Figure 2.2 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Homemade, 1966. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Figure 2.3 Robert Whitman, Prune Flat, 1966. © 1966 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved
This combination of live and filmed dance contributes to the work’s deeply layered investigation of memory’s function in choreography, where it is an invisible but necessary component in the learning, repetition, and transmission of movement. Compared with other artists’ combination of live performance and film projection, Homemade stands apart for the unified, rigorously focused visual and conceptual nature of Brown’s artistic choices. All reveal memory’s function in choreography and dance, but also expose a much broader, discipline-specific problem for choreography: its potential to articulate its own definition of artistic originality.
Brown developed Homemade’s movements from a pedagogical model that she dated to Robert Dunn’s 1961–1962 class and teachings: there the use of “found” movement was the source of a new lexicon, common to many Judson Dance Theater members’ 1960s works. This method of “selecting” movement from everyday life and presenting it as dance relates to John Cage’s identification of music with “found sound” and, before him, to Marcel Duchamp’s nomination of “readymade objects” to the status of artworks: the recontextualization of banal “things” from the realm of the everyday to the art realm, provoking inquiry into art’s (or dance’s) definition.
Much as Trillium (1962) consolidated pedagogical principles and re-instantiated particular improvisational events, dating to Ann Halprin’s 1960 summer workshop—applying them to her thematic concern, memorialization—Homemade adopts an early 1960s lingua franca, “everyday movement,” structuring its use according to a systematic concept related to Brown’s work’s exploration of memory. As she explained, “I used memory as a score. I gave myself the instruction to enact and distill a series of meaningful memories, preferably those that impact on identity.”6 With this notion Brown excavated quotidian physical actions related to her childhood or to her current experience as a new mother—vivid movement forms instilled with a private reservoir of emotional affect.
Proposing that the body is an archival repository from which kinesthetic-cognitive material can be retrieved, Brown described Homemade’s movements as “vignettes of memory.”7 Her extraction and framing of pedestrian behaviors from the flow of everyday life and reminiscence so as to present them as dance are metonymically reiterated in the cinematic framing of the recorded version of the choreography.
As a solo dance composed of “microscopic movement taken from everyday activities, done so small they were unrecognizable,”8 the work’s juxtaposition of decontextualized, remembered behaviors tests the limits of gestures’ readability, suggesting a private sign language for which the audience lacks a manual. Interested in connotative gestures and images whose sources are disguised, Brown considered how movement might register on the edge of a viewer’s vision, eliciting her or his desire to impose order on actions that do not cohere in a narrative.
Many of the gestures’ sources are mysterious; others are readily recognizable—or can be correlated to documentations of Homemade’s components, which Brown wrote down when she reprised it in 1996. In its opening move Brown, with her legs subtly vibrating in place, turns a knob and pulls out a fishing line, an image also evocative of the spooling of film on an editing device. Some movements reference outdoor activities from her childhood growing up on the edge of the Olympic Peninsula’s forests and waterways. These include digging for clams, drawing in the sand, or throwing a football, but also activities such as blowing up a balloon or prancing as if one were wearing oversized shoes.
Brown gazes into an imaginary mirror, checks a wristwatch, nods in acquiescence to a teacher or “master”; she enacts domestic activities: holding, cradling, and kissing a young child or lifting an infant from his bassinet.9 Humor punctuates the dance’s relatively even-toned presentation: she emulates the prideful display of a “muscle man,” measures a large caught fish, and most dramatically, at the dance’s beginning, jumps into a pair of slippers placed on the floor. Deborah Jowitt described the actions as “the laundry list of a highly interesting housekeeper.”10
Robert Whitman’s color film zooms in on some of Homemade’s gestures and Brown’s facial expressions, enhancing the visibility of these small movements for the audience. The edits interrupt the smoothly flowing simultaneity of the live dance and its cinematic counterpart. These discrepancies call attention to a challenge faced by the performer: that of producing a rendition that keeps time with the projection, which is invisible, unfolding behind her. Through these dual simultaneous performances, Homemade makes visible the fact that each performative iteration of a choreography always slightly differs from every other, is subtly indeterminate in relation to the choreography’s enduring score. Ellipses in Whitman’s film highlight the impossibility of realizing perfect fidelity to an original choreography in any one example of its performances. Juxtaposing a live to a recorded dance heightens the experience of choreography’s visually precise forms, just as the film documents an individual (unique) performance and (imperfectly) records the choreography’s score.
In light of the dance’s miniaturized gestures and the film’s use of closeups, Carrie Lambert-Beatty interprets Homemade as punning on the idea of the performer’s “projection” of her onstage presence.11 Other interpretations are possible: the relationship of live dance and projected film foreshadows the rise of live feed projection; the video Portapak’s first artistic use dates to 1965. Brown’s effort to closely coordinate the dance’s two iterations evokes the possibility that the live act itself is being projected; the relation of body, apparatus, and projected images also recalls the inventor/photographer Julie Étienne-Marey’s experimental 1872 Odograph, in which a handheld stylus seismographically recorded foot movement patterns.12
The cinematic apparatus (including the electrical cord and sound of the projector’s motor) is clearly visible and audible, a physical object that Brown negotiates on the stage, reminiscent of visual artists’ (such as Bruce Nauman’s or Dan Flavin’s) refusal to hide the technology of cords and switches in their illuminated works.13 The film and title point to the idea of a home movie: many of movements were drawn from a time in Brown’s life after her son’s February 1965 birth: “I had a very young son, an infant, and this is before women’s liberation. It was a big question whether I could continue as a professional or not. The question came not from me, but from society. I worked at home a lot, taking care of this wonderful child and did a lot of my work in the studio that I had.”14
Homemade’s movements are executed in accordance with the (Cagean-derived) method Brown had applied in Trillium (1962): without transitions between them. As Brown said, introducing transitions was “likely to slur the beginning and the end of each discrete [movement] unit,”15 which she wished to be seen in a side-by-side serial fashion. By 1966, the placing of one thing after the other was a well-established compositional strategy in visual art adopted by painters and sculptors as a method for avoiding the appearance of subjectively inflected compositional decision making.
Especially important was Brown’s instruction to execute Homemade as a “live score” whose performance was not to be realized through the repetition of memorized movements, but instead by conceiving the body’s physical memories as deeply buried in it and made available through simultaneous access to the corporeal and the cognitive. With this notion Brown proposed that her performance involved a translation process, with her physical instrument mediating between thought/feeling, on the one hand, and kinesthetic articulation, on the other. Brown