A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing life
10.6092/issn.2036-1599/7686
“Un desiderio di volare” muove i primi passi di danza di Trisha Brown. Assieme a una mente matematica e a un corpo flessibile, evolve nel tempo in forme originali di danza astratta. Onorandone la memoria, quasi a un anno dalla sua scomparsa, quest’articolo ricostruisce i lavori giovanili di Trisha Brown e le personali negoziazioni tra stimoli culturali e biografici che la portarono a definire la propria estetica di danza. Individua i principi ricorrenti del suo approccio compositivo, in cui è impresso il segno delle audaci esplorazioni degli anni Sessanta e Settanta.
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Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing life
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A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing life
https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/article/download/7686/7458
                                            Rossella Mazzaglia


        A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life*


   Since Trisha Brown’s passing in March 2017, artists, institutions and scholars have celebrated
   her life and achievements in art to honor her memory. his paper, which was irst presented as
   a lecture at Barnard College (New York) in 2012, is similarly published to commemorate her
   pivotal role in dance. Far from the modernist idea of encoding the body within a structured lan-
   guage, Trisha Brown conceived choreographic cycles that generated a responsive body negotiating
   private and public spheres, abstraction and complexity within dance. She also applied concep-
   tual art to choreography showing how to make a postmodern dance in relation to space, music
   and narration. hus, the mind in her own body and her compositional approach go beyond her
   aesthetics and time, leaving a seed for future exploration together with her choreographic works.
   In this paper, we go through her artistic path from its beginnings in the Sixties New York scene
   and identify the principles that thoroughly deined it.

          Dopo la scomparsa nel marzo 2017, artisti, studiosi e istituzioni di tutto il mondo hanno
   ricordato la vita e i meriti artistici di Trisha Brown. Questo articolo, che ripropone una con-
   ferenza presentata al Barnard College (New York) nel 2012, si colloca su questa scia commemora-
   tiva per onorarne ancora la memoria. Lontana dall’idea modernista di codiicazione linguistica
   della danza, Trisha Brown ha dato vita a un corpo danzante capace di reagire al succedersi di
   cicli coreograici diferenti, coniugando sfera pubblica e privata, astrazione e complessità. Ha
   applicato l’arte concettuale alla coreograia, mostrando come creare una danza postmoderna in
   relazione allo spazio, alla musica e alla narrazione. Il pensiero nel suo corpo di danzatrice e il suo
   approccio compositivo vanno, pertanto, oltre l’estetica e il periodo storico di riferimento. Rapp-
   resentano un lascito assieme alla sua opera coreograica. Ne ricostruiamo di seguito l’evolvere a
   partire dal contesto newyorchese dei primi anni Sessanta, identiicando i principi che ne hanno
   informato il percorso.



      As a dancer and choreographer, Trisha Brown came of age at a time when traditional
theatrical genres and the barriers between the arts were blurring. John Cage’s statement

       *
         First presented as a lecture at Barnard College, New York (Nov. 15th 2012), the text was very slightly
revised from its original form for publication in «Danza e Ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni».
For inviting me to speak at her University and for her insightful comments, I would like to thank prof. Lynn
Garafola.




                                 «Danza e Ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni», anno IX, numero 9, 2017
                                                                                                danzaericerca.unibo.it
                                                                                  DOI: 10.6092/issn.2036-1599/7686
276                                                                             Rossella Mazzaglia




that “everything is possible” found concrete realization in New York’s experimental art
scene. But his statement also describes her development as a choreographer in the years
that followed. Brown, in fact, belongs to the generation that contributed to breaking
boundaries between disciplinary genres, while keeping an open mind during the whole
of her career. On the one hand, she expanded her ield of interest and investigation to
embrace opera and the visual arts, while continuing to focus on dancing and choreogra-
phy. On the other, she combined diferent means of artistic expression within her works:
there is dance in her drawings and a sense of space and duration, closer to the visual and
plastic arts, in her choreography. he element that joins these diferent approaches is the
body.
      In this regard, I’d like to recount a brief but telling anecdote. During a friendly
exchange of personal recollections following the exhibition of her Early Works at the
Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia in 2009, Brown mentioned a leeting visit to
Sicily years before and the strong impression that the roundness of the urns in a museum
had made on her and how she had tried to preserve that impression on paper, when she
had returned to her hotel. While talking, she was now trying to visualize them again for
me, bringing them back to life with a neat hand gesture that traced an invisible igure of
eight in the air. She told me that her designer’s body held what was in her dancer’s body:
the curve.
      In this way Brown summarized the physicality of her art, its balance between per-
sonal experience and abstraction, while making use of a geometrical igure that theatre an-
thropologists have associated with the dynamics of tension and opposition in the dancer’s
and actor’s body, to the S or double curve suggested by the posture of Greek statues and
deined as the line of beauty by William Hogarth in the eighteenth century. I’d like to
use this example, which is both intuitive and complex, to free our thought from a priori
art and dance categories, so as to follow Brown’s intimate research of a poetic gesture.
his did not abide by pre-determined ideas of what dance should be, but kept such dar-
ing freedom for its developments. Discarding codiied movements with her initial use of
improvisation, game structures, and direct functional actions, she dismembered dance
tradition, working in a personal way along the lines of the Judson Dance heater, follow-
ing the mastery of Anna Halprin and, in certain respects, of Merce Cunningham.
      In this paper, I will mainly focus on Trisha Brown’s early works, which are the ones
she made in the 1960s and 1970s, before the creation of Glacial Decoy in 1979. I will
then give a general outline of her later development, looking at the choreographic process
as a way to access her inal works and her aesthetics. In order to give a portrait of her as
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life                                                          277




an artist, I will not discuss every piece she made, but choose, instead, among the most
relevant, according to the particular phase of her career I will be discussing.
        A recollection of Trisha Brown’s art must irst take into consideration her artistic
and life history in relation to the culture that nurtured her. She grew up in Oregon, the
Evergreen State, near Olympic National Park and the Paciic Ocean. She thus approached
the study of dance with the agility of a body prepared since childhood to deal with the
natural environment. She recalls a pair of towering trees with ivy around the boughs and
a irm leafy “loor” underneath. Like the other children, she would climb the trees and
jump down to see if the leafy tendrils would support her.
        All of her personal search as a dancer and as a choreographer seems to move between
such suspension of uncertainty and the headiness of surprise. What would feel while
lying?
        In that forest she also learned how to challenge water and heights, discovering the
unexpected leaps of a spontaneous movement, which she would later ind in the practice
of improvisation that she pursued beginning in the 1950s.
        In 1960 Brown participated in a summer workshop held by Anna Halprin in Cal-
ifornia, where she experienced an alternative to the codiied systems of movement that
she had previously studied. Haprin’s work was direct and stark, based on the performance
of simple and functional tasks. But it was in New York that the possibility of a diferent
kind of dance became evident to her, along with the awareness that a lifestyle diferent
from the one she knew growing up was possible. In 1986, in an interview with Marianne
Goldberg, Brown said that her «impulses were freed up in New York» and that she «chose
to make a complete break from [her] family, from [her] training, from the class [she] had
been.» «I didn’t want their values,» she told Goldberg, «and yet I hadn’t developed me.
So I was no place. Yet I felt a ierce independence. I remember walking on the streets of
New York with the exhilaration of knowing that I wouldn’t leave. It was a clean start» 1 .
        In New York Brown encountered an arts community that was not only daring but
also in continuous social and artistic interchange. In the art critic Stanley Amos’ place
around the corner from Judson Church, Andy Warhol recalled, «there were always play-
wrights scribbling in a corner and Judson dancers rehearsing and people sewing their
costumes up» 2 . And Washington Square was certainly in the middle of this bohemian

     1. Trisha Brown, quoted in Goldberg, Marianne, Reconstructing Trisha Brown: Dances and Performance
Pieces 1960-1975, PhD thesis, New York University, 1990, pp. 34-35.
     2. Warhol, Andy - Hackett, Pat, POPism: he Warhol Sixties, San Diego – New York – London, Har-
court Brace & Company, 1980, p. 54.
278                                                                                            Rossella Mazzaglia




cultural lux.
      Brown continued to take dance classes. But once she got to New York, she began to
improvise in makeshift spaces with friends such as Simone Forti and Dick Levine equally
unsatisied with traditional methods. Together they learned how to structure improvisa-
tion and how to depersonalize it by means of shared rules.
      In a 1975 essay Brown explained how «structured improvisation» works:
           If in the beginning you set a structure and decide to deal with X, Y and Z
       materials in a certain way, nail it down even further and say you can only walk
       forward, you cannot use your voice or you have to do 195 gestures before you hit
       the wall at the other end of the room that is an improvisation within set boundaries.
       hat is the principle, for example, behind jazz. he musicians may improvise but
       they have a limitation in the structure just as improvisation in dance does 3 .

      Brown’s irst performances in New York were not in dance but in happenings. In
1961 she participated in a happening by Robert Whitman, called Mouth, and in 1963,
she appeared in Flower, another happening by the same artist, in which she fought against
a man.
      Happenings were animated by the same impulse to eliminate narrative and char-
acterization as the Judson dancers, along with a similar emphasis on the performative
moment. hey were chiely made by visual artists, such as Allan Kaprow and Klaus Old-
enburg, who used them to incorporate live experience. In these performances, Brown
discovered a way of setting the imagination free. Jokingly she said that, in happenings, if
you wanted a forest but didn’t have it, you could use broccoli, and if the stalks weren’t
big enough, a photograph of the forest would do. 4 Even though speciic works did not
particularly inluence her personal exploration of movement, the overall approach of hap-
penings was as liberating as the dance activities in which she was involved. he same was
true of the Fluxus performances that grew out of her improvisations with Simone Forti,
who was well-connected with the Fluxus scene. Brown replaced her at the 1963 Yam Fes-
tival in a piece entitled Nuclei for Simone Forti. On this occasion she improvised on a set of
“dance instruction poems” by Jackson MacLow, who had prepared 60 cards with highly
enigmatic instructions such as “seeming to be generally like clocks are” or “saying things
as an engine would”. He would randomly choose the card and she would improvise.
      he use of instructions remained a constant in Trisha Brown’s work, whether they
were used during the compositional process, as a stimulus to improvisation, or in per-

    3. Trisha Brown in Livet, Anne (ed.), Contemporary Dance, New York, Abbeville Press, 1978, p. 44.
    4. Trisha Brown, quoted in Limitations et exposition. Conversations avec Trisha Brown, in Brunel, Lise -
Delahaye, Guy - Mangolte, Babette, Trisha Brown, Paris, Editions Bougé, 1987, p. 73.
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life                                                              279




formance. In 1976, for instance, in the piece Solo Olos, irst conceived as a solo and
afterward changed into a group dance, a dancer called out by name the other dancers
and told them to reverse, spill, or branch, meaning they were either to reverse the dance
phrase or abruptly add the variations that went with the words “spill” and “branch”.
        Nuclei for Simone Forti was not Brown’s only participation in Fluxus events. In 1961
Brown had taken part in structured improvisations with Simone Forti and Dick Levine
(Structured Improvisation with Simone Forti and Dick Levine) and, two years later, with
Yvonne Rainer (Improvisation on a Chicken Coop Roof ). In 1963 she presented a three-
minute solo, Chanteuse Excentrique Americaine, in which she fell forward from a fourth
position saying “oh no”.
        Along with irony and a general looseness of form, one discerns in all these pieces the
coexistence of freedom and boundaries through the use of improvisation and instructions,
verbal as well as written, that framed the action. his recalls the compositional ideas of
George Maciunas, who founded the Fluxus movement. Discussing indeterminate com-
positions in a manifesto of the early 1960s, he writes:
               Requires the composition to provide a kind of framework, an “automatic ma-
           chine” within which or by which, nature (either in the form of an independent
           performer or indeterminate-chance compositional methods) can complete the art-
           form, efectively and independently of the artist-composer. hus the primary con-
           tribution of a truly concrete artist consists in creating a concept or a method by
           which form can be created independently of him, rather than the form or struc-
           ture. Like a mathematical solution such a composition contains a beauty in the
           method 5 .

        Here several ideas seem to resonate from one art expression to the other. We ind
a combination of chance and structure and an emphasis on means and on process made
visible to the observer. hus, Trisha Brown’s participation in the now legendary composi-
tion workshop that evolved into the Judson Dance heater came at a time when the arts
were ripe for change and when dance, like the other arts, would move forward by taking
part in a general redeining of the relationship between art and life.
        So, in 1961, Trisha Brown joined the composition workshop conducted by the mu-
sician Robert Dunn at the Merce Cunningham dance studio. Here she encountered John
Cage’s theories on art and the use of aleatory procedures and techniques. She joined the
workshop in its second year. his was not her irst encounter with his ideas. She had
already heard him lecture on indeterminacy at Connecticut College in the 1950s. In this

     5. Maciunas, George, Neo-Dada in Music, heater, Poetry, Art, in Jenkins, Janet (ed.), In the Spirit of
Fluxus, catalogue of the exhibition held in Minneapolis feb-june 1993, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center,
1993, p. 157.
280                                                                                                    Rossella Mazzaglia




lecture Cage had a stop watch and read a series of texts of diferent lengths, drawing out
the shorter ones to a minute and rushing through the longer ones to inish in the same
amount of time. Brown later said that observing this made her understand Cage’s idea
of the relationship between form and content, which he analyzes in Silence, the seminal
book he published in 1961.
      According to Cage, form was not unrelated to content. Artists should not simply
choose a story and frame it in some kind of artistic format but let the materials and the
means of their art guide their exploration. Brown once said that from Cage she «received
the baton to go forward» and that the material of her dancing became «more like an
object that one could play with in endless research and in new relationships» 6 .
      his was something that Brown would explore both within the Judson and on her
own. In Dunn’s class and at Judson, she interacted with dancers interested in breaking
away from the narrative and expressive forms of American modern dance and working
side by side with visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, and Robert Morris.
Performance experience erased the separation of the arts within the Judson group, as it
did within other experimental groups of Manhattan’s “downtown”. Only the background
training of the main igures of each movement and their critical stand against their former
disciplines, as well as the context in which they performed, allowed for a distinction
between dance, theatre, and happening.
      As a matter of fact, archival documents reveal the use of diferent terms to describe
the same events – sometimes calling them happenings, sometimes dance concerts. his
means that those taking part in the performances or attending them did not necessarily
see them as distinct. More speciically, Judson productions tended to emphasize knowl-
edge of the ordinary body and present disconcerting images of dance, no longer imbued
with virtuosity and technical specialization, although a certain heterogeneity was evident
among its participants. I won’t go into this division now, but rather relate Brown’s work
to a more general Judson idea, that of the “neutral body”.
      Brown created three works for the Judson Dance heater. he irst, Trillium, was a
structured improvisation of very energetic movements that she danced as a solo in 1962.
he second, Lightfall, was an improvised duet with Steve Paxton, made in 1963. Rulegame
5, the third, was a structured group improvisation that she had irst choreographed as a
student at Mills College and recreated in 1964 for a Judson concert. hese works moved

     6. Brown, Trisha - Teicher, Heicher, Danse et Dessin (un entretien), in Brown, Trisha, Trisha Brown:
danse, précis de liberté. Catalogue de l’exposition du 20 juillet au 27 septembre 1998, Centre de la Vieille Charité,
Marseille, Musées de Marseille, Réunion des musées nationaux, Difusion, Marseille, Seuil, 1998, p. 14.
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life                                                 281




in the same direction she was exploring privately with the dancers she had met at Judson,
but here they were shown in a context that was self-legitimizing. At “Judson”, Brown later
recalled, «the performers looked at each other and the audience, […] breathed audibly,
ran out of breath, sweated, talked things over […] behaving more like human beings,
revealing what was thought of as deiciencies as well as their skills» 7 . his change in the
dancer’s presence was totally new in dance of the time and was something that would stay
with her and her peers.
        Brown has always acknowledged her debt to these early years of experimentation,
although with the passing of time she moved away from these early experiences to ind
her own movement language, for which she was already searching when she crossed the
Judson threshold. And yet, those years established her basic attitude and reconirmed the
idea that she could be a choreographer, not just a teacher, wife, and mother.
        he need to ind herself, which she had felt in coming to New York, was certainly
there. Brown was never a committed feminist, but she never denied that being a woman
had made a diference in her career, in becoming an artist, and in her question for eco-
nomic self-suiciency.
        he works she made in the 1960s convey both a personal and an aesthetic explo-
ration that cannot really be separated at this stage of her artistic development.
        he transition to a personal stylistic approach took place in the second half of the
1960s with performances that evoked fragments of the past. his was how she would
exorcise memories of childhood while also challenging fears of the present in order to
mature as an artist. In Shunk Cabbage, Salt Grass, and Waders, created in 1967, she per-
formed powerful movements over a soundtrack of childhood recollections of hunting
parties with her father and their attendant violence. In he Dance with the Duck’s Head
(1969) she returned to the issue of violence, by making powerful movements in a cos-
tume of constricting shapes and fabrics, while a predetermined ight took place between
two people in the audience. In Yellowbelly (1969) she danced to instructions from the
spectators, who yelled at her to move when she stopped, so as to dissipate the dancer’s
fear of making mistakes or forgetting the steps on stage.
        Shunk Cabbage, Salt Grass, and Waders, Trisha Brown has said, was like an exorcism
of her background, in an efort to get in sync with the urban sensibility. She dunked
herself in a tub full of water, then lay on the tub as if she were an oversize bird in a nest,
wetting the loor as she moved around the space. By presenting a double perception of

      7. Trisha Brown in Livet, Anne (ed.), Contemporary Dance, cit., p. 48.
282                                                                                        Rossella Mazzaglia




her body and her self through a voiceover recounting the experiences of hunting and the
body dancing, she reproduced a duality already present in Homemade, choreographed in
1966. Here she danced with a projector strapped to her back that projected her image all
over the space. She danced with her memory as a score, but the memories here were not
told, but rather used as an intimate score.
      Floor of the Forest was a work conceived in 1970 as a physical challenge. A related
piece, choreographed in 1971 as Rummage Sale and Floor of the Forest, showed the same
combination of aesthetic and personal research. In this unique event, the net grid that
served as a loor for the dance was raised in order to organize a sale of second-hand
clothes underneath: while the choreographer-interpreter put on and took of the garments
supporting her in the air, she could watch the spectators trying on the old garments she
was discarding as traces of her past.
      In 1972 Brown talked to the critic Sally Sommer about the memories embedded in
the piece:
           he whole evening was a rummage sale – she said - I was getting rid of my
       hardware pieces. I don’t do works like that any more. […] I really knew that I was
       getting rid of everything. I still see people in the clothes. For them it’s a piece of
       clothing that they liked, a bargain; for me those clothes are symbols of history 8 .

      In these works, personal memories were never represented realistically. Instead they
were “lived” or worked in the dancer’s mind as she danced, playing on the ambivalence
between public and private, as well as on the unstable compromise between the dancer’s
perception and the spectator’s understanding.
      Floor of the Forest was one of the three pieces presented on April 18th 1970. It was
preceded by Man Walking Down of the Side of a Building and followed by Leaning Duets,
a work consisting of balancing with ropes between dancers. hese works belong to the
Equipment Series that Brown started choreographing in 1968 with Planes and that ended
in 1971, when she created her irst Accumulation Pieces.
      In her equipment works, Brown used both indoor and outdoor spaces to generate
a subjective and cultural experience of space, not limited to mere physical solidity and
ordinary gesture. Among her indoor works, Walking on the Wall, presented at the Whitney
Museum in 1971, was certainly the most outstanding. Brown conceived the series walking
around Soho, the neighborhood where she lived. In this familiar environment, she looked
for a partner of her creative imagination in an attempt to rediscover the potential of

     8. Sommer, Sally, Equipment Dances: Trisha Brown, in «he Drama Review», vol. 16, sept. 1972, n. 3,
p. 140.
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life                                                          283




the dancing body that she had instinctively experienced in childhood and that now was
faced with an urban environment that had slowly come to represent her new “home”.
In the 1950s the beat poet Allen Ginsberg had compared Manhattan with its «robot
apartments» and «invisible suburbs» to Moloch, «whose soul is electricity and banks»,
crying out against those who «broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
trees, radios, tons!» 9 . We don’t get the same feeling of alienation in the making of the
counterculture of the 1960s, though many artists were now abandoning the city to live
in communes and in the countryside.

        What about Trisha Brown?

        When Brown irst arrived in New York, she thought of illing her apartment loor
with leaves, which she never did. Now she was using the urban scenery as a source of
inspiration. A change had clearly occurred in her, a change consistent with that feeling
of freedom she had initially experienced. Now, with her need to redeine her identity as
a person and as an artist.

        However, New York could still be overwhelming. In Roof Piece, which she created
in 1971, Brown and her dancers were stationed on separate roofs and communicated to
each other with simple semaphore-like gestures, while people on distant roofs watched.
Nobody on the ground knew or even imagined what was happening up on the rooftops.
Dancers and observers were suspended in relation to the crowded and continuous low
of the city life. Even so, she was not escaping life but rather inding a way to cope with it
through her art.

        In the early 1970s the Soho community was diferent from the one she had known
in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. New York had changed, along with the general
perception of life in the city. Soho had the look of a neighborhood that was gradually
becoming de-industrialized, but it was also undergoing a continuous renovation. At the
same time, emerging from the social movements of the 1960s and their relative failure,
was the perception that change had to be readjusted to a more individual scale: if artists
could not change the world, at least they could efect change in the environment and in
their own personal selves. his perception was shared by the visual artist Gordon Matta-
Clark, who returned to New York in 1969 and collaborated with the 112 Workshop
based at 112 Green Street, where performers, dancers, architects, and visual artists could
practice and show their works. In the 1970s Matta-Clark created what he called “building

    9. Ginsberg, Allen, Howl (1956), in Id., Urlo & Kaddish, translation with original text in English,
Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2010, pp. 44-46.
284                                                                                            Rossella Mazzaglia




cuts” by removing a section of a wall in buildings about to be demolished: as the title of
his 1975 work Conical Intersect implies, these works were framing a part of the city, while
emphasizing the ambivalence between interior and exterior space. His works seemed to
ask: is there an objective space out of the subjective space framed by my eyes and actions?
In fact, these works, often intended to last for the time allowed before the demolition of
the buildings, suggested a functionality of art linked to direct experience and short-lived
perception.

        Matta-Clark’s “Conical Intersect” actions can be viewed as equivalent to what Brown
was doing at a time of recession, high unemployment, and growing crime. Her personal
search thus coincided with the response of downtown artists to social and economic cir-
cumstances. Although she ventured alone in the dance ield, she belonged to a community
that was building its own sense of personal and shared space.

        She thus continued to pursue the direction begun at Judson but readapted now to
changed artistic circumstances. In Dunn’s class she had learned to think of dance in terms
of ideas, and she was now pursuing this approach, following the same line as conceptual
artists. She was interested not only in constructing dance, but also in “constructing the
environment” and building a particular relationship to the audience. In fact, she described
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building as a «natural activity under the stress of an
unnatural setting». It was a task with a «clear order. You start at the top, walk straight
down, stop at the bottom» 10 . Like a machine, the body had to act or react to an external
element.

        «he structure, the set-up, made the choices» 11 , she wrote in the mid-1970s, empha-
sizing the connection between her recent work and her early structured improvisations.
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building explored gravity more as a scientist would, by
measuring it through the body and inding the responses to it in a direct and eicient
way. his was an anti-illusionistic approach that recalled her appreciation of the dancers’
presence at Judson Dance heater: here, as in Leaning Duets, the audience could see how
much time it took for the weight to move the body to stand, lean, or advance until the
task was completed.

        his same approach returned when Brown began working with pure movement
through accumulative structures in 1972. At the same time, she continued making works
called “Structured Pieces,” which are only a few minutes long and convey a single, simple

      10. Trisha Brown in Livet, Anne (ed.), Contemporary Dance, cit., p. 51.
      11. Trisha Brown, in Stephano, Eie, Moving Structures, in «Art and Artists», January 1974, p. 17.
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life                                                    285




image. he Leaning Duets are structured pieces, for instance. And yet, the accumulation
pieces are certainly the most appealing works of this period. hey follow a simple rule of
de-personalizing and objectifying the dance. he accumulation process is an additive one:
the dancers perform movements 1, then 1 and 2, then 1, 2, and 3, and so forth, until the
dance ends. he irst version of the dance was a solo, Accumulation, lasting 4 minutes.
hen, Brown created a group version, Primary Accumulation, which was presented in
diferent settings. In both the solo and group accumulations the dance is always stationary
and almost sculptural: the dancer explores the possibilities of the body, while passing
through arm, leg, and torso alignments. he approach emerged from Brown’s study of
body kinetics with Elaine Summers and from her overall conception of choreography
now approached in an almost mathematical way, through addition. When danced on the
loor, the piece also allows the body to discover what it can do when the legs are free of
weight, extending the exploration further.

        As we have seen, the accumulation process is clearly recognizable. It is even clearer
in a 1973 version, in which Brown described the dance as she performed it, thus using a
process of “double exposure”. his version is called Accumulation plus Talking and comes
between the 1971 Accumulation and another solo, made in 1978, called Accumulation
with Talking Plus Watermotor.

        Watermotor, also made in 1978, reveals a diferent attitude toward movement, one
that Brown had considered exploring at the start of the accumulation series but then put
aside. his new approach consisted of a free exploration of the body’s capacities within an
imaginary sphere around the body that can be compared to Rudolf Laban’s kinesphere.
Brown said she considered it her «duty to ill every portion of the interior of that sphere
with randomly explosive parts of [her] anatomy» in a way that was unpredictable to her-
self, though not without control 12 . his use of the body was clearly related to her practice
of improvisation; it was personal and would surface in her solos, but it was not a type of
movement she could really pass on to her dancers.

        Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor seems to combine all these elements,
while striking a continuous balance between freedom and control in the moment. he
most unpredictable part of the piece is Watermotor, which looks as if it were improvised
but was instead completely choreographed. Compositionally, it uses changes in direction,
speed, and timing. In an interview with Yvonne Rainer, Brown mentioned her eforts
to delect the spectator’s focus by using asymmetrical body movements (for instance,

    12. Brown, Trisha, hree Pieces, in «he Drama Review», vol. 19, marzo 1975, n. 1, p. 28.
286                                                                            Rossella Mazzaglia




moving the body almost totally in one direction, then balancing it with an arm or a leg
in another) or by “cancel[ing]” a thrust generating several possibilities within the body,
creating a balance between order and chaos.

       here are other works of this period that exemplify this search such as Line up, a
group work, in which several of her compositional concerns become clear. Before con-
tinuing this overview, I would like to pause for a moment to consider the elements that,
in diferent ways, seem already to be consistent in her work:

      1. here is a clear idea, from which the choreography results (even improvisation is
         set within the boundaries of that idea);

      2. Movement is partially derived from an external stimulus, whether the environment
         or the compositional method;

      3. here is always a balance between chaos and order, particularly by balancing a
         structure with multiple variations;

      4. here is an unusual relationship to space;

      5. he dance reveals its process.

       his last element seems to diminish in Brown’s later work, whereas the other ele-
ments recur in diferent ways. In particular, the shift from one compositional approach
to another, as in the passage from the equipment to the accumulation pieces, changed
the dances completely, without betraying her creative principles.

       In 2002, at a time when her choreographic life had reached full maturity after more
than forty years of activity, Brown discussed her method, explaining that in making
dances she worked in cycles, that each cycle lasted for two or three years, and that this
had been her habit from Judson on. She went on to diferentiate the “Equipment Pieces”
from what she called her “Mathematic” series, based on accumulation of gestures, deaccu-
mulation, and reaccumulation. hen she started working with an improvisational system
of capturing and repeating what she had improvised with a group of people: this she
called “Unstable Molecular Structure,” with Set and Reset (1983) being the most impor-
tant example of this. In the 1980s Brown moved on to the “Valiant cycle,” in which she
added a diferent kind of physicality to her natural way of moving, using harsh, sharp-
edged movements, while working with duets and trios and intersecting these units. hen,
since these cycles were all very hard on the dancers, she complied with their request to
do something simpler and developed the “Back to Zero” cycle, creating choreographies
more spontaneously and without the complex coordination of the previous cycles.
A Wish to Fly: Trisha Brown’s Dancing Life                                                          287




        After choreographing dances for the production of Carmen directed by Lina Wert-
müller in 1986, Brown focused on musical structures and created works to Bach, We-
bern, and Monteverdi, before going on to direct opera 13 . In 1998 she directed Orfeo at
the héâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Bruxelles.

        his overview reveals how her development as a choreographer was a continuous
work in progress, in which her natural physical qualities were reined in a recognizable
language and in an attitude that remained the same while the methods changed. She dis-
tanced herself from the Judson, as her contribution to opera makes clear, but she main-
tained Judson’s revolutionary conception of dance in comparison to the past, that is, a
dance that does not arise from a codiied technique but is a response to choreographic
instructions. he body is therefore a responsive body in a process that has inverted its usual
way of working in dance.

        Her creative development may have been continuous, but her recognition as an artist
had its ups and downs. She was irst admired by large audiences outside the United States,
then at home. In a 1985 interview with Camille Hardy, Brown recalled the diiculty
of «transfer[ring] the principles of good work and hard work, so easily understood in
the visual art world, to the performance arena». he «most diicult thing about doing
something as extraordinary as Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)», she added,
«was that [it] did not belong to anyone. No one could buy [her] work in the art world,
and the dance world said it wasn’t dance» 14 .

        he shift to choreographing for the proscenium stage was thus particularly signif-
icant as it revealed how her aesthetic could be adapted and extended to ields she had
previously rejected (such as music and later text) and to a wider public, while remaining
faithful to her artistic identity as an abstract experimental artist.

        Glacial Decoy (1979), her irst work for the proscenium stage, made her immediately
aware that there were new contexts to be taken into account, both because the space was
diferent and because the audience had diferent expectations. Her response was to make
her movement more elusive, polykinesthetic, and polyrhythmic, and to collaborate with
other artists. Robert Rauschenberg designed the costumes and scenery for Glacial Decoy,
yet her use of the stage remained just as unorthodox as her “use” of the side of a building
before. She considered it just as normal to use the edge of the stage as its center. One

   13. Trisha Brown, in Morgenroth, Joyce (ed.), Speaking of Dance. Twelve Contemporary Choreographers
on heir Craft, New York – London, Routledge, 2004, pp. 56-69.
   14. Trisha Brown, quoted in Hardy, Camille, Trisha Brown. Pushing Post-Modern Art into the Orbit, in
«Dance Magazine», march 1985, p. 65.
288                                                                                           Rossella Mazzaglia




could even say that her irst dance for a proscenium stage was a dance about the stage
frame, since she had the dancers move along the edges as if attracted by magnets beyond
the wings. As Craig Owens wrote in a 1981 article, he Pro-scenic Event:
              By incorporating the proscenium in this way, Brown has successfully subverted
         its pictorializing function – its tendency to present what it frames as integral, com-
         plete, self-suicient, but only by delimiting, restricting, conining it. Because the
         contours of the dance do not appear to coincide with those imposed by the prosce-
         nium or, rather, because the frame deines the dance only by truncating it, Brown
         has exposed the limitation implicit in any act of framing 15 .

        Moreover, the collaboration between scenery and dance, as later the collaboration
of dance with music and text, is not aimed at a fusion or at semantic coherence, as in the
modern dance tradition. Rather, as in the Cunningham tradition, each element works
on parallel lines and is only combined in the observer’s eye. his is a typical postmodern
approach, which is based not on the purity of each medium but on equivalent logical
operations and structures. So, in Glacial Decoy, the continuous transition and diversion
were the guiding principles that both Brown and Rauschenberg elaborated in their own
ield. It is useful to quote Brown herself in this regard:
             Bob (Rauschenberg) titled the dance Glacial Decoy, and it was relevant to the
         dance. he decoy idea is of delection. It’s something I work with in my dancing. I
         make moves that delect your eyes all the time. Here it was ampliied. here were
         slides to delect from the dance, as well as multiple imagery to keep you moving all
         the time 16 .

        In the end, the outcome is a layered dramaturgy, in which every layer reverberates
with the other. In fact, later Brown works moved toward a higher stylistic essentialness,
if compared to her early ones, without denying the layering both of meaning (between
private and public perception) and of visual, sound and kinesthetic messages, ampliied
by the addition of music and narration in her later opera work. As her work expanded
to include music, text, and story, it did not lose its original aesthetic impulse and human
complexity. As she explained – and on this note I would like to end this memento of her
life:
              My sensibility, my gaze on human beings, that extends to the world community,
         is evident in my work. It’s in my vocabulary, and in the relationship between the
         dancers and in the resolution of chaos within a phrase. I think of the game between
         disgregation, disillusion, cancellation, fragmentation and of their resolution as a
         way to negotiate peace 17 .


    15. Owens, Craig, he Pro-Scenic Event, in «Art in America», dec. 1981, p. 128.
    16. Trisha Brown, in Sears, David, A Trisha Brown-Robert Rauschenberg Collage, in «Ballet Review», vol.
10, n. 3, Fall 1982, pp. 49-50.
    17. Trisha Brown in Pratl, Carol, Trisha Brown, in «Dance Europe», june-july 1997, p. 44.
