This act of concentrated kinesthetic intelligence exists as a trace in Bruce Nauman’s double-exposed photograph, Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966). It records the impossibility—not the actuality—of placing mind over matter. Given Nauman’s acquaintance with Meredith Monk (who later joined Dunn’s class) and his awareness of Halprin’s work, might his photograph echo the passed-on story of Brown’s legendary levitations? A true myth of Brown’s artistic biography and a touchstone for her subsequent investigations of gravity and gravitylessness, her uncanny physical virtuosity and understanding of the body’s logic have a rational explanation. For a time, her highly athletic older brother, Gordon Brown, a high school football and basketball star, “was training [her] to go into the Olympics as a pole-vaulter in the backyard. The yard was slanted and he had me starting on the high side. His theory was that if I could get into an arcane area of sports, and I was good at it, then I could beat the Russians.”59
Figure 1.3 Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966, black-and-white photograph, 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm). © 2015 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery
A testament to Brown’s athletic prowess, the story references vestiges of movement memories preceding Trillium’s trademark levitation. Indeed, Yvonne Rainer recognized Trillium as re-creating the earlier levitation on Halprin’s deck, suggesting that Brown’s dance returned to, and memorialized, experiences from Halprin’s class: “Two years later (i.e., in New York) Trisha would duplicate the move, without the broom, in her solo Trillium.”60
Figure 1.4 Audiotape box of Simone Forti sound score for Trillium, 1962. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
The idea of re-creating or reinstantiating vestiges of improvisational events from Halprin’s workshop is central to Brown’s choice of Trillium’s sound score and key to the dance’s meaning. Recording Forti’s improvised vocalizations on reel-to-reel tape (still a relatively rare technology in the early 1960s),61 Brown consolidated, through one example, a memory but also a concept: her poignant experiences of many fleeting extemporaneous performance moments (witnessed in Halprin’s workshop), whose disappearance she mourned, stating, “It bothered me that all of this material was going into the ether.”62 By having Forti replicate a vocal improvisation that had made a strong impression that summer, she preserved one instance among many lost moments of movement and sound improvisations, synecdochically representing improvisation as an idea; indeed, today the sole concrete record and remnant of Trillium resides both in the three words, its task instructions, and in a physical artifact: the audio reel of its original sound accompaniment.
The experimental sound score reflects Brown’s response to Simone Forti’s extraordinary vocal improvisations and exposure to the music of Terry Riley and La Monte Young, followers of John Cage, who were accompanists, as well as participants, in Halprin’s workshop. Her choice of the score for Trillium may also have been reinforced by her November 1961 performance in Yoko Ono’s Carnegie Recital Hall concert, which featured music, movement, objects, sound, and action. Brown remembered, “I was invited to be in something that was some kind of a theater piece that was being done at Carnegie Hall with … a woman named Yoko Ono. I had a specific thing I had to do in dance, but she was making orgasmic sounds over a microphone out of sight. I didn’t know where she was. And another dancer was stacking cardboard boxes up. I had no idea what this was, but you know, Carnegie Hall certainly validated my presence in New York City to my parents at this point.”63
Accompanying a “rhythmic background of repeated syllables [and] a tape recording of moans and words spoken backward was an aria of high-pitched wails sung by Ono.”64 The orgasmic sounds Brown recalled—the element of the concert that is most often described—derived from Ono’s childhood memory of hearing the noise of a baby’s birth. Re-creating the sounds and manipulating them electronically so that they played backward, she proceeded to learn the piece, repeating these sounds as a live vocal performance.65
Ono’s work anticipates Brown’s use of Forti’s experimental vocal music, based on memories, such as “Simone Forti lying in bed, singing Italian arias” and Forti improvising in Halprin’s class: the image of “Simone with a garden pointed at her mouth, singing a beautiful Italian aria into the hose that is issuing water into her mouth simultaneously.”66 Brown said, “I didn’t know what category of behavior that went into. Simone brought a very accomplished level of improvisation back to New York.”67 “Simone did absolutely extraordinary things. When you see something that incredible and perceive it as poetic.”68
To comprehend the score’s symbolic function requires revisiting further aspects of Brown’s experience in Halprin’s class: how and why she arrived there, her perceptions and experiences of Halprin’s teachings, and ultimately the process by which she chose to introduce improvisational elements in her first choreographic composition.
At Mills College, Brown had studied traditional modern dance and traditional modern choreographic composition according to Louis Horst’s methods. The school’s Music Department was historically more progressive than its Dance Department; John Cage had taught there in 1954 and provided music for Horror Dream (1947), a choreography-for-film by the founder of the Mills College Dance Department, Marian van Tuyl (1907–1987). The Music Department influenced dance teachers with whom Brown studied: Eleanor Lauer, Rebecca Fuller, and the musical accompanist Doris Dennison (1908–2009), who had worked with Cage in the 1950s.
Figure 1.5 “Percussion Band,” John Cage and Marian van Tuyl, Oakland Tribune, 1941. Photograph © Don McDonagh, Special Collection, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland, California
Brown fondly remembers attending Sunday dinners at the home of the émigré composer and director of the Mills Music Department, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), who in the 1920s, in Paris, had been a member of “Les Six,” the most avant-garde musical composers of the day. During these gatherings Brown would assist his wife, the librettist Madeleine Milhaud, in the kitchen.69 When Brown studied dance off-campus, she did not go to Halprin’s workshop, as did other students, but instead went to Ruth Beckford’s studio.70 She claimed that at Mills improvisation was considered taboo, a point she made by paraphrasing Horst: “Louis Horst thought it [improvisation] was comparable to turning out the lights and announcing happy hour.”71
After graduation Brown became a dance instructor at Reed College: A 1958 college press release announced that “Patricia Brown, an outstanding young choreographer and dancer from Mills College, will conduct a series of classes of young children of varying groups during the day, and separate classes for beginning and advanced students during the evenings. Miss Brown will continue during the academic year as an instructor in physical education.”72 Reed’s Dance Department was part of the Division of the Humanities and Arts in 1949; in 1953, it moved to the Department of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, remaining there until 1967, when it came under the umbrella of the Department of Arts.
Brown’s decision to teach at Reed was influenced by the example of her teachers at Mills, especially van Tuyl, who was hired for a tenured academic position in 1938 in the midst of the Great Depression. Both Van Tuyl and Lauer described themselves as choreographers/dancers torn between the security of academia and the wish for recognition in the professional context of New York dance.73 In light of Janice Ross’s study of the split between
