The action of Street Dance is viewed by an audience looking out of windows to the street below where dancers point out architectural features and details on signposts or the sidewalk too small for the audience to see. There is a pre-recorded narrative which describes each benchmark or location precisely as it is being pointed out or enacted. This is achieved by the use of a stopwatch during the performance to ensure the accuracy of the timings, which have been painstakingly rehearsed to discover the exact amount of time between each event.

“Street Dance was an assignment in a workshop for the Judson Group by Robert Dunn, which was to make a dance that would be six minutes long. I decided that I should be absent from the performing space but visible for six minutes to the audience, from a window looking onto the street. I provided a tape recording that allowed them to hear my narration about the things on the street below, which could not actually be seen from their point of view. They could see me and my partner, as well as things happening spontaneously on the street, over which I had no control. For this revival, I have given the three couples the information necessary to create their own individual versions of this piece in front of the Wells Fargo building, and they have had to deal with the rigorous detail involved in making this kind of work (a process now referred to as “site specific”—I don’t know that that term actually existed at the time). In any case, it was my intention to have the dancers reconstruct the work by responding to my explanation of it, and then having them set out on their own with the necessary tools to make it for themselves.”

—Lucinda Childs, 2013

Performance history as of December 2014.

Robert Dunn, “Judson Days.” Contact Quarterly XIV, 1 (Winter 1989): 10–12.

Steve Paxton, [drawings to accompany “Judson Days”]. Contact Quarterly XIV, 1 (Winter 1989): 10–12.

There is no video documentation of the first performances of Street Dance.