Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Trisha Brown on Tour

| 105 Trisha Brown on Tour Dancing Times 86, no. 1028, May 1996 I had written an advance article on Trisha Brown for the NewYork Times Arts & Leisure section that was ultimately “killed.” The assignment fell between two editors who didn’t communicate clearly with each other.That was the first time I approached Arts & Leisure (well before John Rockwell was its editor). They had accepted the pitch and made the assignment with a warning: “Ask Trisha the hard questions.” I guess they weren’t hard enough because the story was pulled at the very last minute. I was devastated. So when the venerable editor of London’s Dancing Times, Mary Clarke, asked me for a feature pegged to Trisha’s tour of England, I was more than ready to comply. David Vaughan, author and archivist at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, who had recommended me to Clarke, encouraged me to “cannibalize” the article that never saw the light of day. During the heyday of the Grand Union, the legendary dance improvisation group of the early seventies, Steve Paxton would occasionally take up the microphone, and, very softly, tell the story of Trisha the Wild Child: “Trisha grew up in a forest; she made friends with the coyotes, slept in trees, and could foretell the weather. By age seven, her teeth were broken and stained with blackberry juice.” The story was embellished differently each time, and as was the custom in the Grand Union, it was sheer fabrication based on solid suspicion. Trisha Brown’s connection to nature, her prescience, and her relish for adventure have served her well as a choreographer. When Brown improvised in the sixties, it was not uncommon to see her stop dead in her tracks and drop to the ground, hurtle through the air, or sit still so long that she seemed to disappear. She was, in her words, “practicing not knowing what I was about to do.” She seemed able to be rebellious and peaceful in the same moment. Her choreographic project addressed how to preserve these moments, or, put in a more general way, how to adapt the essential wildness of improvising to the slightly tamer art of choreography. The solution, for Brown, lay not in the accepted theme-and-variations format of mainstream modern dance. As part of Judson Dance Theater in the early sixties, she experimented with game-like rules, the collapsibility of the body, and ways to involve the audience. In the seventies she focused on simple clear structures that allowed her to build a movement style and vocabulary. Her “equipment pieces” defied gravity while exploring physical mechanics and perceptual illusion (e.g., using harnesses to walk on the wall) so that the viewer feels like she’s looking down on people walking on 106 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer a sidewalk far below. She was always looking for ways of subverting expectation . Her love of the outdoors took her to rooftops, lakes, and trees, where she ingeniously fit the human figure into the landscape. In each case she was attended by rapturous, incredulous, and small audiences. Witnessing a performance of this kind, one’s sense of place and possibility was inevitably expanded. In the eighties Brown became known for her collaborations with artists of international stature: Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Nancy Graves, Don Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Lina Wertmuller. She welcomes the artistic interference. “These are always fateful, riskful situations,” she says. “It makes a larger picture.There are two or three of us and we’re carving up the The exhilarating Set and Reset (1983) with Trisha Brown in the foreground. This photo is from the 1990s. (© Chris Callis) The Nineties | 107 culture one way or another, independently and together. That’s larger than what I would do on my own.” Brown met with some controversy in this step to expand.There are those who prefer the intimacy and single focus of the earlier work in galleries, lofts, and outdoors. But she has not lost her sense of place: she and her collaborators approach the proscenium stage as an architectural or philosophical challenge. For Set and Reset (1983), Rauschenberg replaces the wings with transparent fabric so that the dancers are visible backstage, thus asking the question of when they are, and when are they not, performing. In the ensuing years, Brown enjoyed a steadily growing audience, consistent critical acclaim, and an international touring schedule that places her...