Judson Dance Theater
In 1962, a group of dancers who had exhausted the opportunities to study avant-garde dance (having already studied with Robert Dunn and Merce Cunningham) decided to form a collective to conduct their own experiments in dance. They asked Judson Church if they could use its gym for a practice space, and after awhile, asked to give a public performance there. The production was so exciting and so well received that the Church Board had no trouble agreeing to allow the dancers to use the Meeting Room for their performances thereafter, under the label of the Judson Dance Theater. Among the dancers who presented both individual and group shows over the next several years were Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Alex and Deborah Hay, James Waring, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Carolee Schneeman, Judith and Robert Dunn, David Gordon, and Elaine Summers. At times, the participants included dancers who were primarily visual artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, Robert Morris, and Al Hansen. The Judson Dance Theater collective, as such, ended in 1964, and many of the dancers went on to form their own companies, but Judson continued to present dance concerts by these same artists, and others, including Dan Wagoner, Gus Solomons, Rudy Perez, Toby Armour, Meredith Monk, and Twyla Tharp through the 1970s.

You can read Joan Acocella's piece from The New Yorker about the present-day impact of the Judson Dance Theatre by clicking here.

Movement Research at Judson Church
In the mid-1980s, Movement Research, a new producer of experimental dance performances, lost its home for about a year when the City temporarily closed Movement Research's space to repair building violations - though some suspected that the radical nature of some of the performances had also prompted the closing. Judson Church thereupon offered its Meeting Room for the group's weekly performances, which are still presented every Monday night during the academic year.

DADD
For a decade starting in 1993, Judson employed Aziza as a part-time liaison to the arts; she brought in the group Dancers of African Descent Downtown, which included, among many others, Ron Brown, for weekly Saturday night sessions.