American postmodernist dancer
Sally Gross (née Sarah Freiberg; August 3, 1933 – July 20, 2015) was an American postmodernist dancer.
Freiberg was a Lower East Side-born American dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance from her beginnings in the avant-garde NYC art world in the 1950s until her death. Later known as Sally Gross, she was a notable participant of the avant-garde dance group called the Judson Dance Theater during the 1960s. Gross died in Sag Harbor, New York on July 20, 2015, aged 81, from ovarian cancer.[1]
Background and career
Gross, the youngest child of Jewish immigrant parents from Poland, was born on the Lower East Side. She once created a dance based upon her experiences assisting in her father's pushcart vending business, speaking Yiddish, her first language. A graduate of Washington Irving High School and Brooklyn College, she continued to live and work in New York City throughout most of her life.[1]
She began her dance training at the Henry Street Settlement House, where innovative modern dance choreographer, composer and designer Alwin Nikolais was in residence by 1948, developing his abstract cross disciplinary performance style. Perhaps this experience inspired her lifelong search for diverse approaches to movement, from which she evolved her uniquely spare and personal performance works.[2] Her lifelong studies also included classes and workshops with the modern dancers Erick Hawkins, James Waring, Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin, in addition to ballet, classical Japanese dance, traditional Balinese dance, the neuro-muscular-skeletal re-education systems of Mabel Elsworth Todd, Lulu Sweigard and Charlotte Selver, yoga, and tai chi.[1][3]
Perhaps the first major art work Sally Gross appeared in was the iconic Beat Generation 1959 film by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy,[4] where she played the bishop's sister. She was one of the original participants in the choreography classes offered by musician Robert Dunn at Merce Cunningham's Studio starting in 1960, where he applied ideas from music composition, particularly the chance systems associated with John Cage, to dance composition. She continued to participate in Dunn's classes when they moved into the basement gym of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Those sessions led directly into the formation of what became known as the Judson Dance Theater Workshop, founded on rigorously democratic and egalitarian principles that, especially with its rejection of super-technical achievements, was shocking to the establishment dance world of its day but is now regarded as a pivotal cross-disciplinary movement that advanced expanded definitions and tools for dance in particular and performance in general.[3][5]
During the early 1960s, Gross performed in the company of Merle Marsicano, whose abstract choreography paralleled abstract expressionism then considered the avant-garde in the visual arts, and where she was likely introduced to the approaches to movement based on the ideokinesis system of Lulu Sweigard, as Marsicano had been her long-time assistant.[6]
By 1962 she began a lifetime of yearly performances of her own works in small loft theaters, galleries, churches, outdoor festivals, Merce Cunningham's studio and her own Westbeth studio, besides respected downtown art venues such as the DIA Center for the Arts, the Joyce Soho and Joyce Theater, and The Construction Company. Performing both as a soloist and with her company that usually consisted of women only, she carefully honed her works in collaborations with longtime company members including her daughters, Sidonia and Rachel, and later regulars Jamie Di Mare, Heather Lee, Tanja Meding and Gabriela Simon.[7] Another long-time collaborator was lighting designer Blu, whose work frequently garnered praise, for being "poetic" and "painterly." She also performed in works by Yvonne Rainer, Judith Dunn, Elaine Summers, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, among others.[1]
In addition to teaching dance technique, movement workshops, tai chi, improvisation and choreography classes in her studio, Gross taught at City College of New York for many years, at Fordham University and CUNY/Kingsborough College. She was honored with a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, a Harkness Foundation for Dance award, a 2000 Tanne Award and was a multiple year recipient of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust/Live Music or Dance Award.[5]
In 2009, Brooklyn College honored her with a Life Time Achievement Award. During guest artist visits and her semester long residency in 2012 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Interdisciplinary Arts Institute, she collaborated on two major films with Douglas Rosenberg. Gross continued to perform and create new works until shortly before her death at the age of 81.[1] Her archives will reside at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Dance styles and legacy
Sally Gross framed her dances in terms of autobiography. "All of my dance is autobiographical," she once said, "I don't think I've left any of my history out."[8] Dance historian Leslie Satin also documents that Gross began "One and Another," a 1983 solo created shortly after the death of her mother, by stating: "I always thought the time would come when I would have to say something…I wouldn’t know what to say, so I decided…to move."[9]
In a New York Times feature article by dance critic Gia Kourlas (February 29, 2004) titled "Vibrating To The Ideas Of Beckett," Ms. Gross said: "I don’t usually talk about the work, because to me the work is the work….There are so many people who have never seen my work, and it's O.K. with me….I’m not politic. I've been here for such a long time, and we’re still doing the work. That's all that really matters."[10]
On other occasions, Ms. Gross spoke of her interest in stillness and silence, titling one work premiered in 2007 as The Pleasure of Stillness, which documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles adopted as the title for his film about her, also completed in 2007.[2] Maysles said, "I was intrigued to see how she is affected by everyday events, movements and occurrences, which she incorporates in her work. At first sight I thought, ‘Where is the dance?’, but I came to admire the intensity and sensitivities that she and her dancers bring to her work. I learned that dance can also be found in stillness."
In describing her works, reviewers evoked such adjectives as simple, small-scale, workmanlike, blunt, wry, tender, delicate, elusive, fundamental, serene, mysterious, and intense unexpressed emotion. New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning hailed Sally Gross as "the most poetic of minimalist choreographers."[2] Dunning explained Gross "can indicate complex atmospheres and personal histories with the most minimal of brush strokes and the simplest of props."[11] In a 1988 review, Dunning further admired how Gross "distills powerful emotions and suggestions of social situations in small, delicate and utterly simple pieces that have the quality both of fully wrought masterworks and murmured anecdotes."[12] The Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt wrote: "Every moment in a work by Sally Gross appears to be immaculate, chosen with care," and in another review saw her work as: "Life’s wildness compressed into haiku."[5] Bruce Weber, obituary reporter for The New York Times, wrote: "Ms. Gross's work, built from the fundamentals of spare, precise movement and gesture and staged with a painter's eye for figures in space, was emblematic. Inspired, as she often said, by literature and art, and by details of her own autobiography, she translated those elements into elliptical, impressionistic tableaus."[1]
Her works often depended upon the layering of long series of details, built out over an extended rehearsal period as Gross and her company of dancers improvised upon a score supplied by Gross. Generally only known to the performers, its cues might sound like riddles if heard by the audience. When not referencing an existing literary text, her scores could take the form of poetic bits and pieces by Gross, be a list of body parts, prepositions, numbers or compass directions, or be determined by choices of a set piece or prop, such as a bench, ladder, rope, or roll of photographic paper, and the particulars of the performing space (for instance, more than once in her career she contained a dance within the narrow grey painted stairway between the two floors of her Westbeth studio). Then details of each weekly rehearsal were sifted through, and decisions agreed upon that eventually coalesced into the content of the performance. Jamie Di Mare, who worked with Ms. Gross almost thirty years as a dancer and later joined her as co-teacher at Corlears School, explained how rehearsals began with all walking in unison for a few minutes: "We leave the outside behind and find a peaceful place to focus on the little details….That way we form one unit and breathe together before we even start to rehearse." As a result, the dancers became so attuned to one another that it was not clear if, in performance, elements of improvisation remained.
Revered as a teacher of movement and meditation, she invoked walking and breathing as central elements of each class, the same discipline her company maintained in their warm-up rituals. Gross said in reference to why she began teaching a class largely attended by non-dancers, which continued to meet in her studio for forty years: "I had done lots of things I thought were really appropriate for people who were non-dancers but wanted to dance…I don’t think there’s any end to investigating oneself, because we are constantly changing….So I’m here to change with them."[1]
