Everyday movement is revealed as a series of minute physical choices and cognitive-kinesthetic negotiations necessary to execute actions that are assumed to be “natural.” Subjected to “equipment,” movement’s components become visible, much as Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-action photography brought scrutiny to animal and human locomotion.9
Brown’s siting of her work outside of any connection to dance or art institution was not an emulation of visual artists’ circumvention of the commercial art system’s values. Context was the basis for empirical queries into choreography’s component elements. It was also expedient: venues for young choreographers’ work were limited.10 Her concern with choreography’s elements opened dialogue with visual art, where gravity and site specificity were central to contemporary sculpture.
Figure 3.1 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Lightfall, 1963 (Judson Church performance by Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton). Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Recalling her works’ fragility and her artistic isolation, Brown said, “No one could buy my work in the art world, and the dance world said it wasn’t dance—which it probably wasn’t. I was caught in a crack doing serious work in a field that wasn’t ready for it.”11 Between Planes (1968), her self-produced program “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” (1980), and her 1971 Whitney Museum program “Another Fearless Dance Concert,” that crack narrowed, facilitating her works’ entry into the visual art context.
In Planes Brown reimagined dance’s relationship to space and gravity, looking back to two 1963 works, Lightfall and Chanteuse Excentrique Américaine. The former, a duet created with Steve Paxton, was the first of Brown’s dances to be shown at Judson Church at Concert #4, January 30, 1963. Based on the instruction “to fall,” it was a game of task-based actions: one dancer crouches like a football player waiting for a play to begin; the other hops to sit on his or her back, but then is dumped to the ground when the supporting partner stands up, activating gravity’s entropic effect.12 Repeatedly rendered with the same expenditure of effort, Lightfall was accompanied by a soundtrack of Simone Forti’s whistling13 and was an obvious rejoinder to gravity-defying leaps and elevations in ballet and modern dance, as well as to falling’s codification in Doris Humphrey’s and Martha Graham’s techniques, and was therein a response to Yvonne Rainer’s critique of dance virtuosity in her 1966 “NO” manifesto. Lightfall also retranslates to choreography the legacy of Jackson Pollock’s use of gravity as a device in his drip paintings.
Rainer titled Lightfall, seeing it as “delicate in tone but still projecting an element of danger.”14 Robert Rauschenberg said it showed “how much risk they could take.”15 Jill Johnston wrote, “The dancers initiated a spontaneous series of interferences—ass-bumping and back-hopping—which were artless, playful excursions in quiet expectancy and unusual surprises,” continuing, “Brown has a genius for improvisation, for being ready when the moment calls, for being ‘there’ when the moment arrives,” describing this as “the result of an interior calm and confidence and of highly developed kinesthetic responses. She’s really relaxed and beautiful.”16
On June 10, 1963, Brown repurposed falling in Chanteuse Excentrique Américaine, transforming it into a harsh single act. She assumed ballet’s fourth position, leaned over, and as she remembered, “I held it as long as I could, and hit like a ton of bricks”17 while saying, “Oh no, Oh no.”18 She compared the fall to the effect of a “dead weight, like a tree cut down.”19 Titled by James Waring, it premiered at the “Pocket Follies,” at New York’s Pocket Theater (Third Avenue at Thirteenth Street), a program benefiting the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (founded by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham).20 Chanteuse exemplifies what Liz Kotz characterized as “a new type of work [that] began to appear [around 1960 in New York] consist[ing] of short instruction-like texts proposing one or more actions. Frequently referred to under the rubric of ‘event scores’ or ‘word pieces,’ they represent one response to the work of John Cage.”21 Related to the musical concepts of La Monte Young and to “events” pioneered by the Fluxus artist George Brecht, Chanteuse reveals a “[delimitation] of the work to a single event or object,”22 anticipating the focal role of gravity in the “Equipment Dances.” While gravity’s use as movement’s generator in Lightfall reversed Trillium’s hallmark levitational moment, the “Equipment Dances” brought together interests in movement impacted by gravity with dancers who appear to be untouched by its effect.
Planes (see figure 3.2) premiered in a traveling festival of interdisciplinary, technology-driven collaborative artworks, “Intermedia ’68.” John Brockman, its organizer (a twenty-six-year-old Columbia Business School graduate),23 clearly borrowed concepts from the ambitious collaborative “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” (1966), the brainchild of the Bell Lab technician Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg, which emerged from intensive dialogue between artists and engineers that resulted in sensational performances over nine nights at New York’s Lexington Avenue Armory.
Brockman’s commercially savvy program brought together underground 1960s artistic impulses—happenings, Fluxus, sound, and dance performance—in a project whose conception was based on artistic collaboration and that was created specifically to travel to different venues and attract wider audiences to avant-garde performance.24 He promoted “Intermedia ’68” with language drawn from descriptions of conceptual art—as a dematerialization of the object: “These people traffic in experience, not objects,” which “involves going to museums where objects hang on the wall and say ‘Look at me’ and the people look at the picture and see which artist did it, and then move on and it’s all finished.”25 “Who wants objects?” Brockman asked. “What’s interesting is process—seeing, feeling, sensation, the environment.”26
Many definitions of “intermedia” proliferated in New York beginning in 1966. Dick Higgin said it was “art that falls conceptually between established or traditional media.”27 Jud Yalkut’s “Critique: Understanding Intermedia” described overlapping “avenues of musical composition, an area expanded by composers … dancers … painters … and filmmakers” and recognized arts’ cross-pollination as a national phenomenon.28 For “Intermedia ’68” Brown collaborated with Yalkut, a filmmaker, close associate of Nam June Paik, founder of the USCO Collective, and pioneer of video art. He responded to Brown’s request for a film that “disguised gravity,”29 augmenting a choreography begun in 1967 by creating “technology that allowed [her] to support [her]self on a surface that was near-perfect vertical.”30
She altered a wall in her loft at 27 Howard Street, sinking “metal eyes into its surface [to] serv[e] as hand-and foot-holds”;31 this enabled “three dancers to appear to be free-falling as they traveled the area in slow end over end motion.”32 Her use of a surface plane was preceded by her experience of Halprin’s outdoor dance deck, “conceived,” Halprin said, “as a plane on which dance could be performed” and created in response to the site described by its architect, Lawrence Halprin, as “a level platform floating above the ground.”33
Figure 3.2 Trisha Brown, Planes, 1968. Photograph © 2015 Wayne A. Hollingworth, Trisha Brown Archive, New York
The deck’s natural siting inspired open-ended improvisation in real space and time. Oriented vertically, the surface of Brown’s plane produced