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Introduction

Trisha Brown, Back to the Future

Trisha Brown (b. 1936)—recognized as one of the greatest dancers and most influential choreographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—has remained an enigmatic figure for dance historians. The creator of nearly one hundred choreographies and one ballet, the director of six operas, as well as a graphic artist whose drawings have earned a place in numerous exhibitions and museum collections, Brown has been accorded the highest awards for achievement in the dance field in the United States and France. Comprehending the breadth, depth, and impact of Brown’s fifty-year career is daunting, as well as complicated by a divide separating the choreographies that she created from 1962 to 1978, for nontraditional and art world settings, from the theatrical productions, involving visual presentations (sets and costumes) and music, that she realized from 1979 to 2012 and that brought her international acclaim.

Focusing on her first twenty-five years as a choreographer, this book illuminates artistic principles established during her formative years in relation to the first body of choreographies that she created for the proscenium context (1979–1987). Questioning the relevance of the distinction between choreography and visual art, this book locates Brown’s significance in terms of her prioritizing visual experience and insinuating visual art concepts into her works, methods, and processes. Influenced by John Cage’s ideas, Brown queried the definition of choreography, developed an abstract movement language, and forged integrated mind-body intelligences to demonstrate the cognitive-kinesthetic complexities of making, watching, and performing dances. While before her Yvonne Rainer had proposed and explored parallels between (minimalist) objects and dances,¹ Brown, through an elaborate fiction of her own contrivance, established means by which to construct, differentiate, and visualize choreography’s specific artistic constituents, the basis for moving her work forward in a cumulative, deliberately evolutionary artistic trajectory during the years that this book covers.²

Brown’s investigations into choreography paradoxically introduced her work into the expanded field of 1970s art.³ Artists working across a range of mediums shared interests in making processes, site specificity, language, and the nature of ephemeral acts, whether sculptural or performative, to dissolve boundaries separating art’s discrete disciplines from one another.⁴ The visual art milieu not only provided Brown’s work its presentation context. The “white cube” gave her abstract work its internal logic and raison d’être during a vital period of interdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practice, when galleries and museums showcased art—sculpture, film, dance, and performance—that held in common a temporally delimited contingency in the exhibition context; indeed, this book’s writing has had as its counterpart renewed curatorial attention to Trisha Brown’s 1970s choreographies alongside that enjoyed by performance art, contemporaneous with this period of Brown’s career.

Much writing on Brown remains in thrall to her identity as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater (1962–1964) and as the internationally acclaimed “doyenne of postmodern dance,” beginning in the 1980s. Such synonymous terms (“Judson” and “postmodern dance”) deny the development of Brown’s work, reducing her accomplishments to merely expanding on, or disseminating to wider audiences, dance ideas that date to a few brief years of dance experimentation in the early 1960s in which she participated.⁵ The antidote to generalization is reexamination of Trisha Brown’s individual choreographies. Close readings, interpretations, and contextualizations of her key works clarify her distinctive artistic preoccupations and their systematic course from 1962 to 1987.

Never a polemicist on her work’s behalf, Brown instilled her polemic—in part as an inquiry into and theoretical reflection on her discipline, choreography—within her work itself. To a remarkable degree, the dance problems that she set out to solve anticipate vocabularies and tropes through which scholars on dance and performance have come to define choreography’s attributes and functions. Though hardly comprehensive, these include notions of movement’s or choreography’s necessarily inevitable evanescence; contrary views on the transmission of dance, one focused on the role of the body-as-archive and the other emphasizing different methods of inscription and archivization, whether graphic, photographic, or cinematic; concerns with issues pertaining to dance’s longevity or expiration; and finally—a motif announced in the work that marked Brown’s 1962 artistic debut, as well as her retirement from dancing in 2008—the identification of choreography with lament, loss, and mourning.⁶

Brown considered John Cage her most important influence.⁷ Revisiting his effect on her choreographic concepts and creative processes does not merely serve to subsume them under the ever-expanding “Cage effect”—the corpus of musical, performative, and visual artworks that have recently been shown to be unthinkable apart from his teachings and writings.⁸ Rather, recognizing how Cage’s thought and writings provided Brown’s work one of its most significant throughlines goes far to explain the uniqueness of her artistic journey and the unprecedented situation at the crossroads of dance and visual art and their histories, which her work occupies.

Reassessing Brown’s response to Cage’s ideas, and in particular what he described as his “exploration of non-intention,”⁹ contributes to an understanding of the seemingly counterintuitive route by which she subjected choreography to incremental analysis, bringing a visibility to differences separating choreography from improvisation, from gesture, from movement, and from dancing. Instead of making movement and organizing it into dance, Brown discovered movement as an effect of choreography. While in the early 1960s she, together with her peers in Judson Dance Theater, expanded the physical behaviors that qualified as dance, Brown subsequently embarked on an inquiry into choreography’s particular component parts, leading her to invent her own original abstract movement vocabularies. As this book reveals, according to Brown’s nomenclature, it was only in 1978, at the age of forty-one (and after sixteen years as a professional choreographer), that she introduced what she considered “dancing” to her choreography.

The stringency of Brown’s artistic discipline was such that most of the works she made during her early years are of extreme brevity: the majority are less than five minutes long. Most important, and so obvious as to go unremarked, is that apart from two works of the 1970s, all of Brown’s abstract dances (until 1981) were deliberately set to silence, breath, and the sound of footfalls, thereby embracing Cage’s concept of music: silence ensured undistracted attention to movement forms without their subservience to other sources—musical, character-based, or narrativizing. In their succinctness and self-containment, these early works emulate properties of objects with the visibility of their concepts and forms enabling these concise (and often transparently concept-driven) dances to persist in the mind and memory. Ultimately, dancing’s emergence from within explorations internal to Brown’s work and development announced a turning point that paved the way for her 1979 transition to working on the theatrical stage.

Part of a generation of artists who rejected biography as the basis for understanding their art, Brown held dear her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest (in Aberdeen, Washington), to which she often referred as the source of her “natural movement” language. She joked that a high school aptitude test predicted career success as a music librarian;¹⁰ in fact, her two great-aunts were renowned scholars of American–Native American relations and among the first American women to receive PhDs in the 1920s (at Yale University).¹¹ When, in the 1970s, dance critics called her a “brainy choreographer,” she was not necessarily being paid a compliment. But she wore the characterization lightly, translating this identification of her discipline and systematicity as an artist into a publicly accessible self-description: “bricklayer with a sense of humor.”¹² Brown’s ideas, gleaned from many interviews in the 1970s, reveal her mission to educate audiences about her creative processes and how to look at her work—as well as her effort to make more accessible the legacies of experimental dance in which it remained grounded.

By contrast, with her ascent as a great American choreographer working on the stage, she remained cautious about sharing the faceted complexity underpinning the crafting of her dances. This choice, an outward distancing of her work from visual art ideas, still a touchstone, deprived audiences of valuable information, but reflected Brown’s evolving desire for her work to be perceived and assessed as choreography/dancing and awareness that her obsessively conceptual, as well as research-based, working process had become a means to an end: no longer essential to engaging her public or to asserting the seriousness of her artistic enterprise.

Brown started her career in 1962, introducing a work created in the experimental context of the downtown New York avant-garde to the conventional context of the American Dance Festival, a deliberate challenge to established institutional values and assumptions. Similarly, in the initial 1979 choreography (Glacial Decoy), created specifically for the theatrical stage, she adopted a critical attitude toward expected uses of theatrical space—as Craig Owens was the first to point out.¹³ Having derived her work over the previous decade from the “white cube,” she re-sited a dance created in one context, the loft-studio, to that of another, the “black box.” Taking to the stage, Brown invited her contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg, Fujiko Nakaya, Donald Judd, and Nancy Graves to intervene in her choreographic processes, with Brown orchestrating a multiplicity of interacting artistic intentions, much as she did while working with her dancers in the studio, eliciting their contributions to her work’s realization. Her increasingly ambitious theatrical productions, from 1979 to 1987, all share proximity to artistic values of 1960s and 1970s art, with their unity of concept and result reflecting Brown’s continuous exploration of visual experience within the temporal and ephemeral terms of her discipline, choreography. From fascination with the effect of dancing and choreography as seen in relation to the theater’s apparatus, structure, and sightlines, she transformed her path through visual art to establish principles that defined her mature work as a choreographic artist.

Throughout her career Brown strongly resisted categorization. A rare statement on the subject is documented in a 2001 interview with the New York Times. Asked about “her legacy and how she would like her work to be seen fifty years from now,” she replied, “My purpose is to communicate through choreography that meets the standards applied to visual art.”¹⁴ The comment was prompted by the particular legacy-making venture announced in the report: her designation as one of “America’s 100 Dance Treasures” and inclusion in “a commemorative booklet featuring descriptions and photographs.”¹⁵ Raising awareness about the need for dance documentation, the tribute implied the vulnerability of her choreography as contrasted with visual art (objects) through which art makers’ tangible contributions to history live on.

Invoking visual art as the criterion for assessing her work’s significance, Brown aligned her artistic production and ideas with a value of permanence that is inevitably elusive and impossible for dance. This declaration of her exceptionality in the dance field invites reconsideration of concerns that permeate her work: these include her consistent preoccupation with the dynamic between choreography and improvisation; the search for means to imbue her choreography with durability, visibility, and transparency of intent; her fascination with memory as a source of dance making and as a choreographic-specific problem related to dance’s transmission and preservation; and ultimately the exposure of her own artistic originality through a consideration of originality’s meaning in choreography as an art form.

Starting with an extensive reconsideration of Trillium (1962)—the choreography that marked her debut as a choreographer—this book calls attention to Brown’s self-positioning as an artist poised between dance experimentalism and dance tradition. In announcing Brown’s concern with the relationship between choreography and improvisation, her beginnings predict an artistic strategy that she only revisited in 1978. Yet looking back on the entirety of Brown’s fifty-year artistic career—with its ever-changing approaches to composing dances, each demanding/generating new movement vocabularies while also inspiring invention of new models of artistic collaboration—it is this dynamic (between the improvised and the choreographed) that remained the most enduring, foundational component of Brown’s creative process. This book logically, but abruptly, ends with a consideration of Newark (1987), for which the artist Donald Judd provided the visual presentation and sound score—and whose creation was interrupted, as well as informed by, Brown’s first experience in the field of opera (working with Lina Wertmuller in Naples on Bizet’s Carmen).

Retrospectively these projects announced an integration of purely abstract movement with representational elements (from opera)—later recapitulated in Brown’s ever-forward-looking assumption of new creative challenges—all of which lie outside this book’s parameters. At once revealing the circuitry of Brown’s mind in Newark’s aftermath (and coincident with significant changes in the nation’s funding mechanisms for dance in the 1990s), Brown was thrust into a state of ceaseless productivity, undertaking simultaneous projects in multiple arenas. She continued to create choreographies (with contemporary artists and composers) for the stage from 1989 to 2007 alongside the start of her direction of operas—six in all, and beginning with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1998). Simultaneously she embraced a renewed interested in drawing on a large scale in works that ambitiously transcend this medium’s functionality in the scoring of her dances throughout the 1970s, discussed in chapter 4.

Infused with her experience of a character-based performance in Carmen, Newark’s subtle intimations of narrative and transitory but deliberately unconscious gestures were encompassed within Brown’s most athletically challenging, epic coordination of choreography, sets, and sound, born of the meeting of two extraordinary minds: hers and Judd’s. These elements became prominent in Brown’s late work (of the 1990s and 2000s), most particularly through her engagement with the most venerable of interdisciplinary art forms—opera—which necessitated a profound shift away from abstraction, as well as unfathomable degrees of artistic collaboration, given Brown’s approach to this new challenge—artistic and institutional. As she reported on what she referred to as her apprenticeship in opera, she said, “Carmen never left me. That was an extraordinary experience. The only thing wrong was not controlling the context because I was not the director.”¹⁶

She embarked on a new phase of her career by collaborating with, she said sardonically, two dead (i.e., timelessly alive) composers: Johann Sebastian Bach—his Musical Offering—in M.O. (1995) and Anton Webern—his Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5; Three Pieces, op. 7; and String Quartet, op. 28—in Twelve Ton Rose (1996). This inspired intensive research so as to read music’s polyphonic and twelve-tone forms—albeit in her own idiosyncratic visual way—as well as to understand the history, content, and interpretive responses to Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607). On commission from Bernard Foccroulle (director of the Théâtre royal de la Monnaie in Brussels), Brown directed the piece, working closely with the conductor René Jacob. The project was received to wide critical acclaim. No doubt Brown’s genius surpassed expectation in part because, as one critic observed, the “62-year-old Brown is just about the last choreographer you would have expected to turn her hand to opera … and admits she knew zero about opera until recently—which makes her production of ‘Orfeo’ all the more extraordinary.”¹⁷

Despite an almost incomprehensive distance from the austerely abstract works that are this book’s focus, her capacity to excel in this new genre is consonant with her work’s foundation in John Cage’s methodologies, another of this book’s foci. As Brown said in answer to critics’ mystification at her success, “The classes I took with Robert Dunn when I got to New York gave me a concept of how one might make art. And I use that word purposely, as applied to all disciplines. My training is in dance and choreography, but my connection is to form and content, as for any artist. Once I understood that, it was just a matter of time before I could flesh it out.”¹⁸

Inseparable from her beginnings, her late career followed from analysis and intelligent reorganization and reintegration of every aspect of opera within her own abstract approach to the genre’s component parts: music, narrative, character, and libretto (text and image). Most foundational for L’Orfeo was Roland Aeschlimann’s almost telepathic comprehension of Brown’s artistic concerns in a set design that functioned to abstractly spatialize a story grounded in the chasm between the world of the living and the ambiguity of the underworld of the not-yet, yet dead. In this the set compares to Brown’s negotiation of the opera’s content through her abstract movement language, as infiltrated by imagery and emotional coloration; it was created with her company members and transmitted to opera stars and chorus members. Their demanding vocal performances were enhanced by their dancing of Brown’s contribution of movement, rendered through her reading of Alessandro Striggio’s libretto (based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Virgil’s Georgics) in terms that were not literally representational, but intermittently connotative. This reversed Brown’s early derivation of her abstract movement languages through a relation to memory images and her fundamental investigation into choreography.

Most ingeniously she opened the work—with Aeschlimann creating for her a vast lit orb of light (as if a Tiepolo ceiling painting had been reset on the vertical)—portraying the character “Musica” (performed initially by Diane Madden) as an angelic flying figure whose capacity to travel through space beyond the otherwise tangible divisions (walls) of the set’s structure is comprehensible only in light of her extraordinarily reductive investigations of choreography in the gravitylessness and flying announced in her “Equipment Dances” (1968–1974).

Opera’s necessitation of Brown’s response to content inflected the sole ballet that she created on commission from the Paris Opera Ballet’s director Brigitte Lefèvre, who had first seen Brown dance in 1976.¹⁹ This 2004 work was inspired by Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Ode to a Bird” (1962), whose first lines, “O zlozony / O Composite,” gave the dance its title. With its score by Laurie Anderson, its set by Vija Celmins, and its initial inspiration from Edna Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence” (1917), Brown returned yet again to another origin—that of her originating a movement vocabulary, grounded in Locus (discussed in chapter 5). Now she assimilated abstract movement to ballet’s language and pointe work, with the poems’ text and image delivering a structural system of movement, but with light imagery that lends emotive punctuation to the evocative sound score, with its Polish vocalization of Milosz’s poem. (After the performance Brown was named a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters by France’s culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu, the first of three successive honors bestowed upon her in France.)

Whether by self-conscious logic or Brown’s intuition, the first and last operas she made reinstate this theme: returning to origins. Monteverdi’s work is considered to announce the beginning of opera as an art form; indeed, Brown would tell reporters at its premiere that “[she] was further reassured by the thought that the Italian composer had as little experience of the operatic genre when he created the work as she did, for Orfeo is considered to be the first opera in musical history.” Her ballet’s costuming, inspired by fencing attire and created by Elizabeth Cannon, was suggestive of that aristocratic art’s foundation for ballet’s technical language.²⁰ Her last two (2010) operas, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aracie (1733; libretto by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, based on Racine’s Phèdre) and the one acte-de-ballet, Pigmalion (1748; libretto by Ballot de Sovot, based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis), conducted by William Chrystie and Les Arts Florissant, involved engagement with a work seen to herald ballet’s rise to independence as an art form, much as Brown worked throughout the 1970s to establish dance as an art forum, self-sufficient, independent of music, illusion, or story. With Rameau’s work Brown also returned to even deeper beginnings—as a dance student at Mills College who was taught choreographic composition through Louis Horst’s preclassic dance forms, which are intrinsic to the Rameau works and which Brown retranslated through her own language and wit, even as these investigations uncannily brought her career full circle—and in more ways than one.

At the 2010 Amsterdam premiere of Hippolyte et Aracie and Pigmalion, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands made a grand ceremonial entrance, taking her seat in the central box reserved, indeed created (as the proscenium’s history tells), specifically for royalty. This was a marvelous irony and tribute: all of Trisha’s works created for theaters, particularly from 1979 to 1987 (as this book reveals), was developed through techniques applied to undermine the very “positionality” of the proscenium stage’s ancestry in architectural models devised to manifest within the theater a direct relationship between perspectival space and the centrality of royalty’s visual dominion and political power. Now largely symbolic, yet still movingly resonant, the queen’s presence acknowledged Brown’s brilliant achievements and her startling self-effacing artistic authority.

In the midst of all of this work, Brown retired from dancing, making an unexpected appearance in her final choreography, I Love My Robots (2007), on the first night of its presentation at New York’s Joyce Theater in 2008. This work merits a detour, since it thematizes precisely the same concerns with choreography as lament, loss, and mourning that were announced at Brown’s debut 1962 performance when she was twenty-six years old—the subject of chapter 1. Her collaborator, the artist and architect Kenjiro Okazaki, conceived a simple visual presentation of two mobile cylindrical column-like cardboard “robots” set on movable boxes and embedded with computer equipment enabling their movements’ manipulation by offstage controllers. His design’s inspiration, what he referred to as “poltergeist-type robots,” came from Greek funerary grave markers (lekythos) representing scenes of departure or encounter between the living and the dead.

Embellishing his cardboard, artlessly pedestrian figural facsimiles with the notion that “when the wind blows the hair of the woman sitting on a chair, her mind travels far away to a distant land. Her soul, in other words, is transferred to another world,” Okazaki saw “the robots and the human dancers belong[ing] to different orders … as if they were ghosts and human, angels and men, or different species belonging to different environments.”²¹ Furthermore, the robot’s patterned movement on the stage was based on the technologically captured motion of Brown’s hand’s drawing—just as Brown’s choreography included hand movements, some executed on the floor, taken from patterned motions etched in her body during this period when she continued to make large-scale drawings using the approach first established in It’s a Draw/Live Feed (2003).²² Okazaki’s project had two parts. The first, performed solely by Brown’s company, “is this world, the latter is the afterworld. In the first part, the dancers in this world are sensing the presence of some otherworldly thing, but continue dancing without knowing (being conscious of) it being alive.”²³

Okazaki integrated two generative concepts. Considering how “the figure of Deknobo (robot) resembles that of a Greek temple pillar, but its movement traces that of a pen, we [used] a pen tablet as the controlling device, so that the movement of the pen is transmitted directly to the Deknobo. Since we can also record the movement of the pen, playing it back with a delay is also possible. Thus, Trisha on stage can dance with her own movement of the pen in the past. The present Trisha dances with her past self.”²⁴ So, Okazaki said in a statement presuming Brown’s immortality and her work’s transcendent significance, “one cannot see Trisha herself directly; but can feel her presence. That is the meaning of Trisha existing (continuing to exist forever) as a choreographer, and not as a dancer.”²⁵

Okazaki discussed artificial intelligence in terms of “Memory Substitution Machines,” ideas that assumed greater resonance with Brown’s late decision to perform a trio with the two robots (an improvisation that was unassuming, human, funny and poignant in its modesty and spontaneity).²⁶ She marked the stage’s revealed brick wall and its right-hand wall—moving toward the audience but facing sideways—as if she were referencing the set that Aeschlimann had conceived for L’Orfeo as an abstractly spatialized rendering of the division separating the terrestrial realm of Orfeo from the underworld, occupied by Eurydice, who, owing to Orfeo’s absence of visual restraint, condemned her to death rather than returning her to life. In her exit Brown vocalized her mother’s voice, calling out to Brown’s childhood self to come inside from playing outdoors, a touching reminiscence of nature as the source of her earliest enthrallment with movement.

Overjoyed by Brown’s decision to dance again, Okazaki described her as “coming back to the stage as a phoenix,” emphasizing the second part of the dance when “the Deknobos (robots) play around in another world with Trisha who can directly see and talk with them … [and which] appeared as the afterworld, or heaven.”²⁷ With Trisha’s dancing incorporated into the set’s concept, I Love My Robots—whose title also seems to suggest Brown’s withdrawal from dancing to a role of solely molding her dancers to make choreography—the piece’s theme, the memento mori (and Brown’s final public appearance on the stage) bookended with finality that of her first work, Trillium, the subject of this book’s first chapter.