Dancers are unaccountably nervous about acknowledging their history, let alone performing it.
Basing a whole evening on work that attacked the conventions of dance and dance production is courageous now, maybe even quixotic. Even Judson s chroniclers don t quite agree on who belonged to it or exactly when it functioned. The initial workshops and performances took place in New York at the Merce Cunningham studio and the Judson Memorial Church between 1961 and 1964. But Judson is a frame of mind that stretches from John Cage through the first Judson dancers and their subsequent exploits and on to attitudes about choreographing and performing right now. Just last Monday, for instance, Boston dancer Marjorie Morgan and three colleagues presented an evening of videos, performance, and discussion based on the structured improvisation work of Deborah Hay, who s still teaching, writing, and choreographing new dance in Austin.