about the Walker archives, which I was then studying. For a 2007 exhibition, Trisha Brown: Drawing on Land and Air (2007), organized by Margaret Miller, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Institute for Research in Tampa, Florida, I had the pleasure of presenting my first lecture on Brown’s work, as well as contributing my first full essay on her prints and drawings, at Ms. Miller’s invitation.
I was fortunate to report on Brown’s participation in the Rolex Mentor/Protégé Initiative (2011), during which I had many opportunities to observe Trisha Brown at work. Invaluable feedback from Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard University, on a text published in the journal October (2012) strengthened my ideas at an early stage of my writing. I appreciate the support of the October editor, Mignon Nixon, and thank the managing editor, Adam Lehner, for his editing and eye. Initial ideas for chapter 7 appeared in a review that was published in TDR: The Drama Review (2012). Thank you to Julie Martin of Experiments in Art and Technology and Jason Andrew of Norte Maar for inviting me to present a lecture at the New York Armory as part of the John Cage centennial celebration (2012) and to Sam Miller for the opportunity to speak at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (2013), where he is the director. I am indebted to Christina Hunter, director of the Nancy Graves Foundation, for suggesting that I write about Brown’s collaboration with Graves for a catalog accompanying the exhibition Nancy Graves Projects and Special Friends at the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany (2013). Information drawn from this text appears in a different form in chapter 9. At Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the former director, Liz Thompson, warmly hosted my visit to Beckett, Massachusetts, where Jacob Pillow’s director of preservation, Norton Owen, shared his vast knowledge while also patiently tracking down necessary documents and allowing me to study historical videos when I was a research fellow at the Pillow (2014). I thank Lisa Kraus for inviting me to participate in the 2015–2016 educational programs that were part of “Trisha Brown in the New Body,” a collaboration between the Barnes Foundation, Bryn Mawr College, and the Pennsylvania Ballet that was supported by the Pew Charitable Trust for Arts and Heritage. Participating in the Columbia University seminar “Dance Studies” led by Lynn Garafola brought with it the stimulation of being surrounded by a community of enormously knowledgeable dance scholars whom I greatly admire.
At St. John’s University I especially thank Dr. Jeffrey Fagen, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for granting a sabbatical from teaching (2012) and arranging for the provision of travel and research funding, enabling me to study archival resources that may otherwise have remained out of reach. I am also grateful to my wonderful colleagues in St. John’s University’s Department of Art and Design.
Individuals who were particularly helpful to my research in archives, museums, and foundations include Olivier Aldeano, Paris Opera Ballet; Janice Braun, Special Collections, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland, California; Anita Duquette, director of rights and reproductions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Gina Guy, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York; Dean Jeffrey, American Dance Festival Archives, Durham, North Carolina; Laura Laban, who oversees the legacy of Rudolf Laban; Kristen Leipert, archivist, Whitney Museum of American Art Archives, New York; Regina Miranda, executive director of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, New York; Caitlin Murray, archivist, Donald Judd Archive, Marfa, Texas; Janet Passehl, curator, the Le-Witt Collection; Lee Anne Tuason, archives assistant, the Juilliard School, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York; Kirsten Tanaka, head librarian/archivist, Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco; Jill Vuitech, archivist, Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis; and Loisann Dowd White, head of research services, and Virginia Mokslaveskas, associate reference librarian, at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Access to research materials was provided by a number of institutions: the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris; Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Fales Collection, Bobst Library, New York University; the Museum of Modern Art, Special Collections, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Special Collections, Washington, DC; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and the library of the Paris Opera Ballet. During the manuscript’s finalization Zoe Weitzman assisted with research and the book’s anonymous peer reviewers provided helpful comments.
Suzanna Tamminen, director and editor in chief at Wesleyan University Press, graciously and fastidiously shepherded the project from manuscript to book form, all the while remaining steadfast in her role as a sounding board, editorial voice, and supporter of my work. I thank Peter Fong, the book’s production editor, for his ongoing assistance and attention to detail, and for liaising with Mary Becker, who provided much-appreciated contributions as the book’s copyeditor, with Joanne Sprott, the book’s indexer, and with the University Press of New England: I am extremely fortunate for the team’s patience and professionalism in bringing this book to fruition.
Finally, I thank friends, Erica Baum, Emilie Gordenker, Barbara Kilpatrick, Alan Mandel, Ben Manley, Vicky Shick, Tim Turner, Lynne Woods Turner, and most especially Vicki Kurtz. All sustained me with their levity, their encouragement, and their affirmative presences. Trisha, and the ideals exemplified in her work, remained my thoughts’ most enduring accompaniment as I completed this project.
TRISHA BROWN
Introduction
Trisha Brown, Back to the Future
Trisha Brown (b. 1936)—recognized as one of the greatest dancers and most influential choreographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—has remained an enigmatic figure for dance historians. The creator of nearly one hundred choreographies and one ballet, the director of six operas, as well as a graphic artist whose drawings have earned a place in numerous exhibitions and museum collections, Brown has been accorded the highest awards for achievement in the dance field in the United States and France. Comprehending the breadth, depth, and impact of Brown’s fifty-year career is daunting, as well as complicated by a divide separating the choreographies that she created from 1962 to 1978, for nontraditional and art world settings, from the theatrical productions, involving visual presentations (sets and costumes) and music, that she realized from 1979 to 2012 and that brought her international acclaim.
Focusing on her first twenty-five years as a choreographer, this book illuminates artistic principles established during her formative years in relation to the first body of choreographies that she created for the proscenium context (1979–1987). Questioning the relevance of the distinction between choreography and visual art, this book locates Brown’s significance in terms of her prioritizing visual experience and insinuating visual art concepts into her works, methods, and processes. Influenced by John Cage’s ideas, Brown queried the definition of choreography, developed an abstract movement language, and forged integrated mind-body intelligences to demonstrate the cognitive-kinesthetic complexities of making, watching, and performing dances. While before her Yvonne Rainer had proposed and explored parallels between (minimalist) objects and dances,1 Brown, through an elaborate fiction of her own contrivance, established means by which to construct, differentiate, and visualize choreography’s specific artistic constituents, the basis for moving her work forward in a cumulative, deliberately evolutionary artistic trajectory during the years that this book covers.2
Brown’s investigations into choreography paradoxically introduced her work into the expanded field of 1970s art.3 Artists working across a range of mediums shared interests in making processes, site specificity, language, and the nature of ephemeral acts, whether sculptural or performative, to dissolve boundaries separating art’s discrete disciplines from one another.4 The visual art milieu not only provided Brown’s work its presentation context. The “white cube” gave her abstract work its internal logic and raison d’être during a vital period of interdisciplinary artistic and
