space, a 16 mm film shot by Robert Whitman showing Brown executing the same dance (with projector) that she performs live (see figure 2.2).
Figure 2.1 Robert Breer, program for Trisha Brown and Deborah Hay, Judson Church, March 29 and March 30, 1966. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
Homemade has much in common with earlier “expanded-cinema” projects juxtaposing live performance with projected film. These include Elaine Summers’s “intermedia” Fantastic Gardens (1965) presented at Judson Church and two Robert Rauschenberg works that adopt this format (and in which Brown performed), Spring Training (1965) and Map Room II (1965). The latter appeared in the 1965 “Expanded Cinema” programs at Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque, where Robert Whitman’s Prune Flat (1966; figure 2.3) featured live performers whose bodies occasionally served as screens for projected images, and sometimes as hosts for images of the performers’ nude bodies.2
Compared with these examples, Brown’s decision to precisely coordinate the relationship between the dance and film in a single work illuminates choreographic-specific artistic concerns and her medium-specific thinking in Homemade, a multimedial artwork. In expanded cinema, live acts were joined with projected images to create boundary-defying confusion between the “real” and the “illusory,”3 and film was introduced to contexts other than the traditional cinema. Presented at Judson Church, Homemade’s film was (likewise) not contained by a screen or wall; as Brown turned in space, the film was thrown onto wall surfaces and ceilings, and directly into the audience’s eyes (as bright projected light), bringing attention to the architectural setting and encompassing the site in the performance.4
Rather than blurring the lines between art formats, using techniques of cinematic montage, incorporating found footage or combinations of live/projected images for the purpose of creating dreamlike cinematic experiences—as did other works of expanded cinema—Homemade emphasizes the distinctive capacities, functions, and properties of live dance and film as independent mediums. Their interrelationship and simultaneity serve Brown’s singular investigation of choreography, as grounded in the function of the dancer in the choreography’s two reproductions, one live and the other recorded on film.
Homemade produces a new understanding of the role of memory in choreography and of artistic problems that surround an individual choreography’s potential for revival, survival, and originality. It exposes implications of the originality and historical specificity of any individual choreography/performance, including the ways these pertain to a performer’s role in each work’s specific presentation. Extending concerns with memory, memorialization, and preservation that she had explored in Trillium (1962), Brown drew Homemade’s movement score from physicalized memories, performed (as she said) as a “live score” in which “each memory-unit is ‘lived,’ not performed.”5
Figure 2.2 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Homemade, 1966. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Figure 2.3 Robert Whitman, Prune Flat, 1966. © 1966 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved
This combination of live and filmed dance contributes to the work’s deeply layered investigation of memory’s function in choreography, where it is an invisible but necessary component in the learning, repetition, and transmission of movement. Compared with other artists’ combination of live performance and film projection, Homemade stands apart for the unified, rigorously focused visual and conceptual nature of Brown’s artistic choices. All reveal memory’s function in choreography and dance, but also expose a much broader, discipline-specific problem for choreography: its potential to articulate its own definition of artistic originality.
Brown developed Homemade’s movements from a pedagogical model that she dated to Robert Dunn’s 1961–1962 class and teachings: there the use of “found” movement was the source of a new lexicon, common to many Judson Dance Theater members’ 1960s works. This method of “selecting” movement from everyday life and presenting it as dance relates to John Cage’s identification of music with “found sound” and, before him, to Marcel Duchamp’s nomination of “readymade objects” to the status of artworks: the recontextualization of banal “things” from the realm of the everyday to the art realm, provoking inquiry into art’s (or dance’s) definition.
Much as Trillium (1962) consolidated pedagogical principles and re-instantiated particular improvisational events, dating to Ann Halprin’s 1960 summer workshop—applying them to her thematic concern, memorialization—Homemade adopts an early 1960s lingua franca, “everyday movement,” structuring its use according to a systematic concept related to Brown’s work’s exploration of memory. As she explained, “I used memory as a score. I gave myself the instruction to enact and distill a series of meaningful memories, preferably those that impact on identity.”6 With this notion Brown excavated quotidian physical actions related to her childhood or to her current experience as a new mother—vivid movement forms instilled with a private reservoir of emotional affect.
Proposing that the body is an archival repository from which kinesthetic-cognitive material can be retrieved, Brown described Homemade’s movements as “vignettes of memory.”7 Her extraction and framing of pedestrian behaviors from the flow of everyday life and reminiscence so as to present them as dance are metonymically reiterated in the cinematic framing of the recorded version of the choreography.
As a solo dance composed of “microscopic movement taken from everyday activities, done so small they were unrecognizable,”8 the work’s juxtaposition of decontextualized, remembered behaviors tests the limits of gestures’ readability, suggesting a private sign language for which the audience lacks a manual. Interested in connotative gestures and images whose sources are disguised, Brown considered how movement might register on the edge of a viewer’s vision, eliciting her or his desire to impose order on actions that do not cohere in a narrative.
Many of the gestures’ sources are mysterious; others are readily recognizable—or can be correlated to documentations of Homemade’s components, which Brown wrote down when she reprised it in 1996. In its opening move Brown, with her legs subtly vibrating in place, turns a knob and pulls out a fishing line, an image also evocative of the spooling of film on an editing device. Some movements reference outdoor activities from her childhood growing up on the edge of the Olympic Peninsula’s forests and waterways. These include digging for clams, drawing in the sand, or throwing a football, but also activities such as blowing up a balloon or prancing as if one were wearing oversized shoes.
Brown gazes into an imaginary mirror, checks a wristwatch, nods in acquiescence to a teacher or “master”; she enacts domestic activities: holding, cradling, and kissing a young child or lifting an infant from his bassinet.9 Humor punctuates the dance’s relatively even-toned presentation: she emulates the prideful display of a “muscle man,” measures a large caught fish, and most dramatically, at the dance’s beginning, jumps into a pair of slippers placed on the floor. Deborah Jowitt described the actions as “the laundry list of a highly interesting housekeeper.”10
Robert Whitman’s color film zooms
