Brown’s approach to these successive performances of Homemade reinforces its significance as a meditation on various memory-specific and historical dimensions of movement, choreography and their transmission as new originals in each iteration. The conceptual dimension of her outlook is highlighted when compared with choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s work, Years Later (2006), created for Mikhail Baryshnikov. Like Homemade it incorporates a film (by Asa Mader), which is projected on a flat screen behind Baryshnikov’s present-day performance of new choreography. Showing the young Baryshnikov rehearsing in a Moscow ballet studio, the film offers a contrast between his precocious agility as a dancer and the more limited repertoire of movement characteristic of his Years Later live performance.
A celebrity portrait of a legendary dancer, Millepied’s work uses film to reflect on human and technical dimensions of loss in dance, as well as on themes of exile and aging. Homemade’s film component provokes contemplation of the nature of originality particular to a dancer at a particular moment in time; and in it, film is a mobile element that, while fragmentary in its representation of the dance, also introduces the site and the audience into the event of the performance (whereas in Years Later, film remains a static projection appearing as a backdrop for the dancing).37
A specific site influenced A string’s second part, Motor (1965; figure 2.9). Premiered at “Unmarked Interchange: A Concert for Ann Arbor,” it joined other works presented by an offshoot of Judson Dance Theater that orbited around Robert Rauschenberg from 1965 to 1966. The occasion was the annual ONCE AGAIN Festival—the last of a series of ONCE festivals, which started in 1961, to feature performances by the Ann Arbor–based experimental and multimedial performative ONCE group founded by Robert Ashley (together with George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda).38
Presented to an audience of about four hundred people on the top floor of the Maynard Street parking garage, on the University of Michigan campus, Motor involved two props: a Volkswagen car and a skateboard. More specifically the work was (as Brown later described it) a “duet with a skateboard as timing device, and partner, performed in a parking lot, lit by a Volkswagen, driver unrehearsed.”39 The earliest instance of Brown’s taking inspiration from a specific performance site/context,40 Motor directly relates to Robert Rauschenberg’s first dance, Pelican (1963). Titled by Trisha Brown,41 it is the most famous, remembered element of “America on Wheels” (1963), an event held at the National Skating Rink in Washington, DC, to complement the exhibition The Popular Image at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and a “Pop Festival”—both held in the gallery, which included concerts by John Cage (1912–1992) and David Tudor (1926–1996), Claes Oldenburg’s happening Stars, and a lecture by the critic and art historian Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006).
Brainchild of the curator Alice Denney (b. 1922), assistant director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (the sole contemporary art space in the nation’s capital at the time), the program brought the Judson group’s work to a wider swath of the visual art world than ever before; Judson Dance Theater was singled out the as festival’s most important feature. The Pasadena Museum assistant director Walter Hopps said, “Wow! Let’s fly the whole thing to the West Coast!”42 The Pop Festival’s exhibition proved controversial in bringing the work of artists representing a new sensibility—Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Watts, John Wesley, and George Brecht—to the city, home of the Washington School of Color Field painters.
Figure 2.8 Peter Moore, performance view of Robert Rauschenberg’s Pelican, 1963 (1965 performance by Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and Alex Hay). Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Robert Dunn organized the dance program (considered to be Judson Concert #5) as a series of simultaneous performances arrayed around the National Skating Rink—as is recorded on the “America on Wheels” printed, diagrammatic program. Brown performed Trillium (1962) at the rink’s center, dramatically lit by an overhead spotlight; in addition, she presented her second work, a duet with Steve Paxton, Lightfall (1963)—recently premiered at Judson Church Concert #4 on January 30, 1963, Brown’s first presentation of her work in the church.
These Washington performances by Judson members were overshadowed by Rauschenberg’s Pelican, today known through iconic photographs, including one showing Rauschenberg in roller skates, sporting a cumbersome parachute on his back, with Per Olof Ultvedt supporting the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s star dancer, Carolyn Brown, outfitted in a casual gray sweat suit and performing en pointe.
As Steve Paxton recalled, Pelican included other forms of motion: Rauschenberg and Ultvedt “enter[ed] the rink, dressed in gray sweat suits and balanced on their knees on axles attached to bicycle wheels … which they turned by hand, rolling into the space” in fits and starts.43 Discarding the wheels, they suited up in “backpacks to which were attached large pieces of fabric, like parachutes”44 and in roller skates; they engaged Carolyn Brown by circling and supporting her dancing, before exiting, again, by kneeling on their hand-driven bicycle axles. A poetic, visual, and kinesthetic presentation of different movement possibilities,45 Pelican was in Rauschenberg words inspired by conditions of the site: “I favor a physical encounter of materials and ideas on a very literal, almost simpleminded plane.”46
Asked if the roller skating was Pelican’s syntax or unifying image, Rauschenberg emphasized the concrete, pragmatic aspects of his artistic decision making, telling Richard Kostelanetz, “No, it was just a form of locomotion. There were other wheels in the dance too. It was just that once I established the fact that I was going to call the dance a piece and didn’t want it to be a skating act … then somehow the other ingredients had to adjust to that; so that Carolyn Brown … was dancing on points, which is just as arbitrary a way of moving.”47
Motor, created for a parking garage, employed a car and, like Pelican, contrasts different methods of motion and locomotion. Revealing a penchant for reductive simplification similar to her choice of Trillium’s task movements, Motor charts movement’s trajectory from the human body to the earliest, locomotive apparatus—the wheel (of the skateboard)—to the industrial and mechanized motion represented by the car. The car’s utilitarian, nonillusionistic, nontheatrical light source—intrinsic to the object (car) and the performance—made for a context within the context of the garage. As in Pelican, where bicycle wheels, roller skates, and pointe shoes altered (and impaired) movement, the skateboard—with its formulaic opportunities for movement—provided resistance in Brown’s improvisation, as did the car’s unforeseeable, “unchoreographed” behavior and illumination.
Figure 2.9 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Motor, 1965. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Motor