Choreographic Transmission in an Expanded Field: Reflections on “Ten Artists Respond to Trisha Brown’s Locus”

Introduction

I’m a former Trisha Brown dancer. I also direct the Bridge Project, a presenting program committed to multidisciplinary exchange. The Bridge Project began in 2010 as a platform for investigating the post-modern lineage with a special commitment to female choreographers, but has shifted to programming that expands the canon. I approach curating as a form of community organizing. When I envision or evaluate a program, I use a multi-disciplinary lens and draw on current conversations in literature, politics, and visual art.

Figure 1.

Isaiah Bindel and Hope Mohr in Gregory Dawson’s 15, part of “Ten Artists Respond to Locus,” 14 October 2016, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Photo by Margo Moritz)

In 2016, as director of the Bridge Project, I initiated “Ten Artists Respond to Locus,” presented in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, 14–15 October 2016. For the project, I partnered with other curators to commission 10 Bay Area artists from multiple disciplines to learn Brown’s dance Locus (1975) and respond with new work. The Locus project was the first time that the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) had allowed one of Brown’s dances to be transmitted beyond the company for the explicit purpose of inspiring new works of art by artists who hailed from disciplines other than dance.

Locus exemplifies Brown’s use of what she called “pure movement,” or, in her words, “movement that has no other connotations. It is not functional or pantomimic. Mechanical body actions like bending, straightening, or rotating would qualify as pure movement provided the context was neutral” ([1975] 2002:87). To make this “abstract dance,” Brown “designed an imaginary cube for each performer to inhabit, with points on it labeled with numbers corresponding to the letters of the alphabet. Dancers’ gestures literally spelled out sentences from a statement written by Brown as a professional autobiography” (Goldberg 2002:39). As former Brown dancer Mona Sulzman writes, Brown “immersed herself in self-imposed restrictions [...b]y remaining within the imaginary cube, adhering to the sequence of numbers (which once were letters and words), and using only one or several of the twenty-seven points as her sources for a given movement” (1978:122).

As the project director, I wanted to facilitate a conversation inspired by Brown’s work that included artists from a range of artistic disciplines and cultural backgrounds. I also wanted the culminating performances to bring together different aesthetics. To these ends, I made some initial selections, including a poet (Frances Richard), a visual artist (Tracy Taylor Grubbs), an experimental performance artist (Larry Arrington), and a choreographer with a connection to the Brown lineage (Gerald Casel, who danced with Stephen Petronio, Brown’s first male dancer). I then asked several curators rooted in different disciplines in the Bay Area to add to my list by nominating an artist, which resulted in the following cohort:

• Xandra Ibarra (performance art—nominated by Keith Hennessy)

• Affinity Project (theatre—nominated by Erika Chong Shuch)

• Cheryl Leonard (new music—nominated by Pamela Z)

• Amy Foote (new music—nominated by Adam Fong)

• Peiling Kao (choreography—nominated by Dohee Lee)

• Gregory Dawson (choreography—nominated by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)

• Larry Arrington (choreography—nominated by Hope Mohr Dance)

• Gerald Casel (choreography—nominated by Hope Mohr Dance)

• Tracy Taylor Grubbs (visual art—nominated by Hope Mohr Dance)

• Frances Richard (poetry—nominated by Hope Mohr Dance)

The above artists participated in an intensive two-week workshop with Diane Madden, coartistic director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, which included daily morning movement classes and afternoon sessions dedicated to learning Locus (or rather, as much of the dance as was possible given time constraints and the range of people in the room). After an additional two weeks of independent rehearsal, the project culminated in 10 premieres, all in one evening, by the participating artists in response to the process. The 10 pieces comprised Ten Artists...