her juvenilia as unique original dances. From that period she let go of her improvised solo (Trillium), her improvised duet with Steve Paxton (Lightfall, 1963; discussed in chapter 3), and Rulegame 5 (1964), which used dancers and nondancers and a simple game structure. Her remaking of Homemade in a 1996 version bypassed the notion of a “revival” or “reprisal” to insist on its integrity as contemporary artwork.
Figure 2.6 Trisha Brown performing Homemade, 1996. Photograph © Vincent Pereira, Trisha Brown Dance Company Archive, New York
Figure 2.7 Mikhail Baryshnikov performing Homemade, 2001. Photograph © 2015 Stephanie Berger
Brown’s insistence on preserving Homemade as the sole example of her work of the early 1960s is evident in her responses to various efforts to revisit, and canonize, the work of Judson Dance Theater. The first, in 1980–1982, organized by Wendy Perron, Tony Carruthers, and Dan Cameron—the Bennington College Judson Project—was a multi-year, multi-part enterprise (which included an exhibition, Judson Dance Theater: 1962–1966, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, as well as extensive interviews with Judson participants). As part of the “Judson Project” residency/performance element, held at Bennington College on April 11, 1980, Brown presented Homemade but ignored the project’s historical premises, instead performing dances dating from 1975 and after, including (in this order) Accumulation (1971) with Talking (1973) plus Water Motor (1978) (1979), Locus (1975), Solo Olos (1977), “Message to Steve” (a work-in-progress that would become part of Opal Loop, 1980), as well her most recent work, “a fragment of Glacial Decoy (1979).”34
She declined to participate in any of the Bennington project’s New York performances at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, citing her focus on her current choreography.35 For Baryshnikov’s 2000–2001 “Past Forward” project, she remade Homemade for him to perform and also insisted on including a recent work in the program, emphasizing the priority of her present artistic concerns over nostalgic reminiscence.
Brown refused to participate in Danspace’s 2012 Judson Revival project, again insisting on her belief in her works’ historicity—an issue to which she remained closely attuned.36 In this case, Brown’s nonparticipation was also related to the fact that Homemade had just recently been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As to the status of her improvisational duet with Steve Paxton (Lightfall, 1963)—performed twice in the 1960s—Brown never reprised it, although in 1994 she reunited with Paxton for a new performed duet improvisation, Long and Dream, seen first at the Volkstheatre, Vienna (on August 12, 1994), and again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (on October 2, 1996), as part of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration.
For the 2012 Trisha Brown Dance Company program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Homemade was executed by Vicky Shick, a choreographer and former Trisha Brown Dance Company member. It included a new film (actually a digital videotape) by Babette Mangolte. Shick (working with Carolyn Lucas, Brown’s choreographic assistant since 1994) not only studied Whitman’s film but revisited Brown’s notes on the dance’s original memory images. Her exquisite performance struck a sensitive and precise balancing of the theatrical, the actual/everyday, and the dramatization of nonchalant inner focus with a neutrality startling in its fidelity to the tonal qualities of Brown’s performance; this was exceptional in the way Shick interpreted the difference between moments of cartoon-like pantomimic exaggeration and humor (blowing up a balloon, slapping the thigh, doing a little tap dance) and others meant to be seen as private, mysterious, deeply concentrated or playfully self-regarding (looking into a mirror, setting up the slippers to jump into, and later on gamboling about in shoes that are more grown-up than their wearer). In her recording of Shick’s performance Mangolte replaced film technology (which she had used in working with Baryshnikov) with HD video. Her footage of Shick’s performance was screened from a video projector hidden within the original film apparatus—a choice common to curatorial efforts to retain and preserve historical examples of 1960s film/video by altering obsolescent technologies. The effect registered the slightly different ratio characteristic of the shift from an analog to a digital format.
Brown’s approach to these successive performances of Homemade reinforces its significance as a meditation on various memory-specific and historical dimensions of movement, choreography and their transmission as new originals in each iteration. The conceptual dimension of her outlook is highlighted when compared with choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s work, Years Later (2006), created for Mikhail Baryshnikov. Like Homemade it incorporates a film (by Asa Mader), which is projected on a flat screen behind Baryshnikov’s present-day performance of new choreography. Showing the young Baryshnikov rehearsing in a Moscow ballet studio, the film offers a contrast between his precocious agility as a dancer and the more limited repertoire of movement characteristic of his Years Later live performance.
A celebrity portrait of a legendary dancer, Millepied’s work uses film to reflect on human and technical dimensions of loss in dance, as well as on themes of exile and aging. Homemade’s film component provokes contemplation of the nature of originality particular to a dancer at a particular moment in time; and in it, film is a mobile element that, while fragmentary in its representation of the dance, also introduces the site and the audience into the event of the performance (whereas in Years Later, film remains a static projection appearing as a backdrop for the dancing).37
A specific site influenced A string’s second part, Motor (1965; figure 2.9). Premiered at “Unmarked Interchange: A Concert for Ann Arbor,” it joined other works presented by an offshoot of Judson Dance Theater that orbited around Robert Rauschenberg from 1965 to 1966. The occasion was the annual ONCE AGAIN Festival—the last of a series of ONCE festivals, which started in 1961, to feature performances by the Ann Arbor–based experimental and multimedial performative ONCE group founded by Robert Ashley (together with George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda).38
Presented to an audience of about four hundred people on the top floor of the Maynard Street parking garage, on the University of Michigan campus, Motor involved two props: a Volkswagen car and a skateboard. More specifically the work was (as Brown later described it) a “duet with a skateboard as timing device, and partner, performed in a parking lot, lit by a Volkswagen, driver unrehearsed.”39 The earliest instance of Brown’s taking inspiration from a specific performance site/context,40 Motor directly relates to Robert Rauschenberg’s first dance, Pelican (1963). Titled by Trisha Brown,41 it is the most famous, remembered element of “America on Wheels” (1963), an event held at the National Skating Rink in Washington, DC, to complement the exhibition The Popular Image at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and a “Pop Festival”—both held in the gallery, which included concerts by John Cage (1912–1992) and David Tudor (1926–1996), Claes Oldenburg’s happening Stars, and a lecture by the critic and art historian Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006).
Brainchild of the curator Alice Denney (b. 1922), assistant director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (the sole contemporary art space in the nation’s capital at the time), the program brought the Judson group’s work to a wider swath of the visual art world than ever before; Judson Dance Theater was singled out the as festival’s most important feature. The Pasadena Museum assistant director Walter Hopps said, “Wow! Let’s fly the whole thing to the West Coast!”42 The Pop
