The Theatre of Life: Jill Johnston

 

Jill Johnston, c. 1970    

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Edited by Clare Croft

Duke University Press, 2024

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, 

and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a social/sexual/political sea change.   

By the end of the 1950s, modern dance – composed of meaningful gestures, arranged in dramatic plots, and set to classical music, was at the gates of the graveyard. The gestural vocabulary was exhausted, and in Johnston’s view, all that was left was movement “transformed (malformed) by artful exaggeration.”  According to Johnston the revolt actually began a few blocks west of Judson, at Merce Cunningham’s studio where Robert Dunn was teaching choreography to a new group of creators.  Rather than using movement to represent states of being, they were exploring movement itself—rather than miming emotion, embodying locomotion.

Dunn’s students needed a place to show their work, and Judson Church had a huge auditorium with a floor suitable for dancing.  And so the “Judson School” was born.  In 1962 and ‘63, it was an open laboratory for choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Steve Paxton, Judith Dunn, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay.  They showed dances – e.g. Rainer’s “The Mind is a Muscle” – composed not of gestures but fragments of movement, repeated at various angles, simultaneously and sequentially by multiple performers who did not engage the audience with their twinkling eyes, but rather left witnesses to find their own points of interest in a superficially tedious continuum.  This was choreography intended to be inaccessible to the jaded eye – blocking avenues of expectation in order to open up new ways of moving and seeing. It didn’t need to be turned out, sucked in, or stylized.  It could be walking, or even sitting still.  Nearly all of it was ephemeral, but it had its effect.  Eyes were opened, and we were ushered into what Johnston calls the “theatre of life.” 

There, she was a superstar.  Her greatest hit was a spontaneous protest in 1970 at a party in  the Hamptons, a gathering of feminists and journalists gathered to listen to Betty Friedan, who  irked Johnston by refusing to include lesbians in her feminist agenda.  So while Friedan addressed the guests, Johnson stripped to the waist and swam topless in the pool. Instantly she became the center of attention.   Was she drunk? Yes.  Was this a protest?  Yes.  Were you showing off? Yes.  Are you a radical lesbian?  Yes. Did someone put you up to it? No. 

This event she relates with truly Joycean relish.  Jill Johnston’s writing is as fresh today as it was when she splashed it onto the page, showing us the process as well as the product as she typed like a demon and seemingly went with the first draft. 

She won the argument with Friedan by insisting the most powerful political act is a “declaration of homosexuality…the absolute challenge to the social structures as they exist in defiance of our polymorphic and hermaphroditic natures.”  If everyone came out as non-binary the battle of the sexes would be over.  

Clare Croft has carefully curated this cool collection, as Jill might say. It covers the metamorphic sweep of her career – from dancer to critic to born-again lesbian to a philosopher of self, word and world. 

As journalist-at-large, she makes a pilgrimage to the desert retreat of Agnes Martin, who did for painting what Judson did for dance.  They look at paintings and talk about womanhood. ”I’m not a woman” says Agnes. “I’m a doorknob.”  

The Essential Jill Johnston is a doorknob.  Turn its pages and see a brilliant, troubled writer, one of many who chronicled the 60s and 70s, but also something rarer: an investigative journalist of the self, a woman in search of a story to replace the myths she inherited.   

She was the illegitimate daughter of an English gentleman and a Connecticut lady, a shipboard romance crossing the Atlantic in 1926.  Her mother told Jill her father was dead, which he wasn’t, but she never met him. She went to boarding school. She loved her mother but never told her so.  Her struggles with sexual identity landed her in the psych ward of Bellevue.  But one day in 1965 she “lay down on a bed and had enormous labor pains for as long as it took to give birth to myself.”  She found “new ways of writing and dressing and talking and thinking – and being.”   She gave up criticizing dance and joined in a collective movement to write a history of queer and female experience. “Lois Lane is a Lesbian” she titled her three-part coming-out rant in the Voice.  

My favorite Jill Johnston line is not in this book, but I swear I remember it intact. In the middle of some obscure, driven essay, she blurted: “Everything I think is true.”  At the time I thought this was her fragile ego bubbling over.  But now I believe it was a philosophical statement. Everything she thought was true because she thought it, and meant it, and wrote it.  She made an honest woman of herself.  

  Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips