Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art 1962–1987 by Susan Rosenberg (review)

Trisha Brown changed the landscape of dance, straddling the visual art and performance field, transforming not only how to perceive dance, but how to make dance—the actual action of movement creation. She redefined and expanded the idea of dance as art through her poly-directional and idiosyncratic dance language. Rosenberg makes this argument very clear in her compelling book as she puts Brown’s choreographic and aesthetic innovations into a larger artistic and social context.

Through examining Brown’s work, Rosenberg delves into specific pieces and years, explaining how, and why, these particular creations came about, engendered by the artistic inquiries and social communities of the time. It is from this perspective Rosenberg sheds light on what shaped Brown’s artistic journey, showing her immersed in the discourse and conceptual engagements with other seminal visual and film artists of the period, and emphasizes Brown’s participation in visual art and avant-garde festivals. The Anti Illusion Exhibit at the Whitney (1969), with artists like Richard Serra and Bruce Naumann provided, Rosenberg argues, a conceptual framework for Brown’s engagement at the Whitney Museum (1971). Rosenberg describes how some of the 1970s curators worked and commissioned visual artists to produce ephemeral works. She suggests that this was a “precedent for the rise of performance in the visual arts context,” and how for Brown, often as the sole invited dance artist, it “underpinned the introduction of Brown’s works to visual art settings.” Through this book, one gets a clear sense of how Brown and her artistic peers were in a constant dialogue, with an urgency to explore and to expand artistic and geographic boundaries.

In the chapter “Memory and Archive,” Rosenberg highlights Brown’s various “sources,” for lack of a better word. She points to the building blocks that enabled conscious and unconscious thoughts effecting the execution of body movements. Rosenberg manages not only to explain the innate idea of the transfer from a conceptual process to physical execution, but also places Brown within a larger inter-relational world. In doing so, she shows how the thought process enhancing movement invention is also intrinsically connected to the visual arts. As Rosenberg points out, Brown laid the foundation for her continued investigation into art-making. Her work became more complex and layered over time, delving deeper into structures, abstract narratives, and bodily expressions building from her early site-specific work, to equipment pieces, to her proscenium era, and later to her opera works.

The book’s final chapters explain in more detail Brown’s proscenium stage work. As a former dancer with Trisha Brown Dance Company, I appreciate this emergent, not often discussed or understood, conversation. It shows that the complex inter-relational aspects of Brown’s carefully constructed choreographies carry within each work an innate emotional expression. Rosenberg shares Brown’s early interdisciplinary position with the reader: “No one could buy my work in the art world, and the dance world said it wasn’t dance—which it probably wasn’t, I was caught in the crack doing serious work in a field that wasn’t ready for it.” The world is ready today. With the unfortunate passing of Trisha Brown in March 2017, this book is of particular importance.