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Acknowledgments

Trisha Brown’s choreography has been an ongoing source of joy and fascination since 1980. Only in 1999 was I privileged to visit her studio as an assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art hoping to persuade her to make new work for the museum. In 2003 she presented It’s a Draw/Live Feed at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum. Our conversations eventually inspired research that galvanized this book’s writing.

From 2007 to 2010, I had the great fortune to regularly interview Trisha Brown when she was able to carve out time from her extremely busy schedule. It is difficult to find words to express my gratitude to Trisha for entrusting me with this project and for her inspiration and generosity. She gave me exclusive permission to study her personal archives and notebooks, as well as many opportunities to observe her at work in the studio with her dancers both in New York City and in Aix-en-Provence while she was creating her final two works, both operas. For his ongoing unconditional support of my work, I remain thankful to Burt Barr, whom I first came to know as an artist and then as a friend.

This book could not have been written without assistance from many individuals in the Trisha Brown world. Barbara Dufty, executive director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, provided access to research materials in the Trisha Brown Dance Company Archive and facilitated my work in meaningful ways, among them by naming me Consulting Historical Scholar and subsequently Scholar-in-Residence at the Trisha Brown Dance Company, a position that opened doors to company resources, writing opportunities, and public talks during my book’s gestation. The current associate artistic directors, Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden, have been endlessly generous with their time and expertise. I am grateful for their welcoming me to observe company rehearsals, for their patience in answering innumerable questions, and for their knowledge of, and dedication to, Trisha Brown’s work and legacy. I extend my warm gratitude to the Trisha Brown Dance Company archivist, Cherry Montejo, and to the archive creative director, Cori Olinghouse; both provided extensive assistance and insight as I navigated the company’s documentary and moving-image collections necessary for my scholarship and its public presentation. I thank Carrie Brown and Dorothée Alémany, formerly company managers, and the company’s director of development, Monika Jouvert, all of whom graciously assisted me with many aspects of my work over the years. I also thank Thérèse Barbenal (Les Artscèniques, International Representation) for speaking to me about Trisha’s work and for access to records held in her Paris office.

Without the College Art Association’s 2015 Mellon/Meiss Author’s Book Award, this publication would have no pictures. I express my thanks to Betty Hutcheson, director of publications at CAA, and to the anonymous jury who recognized my book’s merit with this grant support.

The extraordinary generosity of Mrs. Dorothy Lichtenstein ultimately made it possible for me to fulfill my vision of the book’s program of illustrations, enriching its visual content and arguments beyond what I imagined would be possible. I also express my gratitude to Furthermore grants in publishing, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

I have been lucky to interview, through meetings or correspondence, Trisha Brown’s friends, collaborators, supporters, and presenters—many of whom shared memories of her early years and eyewitness accounts of her early performances. For reminiscences and knowledge, and in some cases access to important documents, all of which enlivened my ability to understand her work and history, I express my gratitude to Jared Bark, Guillaume Bernadi, Elizabeth Cannon, Nancy Dalva, Simone Forti, Rebecca Fuller, Mimi Johnson, Klaus Kertess, John Killacky, Daniel Lepkoff, Denise Luccioni, Babette Mangolte, Julie Martin, Sam Miller, Gordon Mumma, Kenjiro Okazaki, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Sarah Stackhouse, the late Robert Stearns, Elizabeth Streb, Liz Thompson, Robert Whitman, the late Judd Yalkut, and Peter Zummo. The conservator Christine Frohnert, the New York Times chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, and the art historian and former Chinati Foundation director, Marianne Stockebrand, generously responded to questions and sparked ideas. At Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Scott Briscoe was especially helpful to my study of Trisha Brown’s drawings, as were Brent Sikkema, Michael Jenkins, and Meg Malloy, the gallery’s directors.

During a 2013 trip to Paris, conversations with Brigitte Lefèvre, then director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Thierry Leonardi, general manager of the Lyons Opera Ballet, and Laurence Laffon, Paris Opera Ballet principal dancer, enhanced my appreciation of the warm reception that France has extended to Brown’s work since 1973.

Many generations of dancers with Trisha Brown’s company have made themselves available to me for conversations, informal and formal. I especially thank those whom I interviewed, sometimes on more than one occasion, for giving me the chance to learn about Brown’s work from those who have embodied and contributed to it: Neal Beasley, Elizabeth Garren, Lance Gries, Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus, Greg Lara, Carolyn Lucas, Kelly MacDonald, Diane Madden, Stanford Makishi, Cori Olinghouse, Wendy Perron, Tamara Riewe, Shelly Senter, Lee Serle, Stuart Shrugg, Todd Stone, Laurel Tentindo, and David Thompson. It was a pleasure to speak about Trisha’s work and influence with the choreographers Vicky Shick and Stephen Petronio (both former Trisha Brown Dance Company members) and with Jodi Melnick (who worked closely with the artist on her operas).

This book has benefited from years of studying live (and recorded) performances of Brown’s work and through knowledge acquired from exhibitions produced by individuals whose work established a strong bedrock for my inquiries. These include a 1998 retrospective exhibition of Brown’s drawings, Trisha Brown Danse, précis, liberté (Réunions des musées nationaux, Marseilles, 1998), curated by Corinne Désirens with contributions by Hendel Teicher, which traveled to the New York Drawing Center’s adjunct Drawing Room; and the 2002 exhibition Trisha Brown: Art and Dance in Dialogue, 1962–2002, curated by Hendel Teicher (which I saw at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art)—a show that reintroduced to the museum live performances of early Trisha Brown choreographies originally conceived for the visual art context (including Spanish dance and Spirals). Also invaluable was my visit to Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Doesn’t Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing (2008) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, a retrospective exhibition of Brown’s drawings that also included the first-ever reprisals of Planes and of Skymap and was curated by Peter Eleey (then the curator of visual art at the Walker Art Center and currently curator and associate director of exhibitions and programs MoMA PS1); during my visit Mr. Eleey was extremely generous and helpful in conversing with me about Trisha’s work and about the Walker archives, which I was then studying. For a 2007 exhibition, Trisha Brown: Drawing on Land and Air (2007), organized by Margaret Miller, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Institute for Research in Tampa, Florida, I had the pleasure of presenting my first lecture on Brown’s work, as well as contributing my first full essay on her prints and drawings, at Ms. Miller’s invitation.

I was fortunate to report on Brown’s participation in the Rolex Mentor/Protégé Initiative (2011), during which I had many opportunities to observe Trisha Brown at work. Invaluable feedback from Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard University, on a text published in the journal October (2012) strengthened my ideas at an early stage of my writing. I appreciate the support of the October editor, Mignon Nixon, and thank the managing editor, Adam Lehner, for his editing and eye. Initial ideas for chapter 7 appeared in a review that was published in TDR: The Drama Review (2012). Thank you to Julie Martin of Experiments in Art and Technology and Jason Andrew of Norte Maar for inviting me to present a lecture at the New York Armory as part of the John Cage centennial celebration (2012) and to Sam Miller for the opportunity to speak at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (2013), where he is the director. I am indebted to Christina Hunter, director of the Nancy Graves Foundation, for suggesting that I write about Brown’s collaboration with Graves for a catalog accompanying the exhibition Nancy Graves Projects and Special Friends at the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany (2013). Information drawn from this text appears in a different form in chapter 9. At Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the former director, Liz Thompson, warmly hosted my visit to Beckett, Massachusetts, where Jacob Pillow’s director of preservation, Norton Owen, shared his vast knowledge while also patiently tracking down necessary documents and allowing me to study historical videos when I was a research fellow at the Pillow (2014). I thank Lisa Kraus for inviting me to participate in the 2015–2016 educational programs that were part of “Trisha Brown in the New Body,” a collaboration between the Barnes Foundation, Bryn Mawr College, and the Pennsylvania Ballet that was supported by the Pew Charitable Trust for Arts and Heritage. Participating in the Columbia University seminar “Dance Studies” led by Lynn Garafola brought with it the stimulation of being surrounded by a community of enormously knowledgeable dance scholars whom I greatly admire.

At St. John’s University I especially thank Dr. Jeffrey Fagen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for granting a sabbatical from teaching (2012) and arranging for the provision of travel and research funding, enabling me to study archival resources that may otherwise have remained out of reach. I am also grateful to my wonderful colleagues in St. John’s University’s Department of Art and Design.

Individuals who were particularly helpful to my research in archives, museums, and foundations include Olivier Aldeano, Paris Opera Ballet; Janice Braun, Special Collections, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland, California; Anita Duquette, director of rights and reproductions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Gina Guy, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York; Dean Jeffrey, American Dance Festival Archives, Durham, North Carolina; Laura Laban, who oversees the legacy of Rudolf Laban; Kristen Leipert, archivist, Whitney Museum of American Art Archives, New York; Regina Miranda, executive director of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, New York; Caitlin Murray, archivist, Donald Judd Archive, Marfa, Texas; Janet Passehl, curator, the Le-Witt Collection; Lee Anne Tuason, archives assistant, the Juilliard School, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York; Kirsten Tanaka, head librarian/archivist, Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco; Jill Vuitech, archivist, Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis; and Loisann Dowd White, head of research services, and Virginia Mokslaveskas, associate reference librarian, at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Access to research materials was provided by a number of institutions: the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris; Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Fales Collection, Bobst Library, New York University; the Museum of Modern Art, Special Collections, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Special Collections, Washington, DC; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and the library of the Paris Opera Ballet. During the manuscript’s finalization Zoe Weitzman assisted with research and the book’s anonymous peer reviewers provided helpful comments.

Suzanna Tamminen, director and editor in chief at Wesleyan University Press, graciously and fastidiously shepherded the project from manuscript to book form, all the while remaining steadfast in her role as a sounding board, editorial voice, and supporter of my work. I thank Peter Fong, the book’s production editor, for his ongoing assistance and attention to detail, and for liaising with Mary Becker, who provided much-appreciated contributions as the book’s copyeditor, with Joanne Sprott, the book’s indexer, and with the University Press of New England: I am extremely fortunate for the team’s patience and professionalism in bringing this book to fruition.

Finally, I thank friends, Erica Baum, Emilie Gordenker, Barbara Kilpatrick, Alan Mandel, Ben Manley, Vicky Shick, Tim Turner, Lynne Woods Turner, and most especially Vicki Kurtz. All sustained me with their levity, their encouragement, and their affirmative presences. Trisha, and the ideals exemplified in her work, remained my thoughts’ most enduring accompaniment as I completed this project.