The experimental sound score reflects Brown’s response to Simone Forti’s extraordinary vocal improvisations and exposure to the music of Terry Riley and La Monte Young, followers of John Cage, who were accompanists, as well as participants, in Halprin’s workshop. Her choice of the score for Trillium may also have been reinforced by her November 1961 performance in Yoko Ono’s Carnegie Recital Hall concert, which featured music, movement, objects, sound, and action. Brown remembered, “I was invited to be in something that was some kind of a theater piece that was being done at Carnegie Hall with … a woman named Yoko Ono. I had a specific thing I had to do in dance, but she was making orgasmic sounds over a microphone out of sight. I didn’t know where she was. And another dancer was stacking cardboard boxes up. I had no idea what this was, but you know, Carnegie Hall certainly validated my presence in New York City to my parents at this point.”63
Accompanying a “rhythmic background of repeated syllables [and] a tape recording of moans and words spoken backward was an aria of high-pitched wails sung by Ono.”64 The orgasmic sounds Brown recalled—the element of the concert that is most often described—derived from Ono’s childhood memory of hearing the noise of a baby’s birth. Re-creating the sounds and manipulating them electronically so that they played backward, she proceeded to learn the piece, repeating these sounds as a live vocal performance.65
Ono’s work anticipates Brown’s use of Forti’s experimental vocal music, based on memories, such as “Simone Forti lying in bed, singing Italian arias” and Forti improvising in Halprin’s class: the image of “Simone with a garden pointed at her mouth, singing a beautiful Italian aria into the hose that is issuing water into her mouth simultaneously.”66 Brown said, “I didn’t know what category of behavior that went into. Simone brought a very accomplished level of improvisation back to New York.”67 “Simone did absolutely extraordinary things. When you see something that incredible and perceive it as poetic.”68
To comprehend the score’s symbolic function requires revisiting further aspects of Brown’s experience in Halprin’s class: how and why she arrived there, her perceptions and experiences of Halprin’s teachings, and ultimately the process by which she chose to introduce improvisational elements in her first choreographic composition.
At Mills College, Brown had studied traditional modern dance and traditional modern choreographic composition according to Louis Horst’s methods. The school’s Music Department was historically more progressive than its Dance Department; John Cage had taught there in 1954 and provided music for Horror Dream (1947), a choreography-for-film by the founder of the Mills College Dance Department, Marian van Tuyl (1907–1987). The Music Department influenced dance teachers with whom Brown studied: Eleanor Lauer, Rebecca Fuller, and the musical accompanist Doris Dennison (1908–2009), who had worked with Cage in the 1950s.
Figure 1.5 “Percussion Band,” John Cage and Marian van Tuyl, Oakland Tribune, 1941. Photograph © Don McDonagh, Special Collection, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland, California
Brown fondly remembers attending Sunday dinners at the home of the émigré composer and director of the Mills Music Department, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), who in the 1920s, in Paris, had been a member of “Les Six,” the most avant-garde musical composers of the day. During these gatherings Brown would assist his wife, the librettist Madeleine Milhaud, in the kitchen.69 When Brown studied dance off-campus, she did not go to Halprin’s workshop, as did other students, but instead went to Ruth Beckford’s studio.70 She claimed that at Mills improvisation was considered taboo, a point she made by paraphrasing Horst: “Louis Horst thought it [improvisation] was comparable to turning out the lights and announcing happy hour.”71
After graduation Brown became a dance instructor at Reed College: A 1958 college press release announced that “Patricia Brown, an outstanding young choreographer and dancer from Mills College, will conduct a series of classes of young children of varying groups during the day, and separate classes for beginning and advanced students during the evenings. Miss Brown will continue during the academic year as an instructor in physical education.”72 Reed’s Dance Department was part of the Division of the Humanities and Arts in 1949; in 1953, it moved to the Department of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, remaining there until 1967, when it came under the umbrella of the Department of Arts.
Brown’s decision to teach at Reed was influenced by the example of her teachers at Mills, especially van Tuyl, who was hired for a tenured academic position in 1938 in the midst of the Great Depression. Both Van Tuyl and Lauer described themselves as choreographers/dancers torn between the security of academia and the wish for recognition in the professional context of New York dance.73 In light of Janice Ross’s study of the split between academic dance and concert dance in 1950s America, these women’s desire to bridge this divide is exceptional and had an impact on Brown’s outlook as she embarked on her career.74
Mills College emphasized teaching, based on the 1950s supposition that women would want to balance dance with family life and children. Teaching was “an auxiliary skill, after graduation, to reinforce my conventional life,” Brown said. “Remember, this was the 1950s, a very closed era. I had been brought up to think of marriage, being a mother and a housewife as the most important thing.”75 Nevertheless, at Mills she was surrounded by impressive role models, “Doris Dennison, Becky Fuller, Marian van Tuyl and Eleanor Lauer … women of achievement.”76
At Reed, Brown said her students had no dance training. Liz Thompson, a nineteen-year-old Reed College student when she first met Brown (and who performed in Brown’s Roof Piece, 1971, years before they worked together when Thompson became director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 1980, a post that enabled her to become a major supporter of Brown’s work, as is discussed in chapter 9), recalled Brown teaching a highly eccentric version of Graham’s technique and alignment.77 Brown said she mostly used improvisation. This led her to seek the knowledge necessary to do her job, by studying with Halprin. She recalled, “The nature of the student body [at Reed] at the time was irreverence mixed with a complete lack of training and discipline.”78 Faced with teaching dancers “who didn’t fall into the categories of dance I had been taught at Mills,” she began improvising.79 “I needed to give them a dance experience without having to rely on these kinds of techniques and … so that’s why I went to Ann.”80
Figure 1.6 1960 Ann Halprin Summer Workshop participants at the dance deck in Kentfield, California. From left to right, standing, Shirley Ririe, Trisha Brown, June Ekman, Sunni Bloland, Ann Halprin, Lisa Strauss, Paul Pera, Willis Ward; seated: Jerrie Glover, Ruth Emerson, unknown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, A. A. Leath, unknown, John Graham. Anna Halprin/Papers/Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco. Photograph © Lawrence Halprin, provided by Museum of Performance and Design
Still, Brown was ambivalent, her irresoluteness suggested in a photograph of the Halprin summer 1960 workshop participants. Brown stands far to the left of the group with her long hair hanging over her face, covering it. She described the image