Mills College emphasized teaching, based on the 1950s supposition that women would want to balance dance with family life and children. Teaching was “an auxiliary skill, after graduation, to reinforce my conventional life,” Brown said. “Remember, this was the 1950s, a very closed era. I had been brought up to think of marriage, being a mother and a housewife as the most important thing.”75 Nevertheless, at Mills she was surrounded by impressive role models, “Doris Dennison, Becky Fuller, Marian van Tuyl and Eleanor Lauer … women of achievement.”76
At Reed, Brown said her students had no dance training. Liz Thompson, a nineteen-year-old Reed College student when she first met Brown (and who performed in Brown’s Roof Piece, 1971, years before they worked together when Thompson became director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 1980, a post that enabled her to become a major supporter of Brown’s work, as is discussed in chapter 9), recalled Brown teaching a highly eccentric version of Graham’s technique and alignment.77 Brown said she mostly used improvisation. This led her to seek the knowledge necessary to do her job, by studying with Halprin. She recalled, “The nature of the student body [at Reed] at the time was irreverence mixed with a complete lack of training and discipline.”78 Faced with teaching dancers “who didn’t fall into the categories of dance I had been taught at Mills,” she began improvising.79 “I needed to give them a dance experience without having to rely on these kinds of techniques and … so that’s why I went to Ann.”80
Figure 1.6 1960 Ann Halprin Summer Workshop participants at the dance deck in Kentfield, California. From left to right, standing, Shirley Ririe, Trisha Brown, June Ekman, Sunni Bloland, Ann Halprin, Lisa Strauss, Paul Pera, Willis Ward; seated: Jerrie Glover, Ruth Emerson, unknown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, A. A. Leath, unknown, John Graham. Anna Halprin/Papers/Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco. Photograph © Lawrence Halprin, provided by Museum of Performance and Design
Still, Brown was ambivalent, her irresoluteness suggested in a photograph of the Halprin summer 1960 workshop participants. Brown stands far to the left of the group with her long hair hanging over her face, covering it. She described the image as “the family picture at the end of the whole thing,” and had combed her hair down over her face because “I wasn’t too sure about this group.”81 Yvonne Rainer noted, “In a group photo of the Halprin workshop participants Trisha is nowhere to be found…. She is the standing figure whose hair is pulled over her face and tied around her neck.”82
Over the years, Brown discussed her experience at Halprin’s with a few stories told mostly for humor and to convey her disorientation and fear—for example, describing A. A. Leath, a member of Halprin’s company (the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, founded in 1955), circling around her making loud grunting sounds. Brown said, “I just remember thinking that this whole thing was maybe even creepy. I kept telling myself just keep on participating at the level you can.”83 Simone Forti’s vocal and dance improvisations made the most significant impression on her. It was one such example that she solicited and recorded as Trillium’s soundtrack, preserving an exemplary instance of the kind of improvisational activity that informed Brown’s attitude toward Halprin’s teachings—what she perceived as both their deficiency and their potential: improvisation’s resistance to repetition as choreography but its potential to produce powerful, memorable images.
Each evening, Halprin had her students write her a letter; Brown said, “I would write her only one thing: ‘I would like to learn choreography,’ or ‘I would like to study choreography’; ‘When do we get to make dances?’ Her response to me was that she didn’t feel the group was ready to do that, and so I felt thwarted.”84 Brown compared this with her previous studies: “I didn’t have a sense that there was a curriculum or a structure or a sequence in the classes … some understanding of what we could do through improvisation. Ann may have had some game plan, but I wasn’t informed of it … if I said to one of my professors at Mills, I don’t understand this point of choreography, he had an answer for me and I remember the answers. Then I realized that she doesn’t do choreography, she improvises.”85 If these statements seem tainted by the years separating Brown’s later career from its beginnings, she expressed the same sentiments in a 1964 letter to Yvonne Rainer during a period (1963–1964) when Brown had briefly returned to California, taught classes at Mills College, and participated intermittently in Halprin’s workshops. In that letter, Brown complained to Rainer, “Ann has no sense of structure.”86
Ambivalence about improvisation’s arbitrary randomness—but also recognition of its potent lyricism—informed Trillium’s framing of improvisation in a simple structure. Seen through Brown’s vision of a wild-flower’s expiration, her “choreographing” (by reprising and re-creating) an example of one fleeting jewel-like memory of a vocal improvisation from Halprin’s workshop as her work’s sound score—together with her re-realization of that initial levitation on Halprin’s outdoor dance deck—counteracted her painful experience of lost, evanescent, onetime improvisational events. Trillium thus can be seen as a choreographic rendition of the theme of memento mori, a transposition to choreography of a motif common to seventeenth-century still-life paintings featuring exotic floral specimens (never wildflowers)87 and meant to inspire reflection on the vanity of life. Brown distilled the theme to suggest (as well as contest) the notion that choreographic art might be a vain pursuit, given dance’s fragility and ephemerality, to which she also referred in her image of the wild trillium flower.
Highlighting memory, loss, and mourning, Brown contrasts the fleeting, evanescent, nature of improvisation with choreography’s structural fixity and durability. Well before twenty-first-century dance historians and theorists came to define choreography of the modern period as “charged with a lament verging on mourning,”88 Brown, with startling clarity and formal rigor, questioned whether transient memory and improvisation, as represented in sound and movement, endure through choreography’s tangible, permanent elements (tasks). If the form and format of a temporal art form are contrived according to a fixed logic—encompassed in an image/object and in simple language—might choreography endure?
Brown’s dance objectifies transitory memory and dancing through artistic principles, a context unto itself. Its improvisational moments are contained, produced by an approach still marked by conventions and traditions of choreographic artistry—structure—while her work’s integrity and potential to thrive or die become measurable in relation to a context and to a particular historical moment in the dance’s reception. The recovered story of its provocation of an artistic conflict between experimentation and tradition secures for Trillium an important role in dance history, one deserving remembrance and acknowledgment.89
Identifying disappearance as intrinsic to improvisation, Brown imagines choreography as removed from any absolute or essentialized definition of ephemerality as an intractable attribute of choreography. The dance theorist André Lepecki writes, “If movement-as-the-imperceptible is what leads the dancing body into becoming an endless series of formal dissolutions, how can one account for that which endures in dance? How does one make dance stay around, or create an economy of perception aimed specifically at its passing away?”90 Brown’s Trillium responds to this artistic problem, insisting on improvisation as an ineffable, uniquely original but repeatable element occurring within a fixed choreographic score.
Lepecki’s view that “the casting of dance as ephemeral, and the casting of that ephemerality as problematic, is already the temporal enframing of dance by the choreographic”91 is articulated through Trillium’s presentation of a differential relationship between choreography and improvisation. For Brown the latter is always ephemeral, as contrasted with the durable elements of choreography.
