Culture Rover

the accumulation of “the sixties” in five easy dance steps.

If asked to name one art performance that sums up the 1960s counterculture, Culture Rover would choose Trisha Brown’s Accumulation, from 1971 (seen here in a brief excerpt at the beginning of Byron Woods’ video preview of the Trisha Brown Dance Company at Duke’s American Dance Festival).

Set to the song “Uncle John’s Band” by the ur-countercultural rock group the Grateful Dead, the piece typically features a female dancer who adds simple movements one to the next until they gather into a kind of balanced, natural rhythm: pared down, vernacular, and earthy.

The dancer steps out in front of the curtain, on the stage apron, as if to signal the informality of the performance. The music begins, a lilting acoustic guitar with maracas and clave sticks ambling along behind the melody. First, the dancer’s thumbs gesture like a hitchhiker’s in search of a ride. Then the hips sway and the dancer steps back and forward as if tangoing with the audience. One leg kicks up and down. The thumbs move again in small circles at the waist. The dancer inhales and reaches up skyward, drawing the hands in to the belly and up over the head in what resembles the outstretched end of a yogic sun salutation. Repeat.

Trisha Brown

The pace is easy-going, the body loose and relaxed. Limbs elastic, without the formal rigidity of classical ballet or even much other modern dance. The beauty of the piece is striking: it has a goofy yet profoundly moving quality of dawning illumination.

The dancer alludes to numerous Sixties roles in the brief six-minute performance. She is, first of all, female. I have come to believe that the counterculture was, despite its retrograde aspects, driven most of all by transformations in gender norms. The changing boundary between femininity and masculinity is key. The dancer is an Even Cowgirls Get the Blues adolescent girl setting out on the road in adventure. She is also a religious seeker seeking out the spiritual, meditating at sunrise. She is part dancer under the psychedelic strobe light flash, deep within herself among the ballroom crowd. She is also dancing in her bedroom alone, listening to a song emanate from her record player, imagining community through the vinyl grooves and electronic signals. She has discovered love. She is pleased, amazed, in the moment. She understands and inhabits her own body in a new way. She feels herself move through space: sweetly, sentient, grounded, in tune.

This performance encapsulates the Sixties counterculture because it is about an individual facing the universe: from the possibility of community with others to the discovery of the self to the perception of humanity’s place within larger, non-human realms. The dancer is not a revolutionary here, she has not mapped out an ideology. Instead, she achieves an openness and dexterity of mind, spirit, and body; she discovers a willingness to interact and transform and a desire to know and feel anew.

This consciousness, as it was called at the time, was the invisible vapor fueling the Sixties counterculture. It was more a feeling than an idea; it was a mood not a manifesto, an affective state not an ideological position (though of course these binaries were in continual dialectic interaction).

Trisha Brown’s Accumulation suggests how the Sixties counterculture exploded into being in the relationship of sensation to sensibility. As the dancer repeats her bodily movements, she adds new insights. She accumulates — ideas, awareness, experience, knowledge. Moving and then moving again, returning and reaching out into the dark theater, she establishes connections and then pulls them back into herself.

There were many distopian aspects to the Sixties counterculture, however the openness and discovery expressed in Accumulation presents the Sixties counterculture at its best.

Image: Trisha Brown Dance Company