James Waring (November 1, 1922 - December 2, 1975) was a dancer, choreographer, costume designer, theatre director, playwright, poet, and visual artist, based in New York City from 1949 until his death in 1975.
[5] Waring's collage style of building dance works influenced the development of the avant-garde Happenings which were staged in the late 1950s.
[8][9][10] Later, after serving in the Army in World War II,[10] he studied in New York City at the School of American Ballet, and with Anna Halprin, Louis Horst, Antony Tudor, and Anatole Vilzak, and also took some classes with Merce Cunningham.
[12] In 1946, Waring presented the first of the over 135 original works he would create over the course of his career,[1] "Luther Burbank in Santa Rosa", at the Halprin-Lathrop Studio Theater.
[13][notes 1] The question then arises if Waring's choreographic collages were simply a pastiche of their original sources, or if he had indeed created something new and different from the raw material they provided; was his work "camp", poetic, or postmodern?
[15] Waring was among a group of choreographers and dancers in New York who, in 1951, created Dance Associates, a co-operative which included Aileen Passloff, Tanaquil Le Clercq from the New York City Ballet, Marian Sarach, Paul Taylor, David Vaughn, dance writer Edward Denby, actor Alix Rubin and others.
[1][10] He disbanded his company in 1975, shortly before his death, but, in 1974, his male dancers formed Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a travesty dance ensemble in which the men perform as ballerinas.
[5] Notable among Waring's works were Phrases (1955), Dances before the Wall (1958), Dromenon (1961), Variations on a Landscape, Sinfonia semplice, and Amoretti.
1, which he referred to as a "Happening", was five seconds long,[10][20] but his At the Hallelujah Gardens (1963) was a spectacle which included "a white balloon tree, live geese, and potatoes, and intermittent dance sequences and events: a piece that 'overran its bounds in all directions'."
"[21] Numerous dancers who went on to prominence danced in Waring's company, including Toby Armour, Joan Baker, Richard Colton, Arlene Rothlein, and Ruth Sobotka.
[6] Aside from the dancers who passed through his pieces and classes in New York City, others were influenced by Waring during the 10 years he spent teaching at Indian Hill, which was a summer arts camp in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
[3][5][28] Some of these artists were involved in the creation of "Happenings", which were free-form inter-disciplinary multi-media events, each one unique, and Waring encouraged this new form; he aided Allen Kaprow in putting on one of his first ones.
[32] Waring worked with Frank O'Hara, Maria Irene Fornes, Diane Di Prima, Robert Duncan, Paul Goodman, Alan Marlowe and Kenneth Koch, among other poets and writers.
[5][31] During this period, he and other dancers worked on the literary newsletter The Floating Bear,[33] edited by di Prima and LeRoi Jones,[34] and Waring's "laughter poem for ray johnson" (1960) was published in LaMonte Young's An Anthology.
On the other hand, according to David Vaughan, Valda Setterfield and others, Waring trusted his performers to put across the movement as clearly as possible and with conviction, thus making the material real to the audience.
There was a great sense of liberation that stemmed from John Cage's championing of this philosophy, and Jimmy, among others, was establishing alternatives to the kind of teaching that had dominated modern-dance composition up until then.
He had this gift of choosing people who 'couldn't do too much' in conventional terms but who – under his subtle directorial manipulations – revealed spectacular stage personalities.