Over the years, Brown discussed her experience at Halprin’s with a few stories told mostly for humor and to convey her disorientation and fear—for example, describing A. A. Leath, a member of Halprin’s company (the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, founded in 1955), circling around her making loud grunting sounds. Brown said, “I just remember thinking that this whole thing was maybe even creepy. I kept telling myself just keep on participating at the level you can.”83 Simone Forti’s vocal and dance improvisations made the most significant impression on her. It was one such example that she solicited and recorded as Trillium’s soundtrack, preserving an exemplary instance of the kind of improvisational activity that informed Brown’s attitude toward Halprin’s teachings—what she perceived as both their deficiency and their potential: improvisation’s resistance to repetition as choreography but its potential to produce powerful, memorable images.
Each evening, Halprin had her students write her a letter; Brown said, “I would write her only one thing: ‘I would like to learn choreography,’ or ‘I would like to study choreography’; ‘When do we get to make dances?’ Her response to me was that she didn’t feel the group was ready to do that, and so I felt thwarted.”84 Brown compared this with her previous studies: “I didn’t have a sense that there was a curriculum or a structure or a sequence in the classes … some understanding of what we could do through improvisation. Ann may have had some game plan, but I wasn’t informed of it … if I said to one of my professors at Mills, I don’t understand this point of choreography, he had an answer for me and I remember the answers. Then I realized that she doesn’t do choreography, she improvises.”85 If these statements seem tainted by the years separating Brown’s later career from its beginnings, she expressed the same sentiments in a 1964 letter to Yvonne Rainer during a period (1963–1964) when Brown had briefly returned to California, taught classes at Mills College, and participated intermittently in Halprin’s workshops. In that letter, Brown complained to Rainer, “Ann has no sense of structure.”86
Ambivalence about improvisation’s arbitrary randomness—but also recognition of its potent lyricism—informed Trillium’s framing of improvisation in a simple structure. Seen through Brown’s vision of a wild-flower’s expiration, her “choreographing” (by reprising and re-creating) an example of one fleeting jewel-like memory of a vocal improvisation from Halprin’s workshop as her work’s sound score—together with her re-realization of that initial levitation on Halprin’s outdoor dance deck—counteracted her painful experience of lost, evanescent, onetime improvisational events. Trillium thus can be seen as a choreographic rendition of the theme of memento mori, a transposition to choreography of a motif common to seventeenth-century still-life paintings featuring exotic floral specimens (never wildflowers)87 and meant to inspire reflection on the vanity of life. Brown distilled the theme to suggest (as well as contest) the notion that choreographic art might be a vain pursuit, given dance’s fragility and ephemerality, to which she also referred in her image of the wild trillium flower.
Highlighting memory, loss, and mourning, Brown contrasts the fleeting, evanescent, nature of improvisation with choreography’s structural fixity and durability. Well before twenty-first-century dance historians and theorists came to define choreography of the modern period as “charged with a lament verging on mourning,”88 Brown, with startling clarity and formal rigor, questioned whether transient memory and improvisation, as represented in sound and movement, endure through choreography’s tangible, permanent elements (tasks). If the form and format of a temporal art form are contrived according to a fixed logic—encompassed in an image/object and in simple language—might choreography endure?
Brown’s dance objectifies transitory memory and dancing through artistic principles, a context unto itself. Its improvisational moments are contained, produced by an approach still marked by conventions and traditions of choreographic artistry—structure—while her work’s integrity and potential to thrive or die become measurable in relation to a context and to a particular historical moment in the dance’s reception. The recovered story of its provocation of an artistic conflict between experimentation and tradition secures for Trillium an important role in dance history, one deserving remembrance and acknowledgment.89
Identifying disappearance as intrinsic to improvisation, Brown imagines choreography as removed from any absolute or essentialized definition of ephemerality as an intractable attribute of choreography. The dance theorist André Lepecki writes, “If movement-as-the-imperceptible is what leads the dancing body into becoming an endless series of formal dissolutions, how can one account for that which endures in dance? How does one make dance stay around, or create an economy of perception aimed specifically at its passing away?”90 Brown’s Trillium responds to this artistic problem, insisting on improvisation as an ineffable, uniquely original but repeatable element occurring within a fixed choreographic score.
Lepecki’s view that “the casting of dance as ephemeral, and the casting of that ephemerality as problematic, is already the temporal enframing of dance by the choreographic”91 is articulated through Trillium’s presentation of a differential relationship between choreography and improvisation. For Brown the latter is always ephemeral, as contrasted with the durable elements of choreography. Her self-consciously crafted thematization of the memento mori theorizes in itself the notion of improvisation (not choreography) as “an art of self-erasure.”92 This transforms into a concept Lepecki’s belief that “[once] the question of dance’s presence began to be formulated as loss and temporal paradox, dance was transformed into hauntology and choreography cast as mourning.”93
When Trillium was presented in New York and New London, its dynamic of formalized task, chorographic logic, and indeterminate performance went unseen. Its title’s meaning remained a private element of its inspiration and meaning, whose implications for its author/choreographer differed from the audience’s experience. Spontaneity, not structure, was perceived to be Trillium’s prime attribute. As Steve Paxton wrote many years later, “I have after all seen Trisha Brown in Trillium (a pretty flower that grows in the woods) and been much moved…. The magic is not in the instruction.”94
Likewise the title’s magic, as related to Trillium’s composition/meaning, went unremarked by critics. Jill Johnston drew attention to Brown’s uncommon effervescence as a dancer and performer: her natural ability to evade gravity with a mixture of athleticism, restrained composure, and grace. She wrote, “Trisha Brown’s solo Trillium is spontaneous in another way. The short dance grows, flowers of its own natural accord…. It spreads internally so to speak and Miss Brown is a radiant performer.”95
Maxine Munt recognized in Trillium two themes, “a sit-down fall and handstands,”96 captured in one photograph showing her in an upside-down handstand with knees bent (see figure 1.1) and another showing her falling backward from a standing position (figure 1.7). Steve Paxton recalled, “It was odd to see a handstand in dance at that time. It was odd to see people off their feet doing anything but a very controlled fall,” and he remembered that Trillium also contained “a lot of very beautiful, indulgent movement.”97
Brown said, “Improvisation was not on the grid in New York. Bob Dunn thought it was not acceptable as an answer to a compositional assignment.”98 Paxton corroborated just how unusual and unique was Brown’s 1962 performance of live improvisation—also underscoring the fact that none of the deeply conceptual dimensions through which Brown brought Trillium to realization were recognized or understood. Paxton wrote, “I suppose that TRILLIUM was the first full-blown improvisation shown there, certainly a landmark for me. I recall that she performed it in an introverted fashion, yes shy, quick as lightning, short phrases, sudden shifts, at one point doing a quick, bent-legged hand stand, the body seen as animal and active outside the arena of