Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Phoebe Berglund and Andros Zins-Browne performing Simone Forti’s dance realization of Jackson Mac Low’s “Asymmetry 222” (1980) as part of “Meaningless Work, Get to Work,” curated by Sarah Cooper and Tashi Wada, 4 Dec 2021 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles
up pairs
all pairs in rope story
The experimental poet Jackson Mac Low originally published the above poem Asymmetry 222 in 1980, building on a continuous writing practice begun in 1960 of generating poetry from words, punctuation, typography, and spacing of words on the page that have been determined by certain kinds of chance operations, often using text taken from his current reading as source material. Based on this poem fragment, Simone Forti created a dance work, which she performed in a duet with fellow dance innovator Steve Paxton in 1982. It was staged at a celebration for Jackson Mac Low’s sixtieth birthday, held in New York’s Washington Square church. Here, dancers/choreographers Phoebe Berglund and Andros Zins-Browne perform a new interpretation of these words and movements. ---Sarah Cooper
This video is from “The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975,” a free and open-access digital publication examining experimental scores and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.
Individuals working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and dance in the mid-20th century began to use experimental scores in ways that revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their experimental methods—associated with the neo-avant-garde, neo-Dadaism, intermedia, Fluxus, and postmodernism—exploded in notoriety during the 1960s in locales from New York to Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, becoming foundational to global trends in contemporary art and performance.
“The Scores Project,” with expert commentaries from an interdisciplinary team of scholars with accompanying illustrations, examines a series of experimental scores by John Cage, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young.
This open-access publication is available for free online at https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/ . It includes more than 2,800 images, audio/video files, and interactive features. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book’s main texts, including the full introduction and essays on each of the eleven scores featured in the book.
Edited by Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks, with contributions by Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Benjamin Piekut, and Nancy Perloff
Published by the Getty Research Institute, 2025
______________________________________________________________________
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its library and special collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Research Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.
Getty Research Institute: https://www.getty.edu/research/
Phoebe Berglund and Andros Zins-Browne performing Simone Forti’s dance realization of Jackson Mac Low’s “Asymmetry 222” (1980) as part of “Meaningless Work, Get to Work,” curated by Sarah Cooper and Tashi Wada, 4 Dec 2021 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles
up pairs
all pairs in rope story
The experimental poet Jackson Mac Low originally published the above poem Asymmetry 222 in 1980, building on a continuous writing practice begun in 1960 of generating poetry from words, punctuation, typography, and spacing of words on the page that have been determined by certain kinds of chance operations, often using text taken from his current reading as source material. Based on this poem fragment, Simone Forti created a dance work, which she performed in a duet with fellow dance innovator Steve Paxton in 1982. It was staged at a celebration for Jackson Mac Low’s sixtieth birthday, held in New York’s Washington Square church. Here, dancers/choreographers Phoebe Berglund and Andros Zins-Browne perform a new interpretation of these words and movements. ---Sarah Cooper
This video is from “The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975,” a free and open-access digital publication examining experimental scores and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.
Individuals working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and dance in the mid-20th century began to use experimental scores in ways that revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their experimental methods—associated with the neo-avant-garde, neo-Dadaism, intermedia, Fluxus, and postmodernism—exploded in notoriety during the 1960s in locales from New York to Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, becoming foundational to global trends in contemporary art and performance.
“The Scores Project,” with expert commentaries from an interdisciplinary team of scholars with accompanying illustrations, examines a series of experimental scores by John Cage, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young.
This open-access publication is available for free online at https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/ . It includes more than 2,800 images, audio/video files, and interactive features. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book’s main texts, including the full introduction and essays on each of the eleven scores featured in the book.
Edited by Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks, with contributions by Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Benjamin Piekut, and Nancy Perloff
Published by the Getty Research Institute, 2025
______________________________________________________________________
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its library and special collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Research Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.
Getty Research Institute: https://www.getty.edu/research/
