being destined to immediately disappear, each individual, ephemeral performance of choreography encircles the idea of choreography’s potential to endure.
Homemade solidifies this concept of choreography’s permanence and performance’s originality in its apparatus. As a choreographic work defined by the marriage of performance and filmed reproduction, Homemade questions performance art theory’s separation of live performance from its documentation, instead applying this inquiry to question choreography’s definition, one of her works’ themes and concepts.
Her “double-exposed” dance compares to Robert Rauschenberg’s creation of two nearly identical but slightly different paintings, Factum I (1957) and Factum II (1957). (See figures 2.4 and 2.5.) As he said, “I painted two identical pictures, but only identical to the limits of the eye, the hand, the materials adjusting to the differences from one canvas to another.”27 As Branden W. Joseph notes, “At issue for Rauschenberg was not the exactness of reproduction but the difference within repetition.” He adds, “Though the differences between Rauschenberg’s two Factums thwart the viewer’s mnemonic capacities they do not simply disappear in the observation of one canvas alone. Rather, they continue to haunt each individual work, rendering it incomplete and defeating any claim to full self-presence. Thus neither canvas can any longer attain the solidity and self-identity that can privilege it as an original against which the other can be judged as a copy.”28
The same is true for Brown’s Homemade—albeit with an important difference, which concerns the property of artistic originality in its specific pertinence to choreography. As Rauschenberg does in Factum I and Factum II, Brown requires the audience to make choices regarding their focus on the dance or the film, implying a similar problematization of originality through these two mediums’ juxtaposition. However, if the duality of Rauschenberg’s two nearly identical Factums overturns conventional notions of originality in painting, Homemade insists on the idea of originality’s possibility for choreography, a concept manifested through the function of the singular (and original) dancer whose body/performance mediates between Homemade’s two reproductions—a precise and true understanding of the way any individual dance performance is a unique interpretation.
Figure 2.4 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I, 1957. Oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas, 61½ × 35¾ in. (156.2 × 90.8 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Figure 2.5 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957. Oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and painted paper on canvas, 61⅜ × 35½ in. (155.9 × 90.2 cm). Purchase and an anonymous gift and Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest (both by exchange). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Homemade requires the seamless self-identity of the dancer in both components. Without the particular dancer who appears in the film, Homemade cannot function: the film was not conceived as independent of the artwork for which it was created. While exploring the issue of a dance’s longevity (through its recording), Homemade also invites reflection on choreography’s death and ephemerality. If a successful production or reprisal of Homemade depends on the participation and life of the performer, the dance pre-envisions its own expiration as contingent on the life or expiration of the dancer who embodies the choreography in both of its iterations.
Early in her career, in 1964, Brown expressed a powerful dedication to the notion of authorship and originality in the realm of live performance. Writing to Yvonne Rainer she reported that Ann Halprin had asked Brown and her husband “to do the undressing bit we did in Whitman’s FLOWER. I don’t get that attitude,” she wrote. “I told her we would if Whitman gave her permission and I guess that was the end of that.”29 In other words, she deferred to Whitman’s authorship, ownership, and rights to his performance as an original artwork and believed that her re-presentation of it, without his authorization, would be an act of theft and forgery. Homemade consolidates her ideas about a performance’s authorship, authenticity, and originality.
Marking the first of many instances when Brown explored the visual experience of “split perception,” or what she later described as “visual deflection,” Homemade’s format relates to instructions for performance announced in John Cage’s lecture “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?”: “A performance must be given by a single lecturer. He may read ‘live’ any one of the lectures. The ‘live’ reading may be superimposed on the recorded readings. Or the whole may be recorded and delivered mechanically.”30
In Cage’s “45′ for a Speaker,” he questioned the division between listening and watching, envisioning the theatricalization of musical experience and conditions wherein the audience’s attention would be divided: “Music is one part of theater. ‘Focus’ is what aspects one’s noticing. There is all the various things going on at the same time. I have noticed that music is liveliest for me when listening for instance doesn’t distract me from seeing.”31
Brown re-opened this question of split focus, superimposed performances, as well as Homemade’s perpetuation (or potential loss) when she reprised it in 1996. In an especially poignant rendition of the work, presented on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Brown reconstituted Homemade (1966) as a dance between her sixty-six-year-old self and her former self, aged thirty, whose image (in Whitman’s original film) accompanied the live performance (see figure 2.6).
Her continued fascination with the idea that a particular choreography owes its origin and provenance to the choreographer who originally made it and to the dancer who performs it was evident in Brown’s contribution to Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project’s Judson Revival program, “Past Forward” (2000–2001). For that occasion, she invited Baryshnikov to re-create the work and filmmaker Babette Mangolte to contribute its cinematic component, this time filmed in Super 8 mm in a studio at P.S. 122 in New York’s East Village.32
In a film by Charles Atlas screened as the prologue to the “Past Forward” performance program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 7, 2001, Brown’s voiceover accompanies footage of Baryshnikov rehearsing Homemade. We hear Brown, unseen, instructing, “Physicalize a memory … You know there’s that purity of the first time you try something … It’s beautiful … It’s almost the same … but more from your experience.”33 The clip captures Brown’s use of the “live score” idea in welcoming Baryshnikov to introduce his memories to the work. Her approach to including Homemade on a program devoted to reviving artworks made in the 1960s speaks to Brown’s convictions regarding the impossibility of any truly authentic revival, offering, through Homemade’s a contemporary re-rendering, a demonstration of the inseparable dynamic between originality and repetition.
This new original combination of dance and film substituted for Brown’s performance, with Baryshnikov’s appearance bringing the work alive again, and at a particular moment (see figure 2.7). This attitude regarding her
