This transforms into a concept Lepecki’s belief that “[once] the question of dance’s presence began to be formulated as loss and temporal paradox, dance was transformed into hauntology and choreography cast as mourning.”93
When Trillium was presented in New York and New London, its dynamic of formalized task, chorographic logic, and indeterminate performance went unseen. Its title’s meaning remained a private element of its inspiration and meaning, whose implications for its author/choreographer differed from the audience’s experience. Spontaneity, not structure, was perceived to be Trillium’s prime attribute. As Steve Paxton wrote many years later, “I have after all seen Trisha Brown in Trillium (a pretty flower that grows in the woods) and been much moved…. The magic is not in the instruction.”94
Likewise the title’s magic, as related to Trillium’s composition/meaning, went unremarked by critics. Jill Johnston drew attention to Brown’s uncommon effervescence as a dancer and performer: her natural ability to evade gravity with a mixture of athleticism, restrained composure, and grace. She wrote, “Trisha Brown’s solo Trillium is spontaneous in another way. The short dance grows, flowers of its own natural accord…. It spreads internally so to speak and Miss Brown is a radiant performer.”95
Maxine Munt recognized in Trillium two themes, “a sit-down fall and handstands,”96 captured in one photograph showing her in an upside-down handstand with knees bent (see figure 1.1) and another showing her falling backward from a standing position (figure 1.7). Steve Paxton recalled, “It was odd to see a handstand in dance at that time. It was odd to see people off their feet doing anything but a very controlled fall,” and he remembered that Trillium also contained “a lot of very beautiful, indulgent movement.”97
Brown said, “Improvisation was not on the grid in New York. Bob Dunn thought it was not acceptable as an answer to a compositional assignment.”98 Paxton corroborated just how unusual and unique was Brown’s 1962 performance of live improvisation—also underscoring the fact that none of the deeply conceptual dimensions through which Brown brought Trillium to realization were recognized or understood. Paxton wrote, “I suppose that TRILLIUM was the first full-blown improvisation shown there, certainly a landmark for me. I recall that she performed it in an introverted fashion, yes shy, quick as lightning, short phrases, sudden shifts, at one point doing a quick, bent-legged hand stand, the body seen as animal and active outside the arena of ballet-derived dance on feet…. I feel TRILLIUM was a radical position in those times, expressing shyly and delicately an alternate to the idea of performance as directed outward so that the audience is essentially being choreographically lectured to, in the sense that the tone is raised and projected to present the material in a visually/kinetically comprehensible controlled form.”99
Figure 1.7 Trisha Brown, Trillium, 1962. Photograph © 1964 Al Giese
His notion of Brown’s dance as “being choreographically lectured to” and presenting improvisational material in a “visually/kinetically comprehensible controlled form” articulates precisely what Brown’s critics overlooked. Maxine Munt asked whether the Maidman Playhouse program offered “really studio studies,”100 not finished works—a statement similar to Schönberg’s about Trillium as mere “material,” not “dance.” Trillium cast movement outside of any recognizable framework, a technique comparable to Cage’s redefinition of silence and noise, in their materiality, as sounds to be heard apart from any a priori technique or method for creating or categorizing music.
Trillium announces an investigation into choreography’s different components: the distinction between a score and its performance, between choreography and improvisation, and between movement as a series of pre-set forms versus live movement discovered in the moment, through the execution of a score’s instructions. If all that remain of Brown’s dance are the three simple tasks on which it was based—as well as the artifact of its audio accompaniment—Trillium’s problematic reception at ADF introduces new information about the history of 1960s dance and Brown’s complicated attitude towards her participation in it.101
Yet Brown’s display of improvisational virtuosity in performing Trillium (1962)—according to her—was considered by her peers to be overly personal, which she interpreted to mean that displaying her abilities as a dancer did not fit with their stern principles. Writing in her notebook (some years later), she remembered, “In the early years of my career I was distinctly able to levitate. Peer pressure against virtuosity stopped me. Now I can’t do it.”102
Informed by her later discovery and embrace of her idiosyncratically original talents as a dancer, Brown repeated these sentiments in an interview that partly explains the lack of nostalgia which characterized her view of the Judson era: “The great irony of Judson was the good joke they pulled on me: I happened to be a virtuosic dancer, and they said ‘no’ to virtuosity. I had this body capable of moving in ways that not even I fully knew—except that I tasted the rapture of that experience when I was improvising.”103 This statement dates from the moment (in 1978) when—after a sixteen-year hiatus in which she focused on choreography and movement’s objective dimensions and functions—Brown revisited her early interest in improvisation as the foundation for a new movement language, sourced from within the unique subjectivity of her dancing body. Thus the Judson ethos (perhaps as consolidated in Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 “NO” manifesto) had its powerful effect on Brown’s direction and artistic choices.104 As she later recalled, “I got the picture from everyone around me to tighten up my act. I wanted to fit in with the group…. I created a more systematized frame-work in which to behave.”105
Memory and Archive
A string: Homemade, Motor, Outside (1966)
2
The transition from improvisation (you’ll never see that again) to choreography (a dance form that can be precisely repeated) required great effort…. The ideas take a visual presence in the mind and one must find the method to decant that vision.— Trisha Brown1
Brown’s development of “a more systematized framework in which to behave” emerged in the three-part solo A string: Homemade, Motor, Outside (1966). Presented together with Brown’s Rulegame 5 (1964) on a March 29 and 30, 1966, concert (shared with a member of Judson Dance Theater, Deborah Hay), it marked the last of Brown’s three performances of her own work at Judson Church between 1963 and 1966—and her most ambitious choreography to date.
Together, A string’s three dances reveal Brown’s evolving sensibility with regard to her works’ site-determined nature, foreshadowed by Trillium. In juxtaposing dance to film in Homemade, to motion and technology in Motor, and to architecture in Outside, Brown introduced new, concrete models for framing choreography—“decanting it to vision”—all extending beyond Trillium’s elusive, metaphorical contrast of improvisation’s time-bound evanescence to choreography’s fixed, durable structure and context-based meanings.
Exceptional as the sole work from the early 1960s that Brown retained in her choreographic repertory, Homemade explores the issue of reprisal as a choreographic motif and choreographic-specific artistic problem. It presents a self-contained loop in which a live solo performance
