Figure 1.7 Trisha Brown, Trillium, 1962. Photograph © 1964 Al Giese
His notion of Brown’s dance as “being choreographically lectured to” and presenting improvisational material in a “visually/kinetically comprehensible controlled form” articulates precisely what Brown’s critics overlooked. Maxine Munt asked whether the Maidman Playhouse program offered “really studio studies,”100 not finished works—a statement similar to Schönberg’s about Trillium as mere “material,” not “dance.” Trillium cast movement outside of any recognizable framework, a technique comparable to Cage’s redefinition of silence and noise, in their materiality, as sounds to be heard apart from any a priori technique or method for creating or categorizing music.
Trillium announces an investigation into choreography’s different components: the distinction between a score and its performance, between choreography and improvisation, and between movement as a series of pre-set forms versus live movement discovered in the moment, through the execution of a score’s instructions. If all that remain of Brown’s dance are the three simple tasks on which it was based—as well as the artifact of its audio accompaniment—Trillium’s problematic reception at ADF introduces new information about the history of 1960s dance and Brown’s complicated attitude towards her participation in it.101
Yet Brown’s display of improvisational virtuosity in performing Trillium (1962)—according to her—was considered by her peers to be overly personal, which she interpreted to mean that displaying her abilities as a dancer did not fit with their stern principles. Writing in her notebook (some years later), she remembered, “In the early years of my career I was distinctly able to levitate. Peer pressure against virtuosity stopped me. Now I can’t do it.”102
Informed by her later discovery and embrace of her idiosyncratically original talents as a dancer, Brown repeated these sentiments in an interview that partly explains the lack of nostalgia which characterized her view of the Judson era: “The great irony of Judson was the good joke they pulled on me: I happened to be a virtuosic dancer, and they said ‘no’ to virtuosity. I had this body capable of moving in ways that not even I fully knew—except that I tasted the rapture of that experience when I was improvising.”103 This statement dates from the moment (in 1978) when—after a sixteen-year hiatus in which she focused on choreography and movement’s objective dimensions and functions—Brown revisited her early interest in improvisation as the foundation for a new movement language, sourced from within the unique subjectivity of her dancing body. Thus the Judson ethos (perhaps as consolidated in Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 “NO” manifesto) had its powerful effect on Brown’s direction and artistic choices.104 As she later recalled, “I got the picture from everyone around me to tighten up my act. I wanted to fit in with the group…. I created a more systematized frame-work in which to behave.”105
Memory and Archive
A string: Homemade, Motor, Outside (1966)
2
The transition from improvisation (you’ll never see that again) to choreography (a dance form that can be precisely repeated) required great effort…. The ideas take a visual presence in the mind and one must find the method to decant that vision.— Trisha Brown1
Brown’s development of “a more systematized framework in which to behave” emerged in the three-part solo A string: Homemade, Motor, Outside (1966). Presented together with Brown’s Rulegame 5 (1964) on a March 29 and 30, 1966, concert (shared with a member of Judson Dance Theater, Deborah Hay), it marked the last of Brown’s three performances of her own work at Judson Church between 1963 and 1966—and her most ambitious choreography to date.
Together, A string’s three dances reveal Brown’s evolving sensibility with regard to her works’ site-determined nature, foreshadowed by Trillium. In juxtaposing dance to film in Homemade, to motion and technology in Motor, and to architecture in Outside, Brown introduced new, concrete models for framing choreography—“decanting it to vision”—all extending beyond Trillium’s elusive, metaphorical contrast of improvisation’s time-bound evanescence to choreography’s fixed, durable structure and context-based meanings.
Exceptional as the sole work from the early 1960s that Brown retained in her choreographic repertory, Homemade explores the issue of reprisal as a choreographic motif and choreographic-specific artistic problem. It presents a self-contained loop in which a live solo performance by Brown (wearing a simple black leotard and flesh-colored tights) is executed while she sports a film projector on her back—from which is screened, around the performance space, a 16 mm film shot by Robert Whitman showing Brown executing the same dance (with projector) that she performs live (see figure 2.2).
Figure 2.1 Robert Breer, program for Trisha Brown and Deborah Hay, Judson Church, March 29 and March 30, 1966. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
Homemade has much in common with earlier “expanded-cinema” projects juxtaposing live performance with projected film. These include Elaine Summers’s “intermedia” Fantastic Gardens (1965) presented at Judson Church and two Robert Rauschenberg works that adopt this format (and in which Brown performed), Spring Training (1965) and Map Room II (1965). The latter appeared in the 1965 “Expanded Cinema” programs at Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque, where Robert Whitman’s Prune Flat (1966; figure 2.3) featured live performers whose bodies occasionally served as screens for projected images, and sometimes as hosts for images of the performers’ nude bodies.2
Compared with these examples, Brown’s decision to precisely coordinate the relationship between the dance and film in a single work illuminates choreographic-specific artistic concerns and her medium-specific thinking in Homemade, a multimedial artwork. In expanded cinema, live acts were joined with projected images to create boundary-defying confusion between the “real” and the “illusory,”3 and film was introduced to contexts other than the traditional cinema. Presented at Judson Church, Homemade’s film was (likewise) not contained by a screen or wall; as Brown turned in space, the film was thrown onto wall surfaces and ceilings, and directly into the audience’s eyes (as bright projected light), bringing attention to the architectural setting and encompassing the site in the performance.4
Rather than blurring the lines between art formats, using techniques of cinematic montage, incorporating found footage or combinations of live/projected images for the purpose of creating dreamlike cinematic experiences—as did other works of expanded cinema—Homemade emphasizes the distinctive capacities, functions, and properties of live dance and film as independent mediums. Their interrelationship and simultaneity serve Brown’s singular investigation of choreography, as grounded in the function of the dancer in the choreography’s two reproductions, one live and the other recorded on film.
Homemade produces a new understanding of the role of memory in choreography and of artistic problems that surround an individual choreography’s potential for revival, survival, and originality. It exposes implications of the originality and historical specificity of any individual choreography/performance, including the ways these pertain to a performer’s role in each work’s specific presentation. Extending concerns with memory, memorialization, and preservation