of her seven-floor loft building, Brown realized Man Walking with basic mountaineering equipment purchased at Tent and Trail’s Chamber Street store. Rigging the body, like Cage’s preparation of a piano, she situated two belayers, the artist and anthropologist/artist Richard Nonas and the artist Jared Bark, on 80 Wooster Street’s roof. Their manipulation of a simple rope-and-pulley system enabled the walker, her husband at the time, Joseph Schlichter, to release his weight into their hands and, as the film documentation reveals, perform a reasonably accurate reproduction of the act of walking. With back held straight, perpendicular to the building and parallel to the ground, he promenades, seemingly effortlessly, in an altered orientation to gravity’s inexorable logic (see figure 3.7).62
Man Walking redescribes the compositional logic of Cage’s indeterminacy lecture, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy” (1958), published in Silence (1961). As described by Cage, with an invitation from the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt, he “decided to make a lecture within the time length of his Music of Changes (each line of the text whether speech or silence requiring one second for its performance), so whenever [he] would stop speaking, the corresponding part of the Music of Changes itself would be played.”63 In a recorded iteration, “Indeterminacy, New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, Ninety Stories by John Cage with Music,” originally issued in 1959 as Folkways FT 3704, Cage presented ninety stories spoken aloud but so that each would take only one minute, a choreographing of time that he had earlier explored in “4′33″”. In that work, the activity of opening and closing the cover of the piano’s keyboard according to Cage’s deliberate structures, based on time, served to frame silence and thereby redefine ambient sound/noise as music.64 Man Walking equates time with the walker’s travel and path through space, between two fixed points of architecture (rather than in relation to parameters provided by a stopwatch’s increments).
Figure 3.6 Poster for “Dances in and Around 80 Wooster Street,” 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden
Figure 3.7 Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden
Brown alluded to Cage’s ideas as her source: “All those soupy questions that arise in the process of selecting abstract movement according to the modern dance tradition—what, when, where and how—are solved in collaboration between choreographer and place. If you eliminate all those eccentric possibilities that the choreographic imagination can conjure and just have a person walk down an aisle, then you see the movement as an activity.”65 “This space of time is organized,” Cage wrote in “Lecture on Nothing.”66 Brown’s Man Walking replies, the space of a walk organizes time and visualizes space.
“Man Walking,” Brown said, “came out of a realization that modern dance has a method of choreography … that dance has a beginning, a middle and end. I thought where do I begin? You start at the top of the building and you tell them to walk down … And when they reach the ground it is the end. It had a structure to it, albeit a very spectacular dance,”67 a description that set her work against Yvonne Rainer’s emphasis on spectacle’s negation in her “NO” manifesto.68 Using “equipment” meant that there “were so few choices: the structure, the set up, made the choices.”69 Man Walking visualizes choreography-as-structure in relation to a site.
Describing her work as a “dance machine,” Brown evoked Sol LeWitt’s 1967 definition of conceptual art: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.”70 As she said, “Man Walking was like doing Planes but purifying the image. It had no rationale. It was completely art.”71 Walking and running were common movement choices in 1960s dance: for example, in Yvonne Rainer’s We Shall Run (1963), where seven dancers and nondancers ran in patterns for twelve minutes to Berlioz’s Requiem (1837), and in Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover (1967), where dancers and nondancers traverse space, stopping, sitting, and moving on, displaying a cornucopia of styles, comportments, and postures of walking manifested in different bodies. Paxton said pedestrian movement was used “to eliminate the look of learned movement.”72 To Judson participants’ inquiry “Can walking be dance?” Brown proposed a more fundamental question: “What is walking?”
Framed by architecture, and thereby both attached to and separate from everyday life, each incremental movement choice enacted under new empirical conditions made for a fictional re-creation of mundane behavior. The performance depends on the dancer’s physical memory and the organization of (or failure to organize) walking’s elements: legs, arms, back, hips, and head are adjusted in relation to a known activity, encompassed in language, in an effortful reconstruction whose greatest challenge is for the feet to maintain the effect of traction against the wall, while floating in space. Rather than showcasing pedestrian behavior to dispense with choreography, Man Walking reveals the choreographed aspect of everyday life’s forms.
When reprised at the Whitney Museum of American Art in September 2010, each performance started with the walker cantilevering forward in space with the soles of the feet barely touching the point where the building’s face joined the roof. One performer, the choreographer and first male dancer in the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, described “reaching [his] head into space and lengthening [his] body, to create tension against the building, while trying to hold onto space at the molecular level, even as the body [was] telling [him], ‘This should not be happening—don’t do this.’”73 The choreographer Elizabeth Streb, the first woman to perform the walk, recounted of her Whitney performance, “I felt like an idiot savant: like ‘I don’t remember how to walk.’”74
Edgar Degas’s preparatory sketch for the painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879)—on view at New York’s Morgan Library during the 2010 performance of Man Walking—is an antecedent of Brown’s dance. A woman is suspended, like a caught fish, from a high wire gripped in her mouth, and her body made strange by its role in a circus act. It details the apparatus of the performer’s suspension, a wooden plaque hollowed to hold her bite, attached to a simple hook—the mechanism of her upward lift to the tent’s heights.
Man Walking—particularly the 2010 version—likewise revealed the apparatus that made movement possible: this was because a new, highly visible metal rigging system was provided by a company that serves primarily the entertainment industry. Their technology was not optimal for the performances, but it would have been impossible to know that. However, when BANDALOOP’s Amelia Rudolph performed the work at UCLA in 2013, a less visible and simpler apparatus was used, and this made for a seemingly more natural performance.75
One could see the walker being held/lifted while trying to exert her or his weight/force to descend. The most natural of human acts is shown to be a function of gravity. The body becomes a material altered by structure, and choreography appears to be self-contained, self-generating, and object-like. Realized two years after Neil Armstrong’s historic, televised walk across the moon’s surface on July 11, 1969, Brown’s work resonated with popular interest in antigravity situations, which showed bodily experiences of weight, spatial coordination, and movement to be contingent, unnatural. A 1976 letter from the editor of Astronautics and Aeronautics sent news of her works’ resemblance to space-exploration research; Brown was invited to visit NASA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to observe simulations of zero-gravity
