“What’s at stake is the question of authority,” Johnston wrote in “The Unhappy Spectator.” She had spent a decade becoming a charismatic representative of artistic assaults on charisma, celebrating new styles of dance whose everyday gestures—walking, lying down, picking up and dropping things—risked boredom and offense. Like the artists she championed, Johnston’s methods could be sexy, aggressive, annoying, or enraging. She would goad or seduce her audiences into responsiveness. She wrote the instruction: wrestle her to the floor.
Authority—who wields it and how—was also the question at stake for feminism and gay liberation. Around 1970, Johnston reinvented herself as a jolly militant and lesbian prankster, charming and irritating her sisters by turns. She derailed a Ti-Grace Atkinson speech by propositioning Atkinson from the audience; she derailed an East Hampton fundraiser by undressing poolside and swimming laps. Like the performance reviews that preceded them, these antics were often trivialized as mere mischief. In a prescient 1960 column about a program of Happenings, Johnston preempted such criticisms: “It was serious because it came out of a thoughtful revolt against a world in chaos that was pretending order.” {read}