Jill Johnston

Jill Johnston died on September 18, following a stroke nine days earlier. The shock waves are reverberating. Perhaps we thought she was indestructible. Jill began to write about dance for The Village Voice in 1959, four years after Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer founded the small, feisty downtown weekly. She’d danced briefly, but became fascinated with the history and criticism of the field while working in the New York Public Library’s Dance Collection. By the mid 1950s, she was contributing articles to Dance Observer and Art News . Almost from the beginning of her approximately 15 years of contributing a column to the Voice , Johnston matched her tone to that of a paper dedicated to producing shrewd, brainy, and obstreperous commentary on art, politics, and the Greenwich Village scene. At first, she was respectfully and trenchantly analytical of her heroes so far — Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and José Limón, although she soon “deposed” Limón — preferring Merce Cunningham’s level gaze (“He didn’t have his head in the clouds and he wasn’t hanging it between his legs either,” she wrote in the Voice in February of 1968). “I mean you didn’t have to feel sorry for him on one hand or hope for redemption from the powers above on the other.” Johnston was viewing Yvonne Rainer with interest well before the historical 1962 debut of Judson Dance Theater, and her own background in art history, coupled with her iconoclastic bent, fit brilliantly into the zeitgeist of those rambunctious and rebellious choreographers, as well as of the ’60s in general. The composition classes that John Cage taught at the New School between 1956 and 1960 attracted writers and painters as well as musicians and helped prompt adventurous artists to blur the distinctions between their respective fields and between art and life. Jill could bring depth to a discussion of Robert Morris or Robert Rauschenberg when they were identifying themselves as Judson choreographers. She could invoke Kurt Schwitters when writing about Jim Dine’s 1968 Car Crash . Above all, by writing vividly, with slangy erudition, about the Judson choreographers, she helped a wide readership to accept and, through her eyes, to see into radical works by choreographers such as Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Lucinda Childs — works that said readers might otherwise be prone to dismiss as “not dance.” At a time when painters, composers, choreographers, and vanguard theater directors were using techniques of collage, assemblage, and chance procedures to defy traditional ideas about art, Johnston took her writing further into structural analogies with the work she was discussing. In one 1968 Voice column, entitled “Dancescrabble,” she collaged found phrases, including some from her own writings. It opened with, “The dancer stops short in her initial flight track, a full open run of high expectation, steps back slowly, a hand at the chest. Look down first, Madam, before stepping up, your hat is slipping. You’re not supposed to smile when I enter the room. But I thought…you thought…All my trains left ages ago.” During the late ’60s and early ’70s — a time of mental disturbances for her — she also became more interested in writing about herself; her Voice column was still called “Dance Journal,” but the “dances” she saw (and participated in) ranged over road trips, foreign cities, art-world parties, political disasters, meetings with friends, and sudden revelations. Her prose became increasingly wilder and woollier and syntactically daring — and often uncannily poetic. At one point, she abandoned all punctuation except for the occasional period. Toward the end of the ’70s, Jill cleaned up and tamed down her style a bit. As she notes, in the bio on her elegantly comprehensive website, “With the world becoming increasingly conservative, it seemed unlikely I would even survive without writing to reach a larger public.” She came out as a lesbian feminist with Lesbian