our collaborations. Still, the installation-a 150 foot "wall," made of translucent mesh fabric attached to ten-foot high poles, manipulated by a dozen movers-transformed the space with color and motion that framed the dancing by six company members.

For the second iteration of the piece, commissioned in 1997, the collaborators joining Solomons Company/Dance and architect De Vere, were musician Walter Thompson, and fabric technologist Stephanie Siepmann, who designed and fabricated the costumes with her three-dimensionally engineered fabrics that added additional texture and shape to the dance movement. This time, the sound was acoustic with the musicians scattered through the space after being escorted into the space with the fabric wall.

In this iteration, there was a counterpoint between different configurations of the fabric wall into a series of bowties, a rectangular prism, and the actions of the dancers whose movement texture and density varied, as they traversed U-shape on the north, east, and south sides of the reflecting pool. They alternated between doing simultaneous solos, warping the white, three-dimensional fabric of their costumes into bizarre silhouettes, and clumping together in tight group formations, which turned them into asymmetric masses echoing the Henry Moore sculpture in the pool.

The musicians-brass and percussion-responded to the gestural language, "sound painting," invented and developed by the composer/conductor Walter Thompson, which can determine his choice of pitch, volume, and timing, of their improvisation. Between passages of playing, the musicians relocated to various assigned spots on the plaza, adding an additional layer of pedestrian movement to the dancing. The 1997 version was by far the more successful in transforming the plaza. A review of this performance can be found in Red Squalls (Choreographic work : Solomons) [clippings], call number *MGZR.

15. CROWD

In 2005, Thomas De France, then a professor of dance in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT, invited me to do a month-long residency there with the MIT Dance Theater Ensemble, which he was directing. The residency consisted of four weekend visits, Friday to Sunday, as the students-double and triple majoring, as many of them were-only had time to meet then. Since their attendance couldn't be consistent, prior planning on my part was essential.

Recalling the lobby events I had done with my company at MIT in 1972, I decided to make a site-specific piece for the multileveled Rotch Architecture Library with its many nooks and crannies, where the roving audience, moving from top to bottom, could make surprise discoveries of small movement tasks happening throughout the space and culminating in the reading room/lounge.

Each week in the few hours we had on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, I would explore materials with those present, and imagine how it could be arranged in the multilevel library. I had my days free to imagine how to arrange the materials. One consistent thing about MIT students is their enormous intelligence. So, each time I'd return, the ones I'd seen the previous week had brought their cast mates up to speed on the material. They had learned and mastered it, and we could quickly get on the same page.

The site-specific performance happened at the culmination of the residency, and the audience seemed as mystified and fascinated by the ambulatory dance as they'd been thirty years before by the shenanigans in the rotunda. The more things change. Later, I restaged the dance for proscenium stage to do in their December concert; that, the audience seemed to understand.

Of course, since neither CROWD nor Random Funny Walks were part of my 1994 donation, the only information in the Dance Division about them will be these personal recollections and I include them to complete the research into the list of my site-specific works.

16. Random Funny Walks (2007)

In 2007, in celebration of Jenneth Webster's twenty-fifth and final season of producing Lincoln Center Out of Doors, I was invited to create another site-specific dance to share a program with Yoshiko Chuma, Merian Soto, and Elaine Summers on the South Plaza of the complex, adjacent to Damrosch Park. The piece was conceived to take place among the audience, who would be sitting on the grid of stone benches, arranged for leisurely reading, chatting, lunching, or killing time between appointments.

Working closely with the layout of the plaza's geometry, I designed it to fill the space with movement to be seen from all angles. The music was a selection of jazz-rock songs, and the cast was made up of students of mine at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts: Bryan Campbell, Andrew Griffin, Silas Riener, Saeed Siamak, Sydney Skybetter, and Nick Strafaccia.

We were scheduled to perform at 6:10 and 7:10 p.m. on August 23. But when we arrived for our technical run-through, we were told that the audience was not going to be allowed to sit on the benches for reasons of "crowd control," and the dance would have to be done on the people-free space, which rendered it virtually pointless. In retrospect, I perhaps should have had the fortitude to simply refuse to perform the dance, because the conditions were not as promised. But I was loath to deprive my dancers of the fruits of their labor, so they did the first of two scheduled performances. After which, I prevailed upon the security to allow "selected" audience members to occupy the benches for the second showing.

The final piece, done only at the end of the second show, when the sun had set, was by Elaine Summers; it involved projections on balloons suspended in the space. Fortunately, the reviewer form the New York Times stayed for both runs in order to see that piece and noted in her review that Random Funny Walks made more sense with people on the benches. Altogether, that experience was less than artistically fulfilling

Conclusion

Coming to the end of the half-year process of researching and writing this essay, I am no longer intimidated by the mysteries of accessing and using materials in the Library's comprehensive Dance Division. In addition, my curiosity has been piqued to undertake more research in future, perhaps, into what this current search has only begun exploring. Yes, the meanings of the letter-number identifications of documents and videos still remain mysterious to me. While the numbering (classification) systems are arbitrary, they do bring similar or related materials together. I know that by going to the public library section that includes the 720s, I can find books on architecture. And, knowing that the Dance Division has several generic call numbers (*MGZR for clippings, *MGZA for periodicals) helps me identify the kind of materials I was finding in my catalog searches. At least now their connection to actual materials is actually comprehensible to me.

Revisiting my early work has been edifying, in light of the new insights I've acquired over the years of teaching and seeing vast quantities of choreography. My understanding of the mechanics of the dance making craft have been sharpened by having to articulate to my students what makes work engaging, whatever its aesthetic point of view may be. Watching my own earlier work corroborates the validity of my evolved notions about what makes better work. I wish I'd had a mentor with those insights back then to help me edit and refine and ask better questions about my own dances.

Site-specific, site-nonspecific, and site-adaptive work encompasses a spectrum of dance far too broad to cover in a single stroke. After a choreographer's initial choice to use an alternative location, artistic vision, aesthetic choices, logistical decisions, and more inform the resulting product and its expressive impact. Limiting my investigation primarily to my own work has afforded me first, a comprehensible chunk of information to probe and second, a way of reviewing my own artistic choices and decisions in a productive way.

What inspired me to locate dancing in the midst of the public in the first place was a desire to make it unavoidable, since it was largely incomprehensible to them anyway. All my site-specific dances except Chryptych have been free and open to the public, because in the early '70s, the general public was largely unaware even of the existence of concert dance, let alone what it comprised. For most civilians in those days, social dancing, folk dance, and Broadway shows-West Side Story and the Rockettes-was all they knew of the art form.

Being one of the spawn of the experimental Judson Dance Theater-which in fact compromised its own iconoclasm by labeling itself "Theater"-I was all for deconstructing form and structure, to get at the quintessence of dancing; what could be eliminated from modern dance as we knew it and still be dance—stage, music, costumes, story, emotion. But I was unwilling to relinquish skilled technical movement in the process, as most of the Judsonites had by favoring pedestrian activity. I thought of site-specific and site-nonspecific dances as valuable adjuncts to the dances made for the stage; to me, they were all interesting to try.

Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

1. Graham, Martha, no. 647, Library call number *MGZEA
2. Solomons, Gus, no. 9, Library call number *MGZEA
3. Stephan Koplowitz and Company, no. 4, Library call number *MGZEA
4. Wood, Marilyn, no. 3, Library call number *MGZEA
5. Sankai Juku (Company), no. 3, Library call number *MGZEA
6. Streb, Elizabeth, no. 8, Library call number *MGZEA
7. Gus Solomons Papers and the Gus Solomons Company/Dance Records, Box 8, folder 6, Libarary call number *MGZMD 214
8. Gus Solomons Papers and the Gus Solomons Company/Dance Records, Box 13, folder 10, Libarary call number *MGZMD 214
9. Photographs by Lois Greenfield
10. Photographs by Lois Greenfield
11. Photographs by Lois Greenfield
12. Photographs by Lois Greenfield
13. Gus Solomons Papers and the Gus Solomons Company/Dance Records, Box 13, folder 10, Library call number *MGZMD 214
15. Solomons, Gus [clippings], Library call number *MGZR

Gus Solomons jr

After getting a bachelor of Architecture at MIT, dancing with Martha Graham, Donald McKayle, Pearl Lang, and Merce Cunningham, and founding and directing two companies, Solomons Company/Dance (1969-94) and PARADIGM (1996-2011), Gus Solomons Jr. continues to perform as a guest dancer in various projects, including  Black Mountain Songs at BAM Harvey and Isaac Mizrahi's Peter and the Wolf at Guggenheim Works & Process. He also reviews dance, mentors choreographers, and acts.