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Overview
Trisha Brown re-shaped the landscape of modern dance with her game-changing and boundary-defying choreography and visual art. Art historian Susan Rosenberg draws on Brown's archives, as well as interviews with Brown and her colleagues, to track Brown's deliberate evolutionary trajectory through the first half of her decades-long career. Brown has created over 100 dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works. This book discusses the formation of Brown's systemic artistic principles, and provides close readings of the works that Brown created for non-traditional and art world settings in relation to the first body of works she created for the proscenium stage. Highlighting the cognitive-kinesthetic complexity that defines the making, performing and watching of these dances, Rosenberg uncovers the importance of composer John Cage's ideas and methods to understand Brown's contributions. One of the most important and influential artists of our time, Brown was the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship "Genius Award."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576637 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
SUSAN ROSENBERG is consulting historical scholar at the Trisha Brown Dance Company. She directs the Master's Program in museum administration at St. John's University, New York, where she is also an associate professor of art history.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Seeing the Score
Trillium (1962)
* * *
Hers was the most original material. Could we suggest she try and make a dance? — Bessie Schönberg
On March 13, 1962, Trisha Brown made her choreographic debut with her first professionally presented choreography: Trillium (1962). It was included in an interdisciplinary Poet's Festival at New York's Maidman Playhouse on Forty-Second Street: the event featured experimental music, happenings, visual art, and dance by artists who embraced composer John Cage's ideas. Four months later, she presented the dance to be assessed for possible inclusion in a performance scheduled to take place at the center of the modern dance establishment: the American Dance Festival (ADF) at Connecticut College in New London. On July 30, she was one of sixty dancers who auditioned for an August 7, 1962, juried "Young Choreographers" program that aimed to showcase work by representatives of America's most important dance departments — those at Bard College, Bennington College, Juilliard, and the University of Wisconsin — along with one artist from Sweden and two from New York, including Trisha Brown.
At Maidman Playhouse, Trillium — a dance executed according to the three simple instructions "stand, sit and lie down" — was singled out as "the high point of the evening ... a taut construction and a nice performance." The ADF jury (Louis Horst, Bill Bales, Bessie Schönberg, and the festival's director, Jeannette Schlottmann) initially rejected it, later reversing their decision. This owed to Bessie Schönberg's change of heart, recorded in a note to Schlottmann: "Last night I must have been too tired tothink straight. But Trillium kept haunting my early hours. Now if we permit Nancy to work on her eccentricities and show [in] the finale ... why can't the 'Trillium' girl not enjoy the same privilege? Hers was the most original material. Could we suggest she try and make a dance?"
Brown has revisited this controversy on many occasions, deriving from it an iconic avant-garde origin story of misunderstanding, a scandale of refusal, and ultimately acceptance and triumph: "I think some stories are emblematic of how I got where I am and that's why I go back to them." In a letter to her friend Yvonne Rainer, she explained that the dance had been rejected for its absence of form (choreography) and its music. She also affirmed her steadfast defense of her work: with other students' support, jurors at ADF agreed to include her work on the "Young Choreographers" program, although Brown refused to eliminate Trillium's musical accompaniment as a condition of its acceptance.
This contretemps, Brown told Rainer, marked an unprecedented student rebellion against the festival's authorities. "There was something quite extraordinary that happened for a week ... Turned down. No form," she wrote. "Louis H. said it was dull and acrobatic and that I was barking up the wrong tree in NY ... and I am irresponsible [and] without dignity ... And music made him sick and was not beautiful. But the students, Sally Stackhouse in the lead, started a petition and hounded the judges [who] reconvened and said, 'Yes, but no music' — so I said no. So they reconvened and [I] said Yes. And I did do it. The petition was an event ... [the] first time the students ever spoke up at this place. The endless discussions killed me — no form so it's not a dance. And what does it mean?"
Sally (now Sarah) Stackhouse recalled, "I was there at the audition. ... Her Trillium was so stunning ... inventive of course, but also spatially such a contrast from what I was used to that it latched itself into my mind. The movement was ... danced with all the skill and beauty one would expect. ... I was shocked that it wasn't accepted and then really annoyed. ... I must have made a big enough fuss that finally Bessie Schönberg (1906–1997) agreed to meet in the cafeteria with Trisha to let her know why the committee had rejected her piece. I don't know who else was on the committee but probably all traditionalists. Trisha told me ... that Bessie said there was no structure to the solo."
Speaking in 1993 to Charles Reinhart (ADF's director from 1968 to 2011), Brown recounted that Schönberg "didn't understand the logic of how I organized this dance ... she made the assumption that there was none." Brown remembered sitting "at the table in the Connecticut College cafeteria" and Schönberg saying, "You just can't take things and put them together in an order, any old order, like this pepper shaker and this ashtray and this napkin, and, well ... this is looking rather nice." In Brown's telling, Schönberg changed her opinion, realizing that Trillium's lack of structure was apparent, not actual. It was choreographed. Stackhouse described the meeting, "in the midst of which [Schönberg] stopped — and got quiet while she observed what she had done — and her face changed — with recognition — that there was an organization! Just not what she expected. And so — she did a 180 and accepted Trillium: that was a powerful encounter of the flexible, enlightened mind of a teacher and the marvelous work of the brilliant young Trisha Brown."
At ADF, Brown was an emissary of experimental dance and new pedagogical approaches to choreographic composition, outcomes of her recent participation in two post-Bauhausian interdisciplinary experimental workshops: that of Ann Halprin (b. 1920) in Kentfield, California, in the summer of 1960 (focused on improvisation) and that of Robert Ellis Dunn (1928–1996) in New York in the winter of 1961 (focused on choreographic composition). Trillium integrates Halprin's use of task instructions and improvisation with John Cage's methods, absorbed through Dunn's class, taught (at Cage's behest) to transmit Cage's ideas on music's composition to choreographers.
Embodied in Trillium are artistic concerns that eluded ADF's jurors, including the dance's basis in three task behaviors — stand, sit, and lie down — a tripartite composition derived from Brown's memories (from her upbringing in Aberdeen, Washington) of the wild three-petaled trillium flower. Executed in an unplanned, changing order, without transitions, Trillium included these actions as well as extemporaneous dancing, the latter related to its music, which proved so offensive to ADF jurors: a recording of Simone Forti's vocal improvisations, "a composite of all the different sounds that could come out of [her] mouth, including pitches, screeching and scraping."
Brown's introduction of an experimental work to a context other to it challenged assumptions, predispositions, and prejudices of modern dance, an act closely related to what came to be known in the 1970s as the art of "institutional critique." This opening of Trillium to judgment by modern dance experts suggests Brown's wish to participate in artistic experimentalism in New York without relinquishing an interest in conventional modern dance models. The story also intriguingly predicts Brown's later career, when, after two decades of showing her work only in nontraditional or art world contexts, she embraced the conventional institutional setting associated with dancing: the theatrical stage.
Trillium evidences Brown's tenacious commitment to the discipline of choreography, instilled in her by her teachers at Mills College, in Oakland, California: Eleanor Lauer (1915–1986) and Rebecca Fuller (b. 1929). Both based their composition classes on the writings of Louis Horst (1884–1964), Martha Graham's musical assistant and the most important pedagogue of modern dance composition in the 1950s. Brown studied directly with him over three summers (1956, 1959, and 1961) at ADF. Horst's insistence on choreography as based in repeatable formal structures became Brown's standard against which she measured her work.
While she would reject Horst's emphasis on choreography's subservience to music, she nonetheless referenced Horst's impact many times, even as she was applying Halprin's and Cage's ideas to choreography in Robert Dunn's class, which he devised, in part, to challenge the dominance of Horst's methods. To her formative education in Horst's teachings she grafted John Cage's different ideas about a composition's structuring. Rather than take a musical score as her choreography's inspiration, Brown adopted Cage's approach: much as he established the parameters or (durational) frames that enabled sound material to be heard and recognized as music, Brown applied three tasks as a structure to generate movement as material, producing a new understanding of what constitutes a dance.
Her 1962 visit to ADF was her fourth. Now she faced a jury. "The reason that I went so many times," she said, "was that Mr. Louis Horst was unforgiving about how I was making choreographies then. And he rejected me more or less, partially. So that's why I went back, to make an impression on him about my kind of dancing and try to link it up with his kind of structured choreographies." Brown's inclusion in the "Young Choreographers" program was a victory for her, in that she was seeking validation for her experimental composition, the legitimizing imprimatur of choreography. In the Robert Dunn workshop, where Trillium was created, conventional ideas about dance movement and choreographic composition were discarded — in what some might identify as an anti-dance position. Brown recalled that in Dunn's class judgment was eschewed, in alignment with Cage's approach: "The students were inventing forms rather than using the traditional theme and development or narrative, and the discussion that followed applied non-evaluative criticism to the movement itself, and the choreographic structure, as well as investigating the disparity between the two simultaneous experiences, what the artist was making and what the audience saw."
Brown's point echoes one made by John Cage, in which he differentiated a work's maker from its viewer, a point that is also relevant to considering Brown's dual siting of her dance in New York and New London and to content-based meanings inspirational to her dance (but not necessarily apprehensible, or meant to be transparent to its audience): "A composer knows his work as a woodsman knows a path he has traced and retraced, while a listener is confronted by the same work as one is in the woods by a plant he has never seen before." Brown's "plant," presented to two different listeners/lookers, invited New York critics and America's reigning modern dance experts to weigh in on the very question that Dunn's teaching of Cage's ideas had put into play: "What is choreography? What is dance?"
Trillium's "transplantation" to two different contexts is not an element external to it (part of its reception), but a concept Brown instilled in her dance at the outset. This is obvious from an examination of what is known about Trillium: Brown's ideas for its choreography and performance, as recorded in two photographs, the firsthand testimony of Brown's peers, two published reviews, and a 1964 photograph of Brown rehearsing in a studio at Mills College. It captures her in the air, elevated in a horizontal position above the ground — the hallmark movement in her controversial dance.
Steve Paxton, a participant in Dunn's workshop, who practiced improvisation with Brown and Simone Forti outside of the class, offered important testimony about Trillium. In a 1981 interview, he interpreted its title's relation to its content (not its form), recalling, "Trisha told me that a trillium was a flower that she had found in the wood. ... She said she used to pick them ... but by the time she got home, they would be wilted and faded ... that's what she thought about movement — it was wild, it was something that lived in the air." Paxton, a master of improvisational performance — dance that is "not historical. Not even a second ago" — saw Trillium as emblematic of Brown's love of dancing's unruly ephemerality.
Paxton's attachment to, and investment in, improvisation's creative potential informed his retrospective reading of Trillium as an elegy for the fading perfume of the wildflower — of movement and dancing. Other meanings of Paxton's story emerge if its valence shifts from the issue of movement's evanescence to the problem of choreography's structural survival. This is what riveted Brown and inspired Trillium's concept. Transplantation, an idea imbued in Trillium's story, was an act that Brown made real, resiting her dance from one context — "natural" and organic to it to another that was "domesticated" and defined by convention/tradition. In actualizing Trillium's concepts of decontextualization and transplantation, Brown revealed a precociously acute understanding of how an institutional context, or performance situation, affects the way a choreography is seen and how it produces its meaning, as well as its import.
Brown came to join Dunn's class through the recommendations of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Having learned of the Fall 1960 workshop being offered by Robert Dunn, a composer and former musical assistant to Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham (at whose space on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue Dunn's class was taught), they encouraged Brown to relocate to New York. In the winter of 1961 she traveled to the city by Greyhound bus to join Dunn's class, living for a short time at a YWCA near the Port Authority, then with family members on Long Island, and finally in the borrowed apartment of Steve Paxton at 529 Broome Street.
Brown's first appearance as a performer in New York was in Robert Whitman's March 1961 Mouth at New York's Reuben Gallery, a venue known as the first to showcase "happenings" (the expansion of painterly ideas with new materials and the body into three-dimensional space, environment, and time). Brown recalled, "Someone said, 'Would you like to be in a happening?' I said, 'What is a happening?' I found my way into the midst of a Robert Whitman happening across the Bowery. Yes, middle class values, very young, 23, maybe 22, going into a small, dilapidated space like the lower floor of a tenement building." Brown's choice of Trillium's title (based on a living object/image) relates to titles' function in Whitman's visually poetic, imagistic works, which he called "moving sculpture."
Writing about Flower (1963) — in which Brown also performed — a critic focused on his "distinctive form ... massive and quiet, primitive and sensuous, integrated by a central idea in which all the occurrences relate to the title of the piece." Whitman celebrated the roles of title and image in his 1966 Prune Flat: "Titles are always appropriate and ... usually very important. They do acquire, if they have any sense, you know, they become a metaphor, part of the image of the piece." In his abstract theater, Whitman said, "I conceive of each piece as one image, and by the end of the piece the image is revealed through exposure of its different aspects."
He also said about his performances that "you might think of them ... as an object. An object of consideration for the mind." In a 2002 conversation Brown mirrored back to Whitman his notion of a poetic image as a work's unifying principle and basis for its temporal unfolding, recalling Trillium: "It's about realizing an image, and it's nonverbal."
She too worked from an image to an abstract structure, transposing the flower's three-part structure to a three-part composition. Attributing her approach to Halprin's teachings, she conveyed how Trillium distills and encapsulates in her work a particular moment in her training in a fashion that was a precise as well as a strikingly literal response to innovations then being introduced to contemporary dance. Brown identified the use of "task" and "improvisation" as specific to Halprin's workshop. "Anna [Halprin]," Brown said, "had identified a normal task as a form for performing. ... Her work is primarily improvisational. Nevertheless a task was something quite ordinary, like sweep the floor, stack cardboard boxes or dress and undress. That notion was like a found form, and it came into New York through this class."
For Halprin, tasks were "systems that would knock out cause and effect," "open[ing] up the possibility that movement can come from a more functional basis." Task is a tool for generating movement that appears to be objective by avoiding subjective compositional decisions, including approaches to choreographing based on narrative, characterization, or self-expression. Task enables movements' discovery in the act of improvisation — not by imitating already-given movement techniques or forms.
Brown recalled Trillium's making as "working in a studio on a movement exploration of traversing the three positions, sitting, standing and lying. I broke these actions down into their basic mechanical structure, finding the places of rest, power, momentum and peculiarity." Describing Trillium as a "structured improvisation," she invoked Simone Forti's influence — her technique for improvising movement in relation to scores and structures, practiced outside of Dunn's workshop. Describing Trillium as a "kinesthetic piece," she credited Halprin's anatomically based teachings, the legacy of Halprin's teacher, Margaret H'Doubler (1889–1982). Retrospectively describing it as a "serial composition," she recognized its connections to mid1960s art and music.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Trisha Brown"
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Copyright © 2017 Susan Rosenberg.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Trisha Brown, Back to the Future
Seeing the Score: Trillium (1962)
Memory and Archive: A string: Homemade, Motor, Outside (1966)
In a Crack between Dance and Art: "Equipment Dances" (1968–1971)
The Economy of Gesture: The "Accumulations" (1971–1973)
To Diagram, to Dance: Locus (1975)
Anthologizing Process in Line Up (1977)
Subjectivity, Desire, and the Thinking Body: Water Motor (1978)
From the White Cube to the Black Box (1979–1981)
The Name of the Game: Set and Reset (1983) and Lateral Pass (1985)
Abstraction and Theatricality in Newark (Niweweorce) (1987)
Epilogue: Trisha Brown's Archival Imagination
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
“This is a thrilling, essential book and it confirms Trisha Brown’s status as the major artist who transcends disciplinary boundaries and also illuminates a creative process that is unmatched in its rigor and beauty.”
“This important book makes the essential point that Trisha Brown situated her choreography in relation to visual art not simply because of the community of artists around her, or her affinity for drawing—but, as Rosenberg convincingly argues, because Brown’s interests in the preservation and transmission of movement drew strength and inspiration from a proximity to the histories and institutions of art.”
“After years of deep research into the life and career of Trisha Brown, Susan Rosenberg has illuminated not only the major works of this most imaginative of postmodern choreographers, but the ideas that shaped them and the artistic climate to which they so greatly contributed. An amazing achievement.”
"After years of deep research into the life and career of Trisha Brown, Susan Rosenberg has illuminated not only the major works of this most imaginative of postmodern choreographers, but the ideas that shaped them and the artistic climate to which they so greatly contributed. An amazing achievement."—Deborah Jowitt, author of Time and the Dancing Image
"After years of deep research into the life and career of Trisha Brown, Susan Rosenberg has illuminated not only the major works of this most imaginative of postmodern choreographers, but the ideas that shaped them and the artistic climate to which they so greatly contributed. An amazing achievement."—Deborah Jowitt, author of Time and the Dancing Image
"This is a thrilling, essential book and it confirms Trisha Brown's status as the major artist who transcends disciplinary boundaries and also illuminates a creative process that is unmatched in its rigor and beauty."—Sam Miller, Director, Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, Wesleyan University
"In this overarching, finely detailed book, Susan Rosenberg situates Trisha Brown's evanescent choreography among the painters and sculptors who were her muses and colleagues. An insightful and enlightening translator, Rosenberg connects the mercurial body to the incisive mind, so that we can read Brown's work, and see her thought."—Nancy Dalva, Merce Cunningham Trust Scholar in Residence
"This important book makes the essential point that Trisha Brown situated her choreography in relation to visual art not simply because of the community of artists around her, or her affinity for drawing—but, as Rosenberg convincingly argues, because Brown's interests in the preservation and transmission of movement drew strength and inspiration from a proximity to the histories and institutions of art."—Peter Eleey, Museum of Modern Art
“In this overarching, finely detailed book, Susan Rosenberg situates Trisha Brown’s evanescent choreography among the painters and sculptors who were her muses and colleagues. An insightful and enlightening translator, Rosenberg connects the mercurial body to the incisive mind, so that we can read Brown’s work, and see her thought.”