NEW YORK, NY.- David Gordon, a venerable, award-winning choreographer and director who was a founding member of the 1960s experimental collective Judson Dance Theater, died Jan. 29 at his home in the New York City borough of Manhattan. He was 85.

His son, Ain Gordon, said the cause had not been determined.

To David Gordon, art was life and life was art. He was part of a generation that broke the rules about what a dance could be, paving the way to postmodernism.

Gordon, who was also a founding member of the improvisatorial group Grand Union and director of the Pick Up Performance Company, wove aspects of his private life into his performance works, which he reframed over the years to create an ever-evolving choreographic tapestry.

His satirical humor, impeccable timing and ability to see the stage as a kind of moving painting — and to design it with care, precision and the kind of innate style that cannot be taught — made his vision singular.

“His gentleness and wit were always a pleasure,” said Mikhail Baryshnikov, who commissioned dances by Gordon for American Ballet Theater and worked with him on other projects, “but I think they were congenial cover for deep and sometimes dark thoughts about the world. That’s what made his work interesting. He’d take a chair, a picture frame, a simple step, and suddenly there was provocative theater. He was a sort of alchemist in that way.”

Above all he was inspired by dancers. In an essay that was included among others by artists in the book “The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance and Memory” (2018), Gordon said, “Dances may be glorious reverberating abstractions or eloquent high-class dance storytelling or thoughtful, emotion-provoking nonlinear narratives, but dancing, no matter what, always seems to be about the people who do it.”

The most important dancer in his life was his wife and muse, Valda Setterfield, a former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. They met in 1958, the year she arrived in the United States from her native Britain, through choreographer James Waring, who was making a series of solos for different dancers. Setterfield’s rehearsal butted up against the beginning of Gordon’s, and suddenly they found themselves in a duet.

“David seems to remember saying, ‘If nobody asks you, I think we should get married at the end of the year, but I don’t want to talk about it,’” she said in a 2003 interview. They married in 1961. The night before Gordon’s death, they had celebrated their 61st wedding anniversary.

David Gordon was born July 14, 1936, in Manhattan. His parents, Samuel and Rose (Wunderlich) Gordon, came from Jewish families that had emigrated from Eastern Europe. His father held a series of jobs, including as a postman. His mother was a homemaker. Gordon grew up mainly on the Lower East Side before moving with this family to Coney Island toward the end of his adolescence.

He attended Brooklyn College, where he started out as an English major, believing that he would become an English teacher. Then, he said in a 2016 interview, a realization hit him: “I’m never going to do this.”

He switched to the college’s art department, where he met Barbara Kastle, a visual arts student, and trailed her “like a puppy — or a stalker — to the Modern Dance Club,” as he wrote in “Archiveography,” a website chronicling his life and career.

He joined the club and found himself performing the lead in the college’s production of “Dark of the Moon.” In 1958, he began dancing with Waring, who had approached him in Washington Square Park and said, “You must be a dancer.”

He performed with Waring’s company from 1958 to 1962. “An enormous amount of this,” he said about his career, “is really about being in the right place at the right time in conditions I didn’t make happen or imagine. Who was lucky here? Who was looking at and talking to and hearing from people who were really thinking in ways that I never would have stumbled upon in my Ludlow Street life?”

It was that outsider mentality that made him a keen observer of others and gave him an awareness of how connected art and life were.

In Robert Ellis Dunn and Judith Dunn’s composition classes in the early 1960s, Gordon met other young dance artists, including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. That led to the birth of Judson Dance Theater.

In 1962, at Judson’s inaugural program, Gordon presented two works, “Mannequin Dance” and “Helen’s Dance.” But in 1966 he stopped choreographing for several years, after his “Walks and Digressions” was greeted with boos. He continued to focus on his design career, which included creating the windows for Azuma, the then-popular Japanese import stores in Manhattan.




He returned to dance at the urging of Rainer and performed with her company. Choreography came next, when she asked him to teach a group of non-dancers she had been working with. He had no material, he said, so he “would fool around, improvise with the students.”

“I started to make something, and that turned into ‘Sleepwalking.’”

For that dance, Gordon was inspired by seeing drug addicts nod off in the streets. “You couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to fall on their heads,” he said. “And then they didn’t, and it would take a while, and then they would suddenly start again.”

It was a productive time for him. “The Matter” (1972), a work he revisited throughout his career, included a seminal solo for Setterfield, who, while nude, moved in and out of poses in an out-of-sequence score that Gordon had arranged from Eadweard Muybridge photographs.

In 1974, Gordon choreographed another influential work, “Chair, Alternatives 1 Through 5,” which emerged from an accident that Setterfield had been involved in on Long Island when a car in which she was riding was hit by a train. To help in her recovery, Gordon created a duet using folding chairs.

In the 1980s, Gordon, at the invitation of Baryshnikov, then the artistic director of Ballet Theater, choreographed two works for the company: “Field, Chair and Mountain” (1985) and “Murder” (1986), which featured sets and costumes by Edward Gorey. It was adapted into “David Gordon’s Made in USA” (1987), part of the public television series “Dance in America.”

In 1991, he wrote, directed and choreographed “The Mysteries and What’s So Funny,” in which Setterfield played the role of Marcel Duchamp. It resulted in Bessie and Obie awards for Gordon. He continued to explore family dynamics in 1994 with “The Family Business,” a collaboration with his son and Setterfield; it earned another Obie.

Gordon returned to his dance roots in the late 1990s, creating three productions — smaller in scope yet no less eloquent — at the lower Manhattan performance venue Danspace Project, beginning with “Autobiography of a Liar” (1999).

In 2012, he re-imagined some previous works under the title “The Matter/2012: Art and Archive,” as part of a Danspace Project series celebrating the 50th anniversary of Judson Dance Theater. For the Judson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, he created “THE MATTER @ MoMA,” a new version of old material. Choreographer Pam Tanowitz performed “Mannequin.”

“He sang ‘Second Hand Rose’ while I moved,” Tanowitz said. “Sometimes I wanted to burst out laughing and sometimes I wanted to cry. But that was his work. The emotion would just creep up on you.”

Gordon never stopped creating works of substance. In September 2020, while sheltering at home amid the pandemic, he created “The Philadelphia Matter — 1972/2020,” a choreographic collage of more than 30 Philadelphia dance artists performing material from three of Gordon’s works on video. It included “Chair.”

The work was originally intended as a live performance, but Gordon, then 84, pivoted to video. “I’m not making a whole lot of plans in 2021 and ’22,” he said, “and what’s more, I’m living in a world where if I go out, I’ll die.”

He continued, “I’ve been having a very sort of rewarding time during an unrewarding period.”

In addition to his son and his wife, he is survived by a sister, Lois Gordon, and two granddaughters.

The final piece Gordon completed was “The New Adventures of Old David (What Happened — 1978/2021),” a film for Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

In late December, Gordon and Setterfield sent out their annual end-of-the-year digital card — another kind of performance, a collage made of words. It was his version of “Send in the Clowns,” albeit with new lyrics: “Don’t give up. Don’t you dare. Oughtn’t we to ask the clowns to appear in this clearly un-American atmosphere?”

The finale? “Please send in the clowns. They oughta be here.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.