Ballet’s use of rope equipment anticipates this material’s vertical repurposing as part of an efficient new choreographic production system, while Autobiography previews its foundation in a pedestrian action surprisingly reoriented in relation to a quotidian situation. Part Fluxus event, part choreography, Autobiography involved Brown’s “endeavor[ing] to collapse and organize my mornings on the hood of a car. I had a camper stove, and I lit it. I sat there on the hood drinking coffee, then performed yoga while the car drove around Naponack, where, at the time, I owned ten acres of land.”58 While evocative of works such as Music by Alison (1964) in which—sitting on a chair on Mercer Street—Fluxus artist Alison Knowles shook out her clothing, Autobiography is a dance: its title puns on the autobiographical actions unfolding on an automobile’s roof with the car serving as the dance’s vehicle of travel.
Brown used Carol Goodden’s test still for Autobiography to promote her April 18, 1970, “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” (1970): the picture shows her outfitted in patterned culottes and a striped T-shirt, executing a yoga shoulder stand on a car roof. The image tantalizingly predicts the astonishingly inverted everyday behavior seen in Man Walking and in other works’ siting in a relation to the totality of the environment surrounding Brown’s residence (see figure 3.6).
Dances were performed in an interior courtyard, on the second floor (Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque), and on the street. Brown embraced a location that a 1974 New York Times headline deemed “Gray, Grimy Wooster Street”59 and an aesthetic of urban detritus inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s work.60 She said, “I wanted to work with the wall … It was dark, dirty and there were exteriors of buildings that could become a place for a sort of performance. I chose this exterior wall and then thought—why not use mountain climbing equipment? I checked this out with Richard Nonas … and a few other guys that knew about dangerous acts in the world.”61
Figure 3.5 Trisha Brown, Autobiography, 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden
Conceived as a simple walk down the surface of the interior courtyard of her seven-floor loft building, Brown realized Man Walking with basic mountaineering equipment purchased at Tent and Trail’s Chamber Street store. Rigging the body, like Cage’s preparation of a piano, she situated two belayers, the artist and anthropologist/artist Richard Nonas and the artist Jared Bark, on 80 Wooster Street’s roof. Their manipulation of a simple rope-and-pulley system enabled the walker, her husband at the time, Joseph Schlichter, to release his weight into their hands and, as the film documentation reveals, perform a reasonably accurate reproduction of the act of walking. With back held straight, perpendicular to the building and parallel to the ground, he promenades, seemingly effortlessly, in an altered orientation to gravity’s inexorable logic (see figure 3.7).62
Man Walking redescribes the compositional logic of Cage’s indeterminacy lecture, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy” (1958), published in Silence (1961). As described by Cage, with an invitation from the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt, he “decided to make a lecture within the time length of his Music of Changes (each line of the text whether speech or silence requiring one second for its performance), so whenever [he] would stop speaking, the corresponding part of the Music of Changes itself would be played.”63 In a recorded iteration, “Indeterminacy, New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, Ninety Stories by John Cage with Music,” originally issued in 1959 as Folkways FT 3704, Cage presented ninety stories spoken aloud but so that each would take only one minute, a choreographing of time that he had earlier explored in “4′33″”. In that work, the activity of opening and closing the cover of the piano’s keyboard according to Cage’s deliberate structures, based on time, served to frame silence and thereby redefine ambient sound/noise as music.64 Man Walking equates time with the walker’s travel and path through space, between two fixed points of architecture (rather than in relation to parameters provided by a stopwatch’s increments).
Figure 3.6 Poster for “Dances in and Around 80 Wooster Street,” 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden
Figure 3.7 Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden
Brown alluded to Cage’s ideas as her source: “All those soupy questions that arise in the process of selecting abstract movement according to the modern dance tradition—what, when, where and how—are solved in collaboration between choreographer and place. If you eliminate all those eccentric possibilities that the choreographic imagination can conjure and just have a person walk down an aisle, then you see the movement as an activity.”65 “This space of time is organized,” Cage wrote in “Lecture on Nothing.”66 Brown’s Man Walking replies, the space of a walk organizes time and visualizes space.
“Man Walking,” Brown said, “came out of a realization that modern dance has a method of choreography … that dance has a beginning, a middle and end. I thought where do I begin? You start at the top of the building and you tell them to walk down … And when they reach the ground it is the end. It had a structure to it, albeit a very spectacular dance,”67 a description that set her work against Yvonne Rainer’s emphasis on spectacle’s negation in her “NO” manifesto.68 Using “equipment” meant that there “were so few choices: the structure, the set up, made the choices.”69 Man Walking visualizes choreography-as-structure in relation to a site.
Describing her work as a “dance machine,” Brown evoked Sol LeWitt’s 1967 definition of conceptual art: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.”70 As she said, “Man Walking was like doing Planes but purifying the image. It had no rationale. It was completely art.”71 Walking and running were common movement choices in 1960s dance: for example, in Yvonne Rainer’s We Shall Run (1963), where seven dancers and nondancers ran in patterns for twelve minutes to Berlioz’s Requiem (1837), and in Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover (1967), where dancers and nondancers traverse space, stopping, sitting, and moving on, displaying a cornucopia of styles, comportments, and postures of walking manifested in different bodies. Paxton said pedestrian movement was used “to eliminate the look of learned movement.”72 To Judson participants’ inquiry “Can walking be dance?” Brown proposed a more fundamental question: “What is walking?”
Framed by architecture, and thereby both attached to and separate from everyday life, each incremental movement choice enacted under new empirical conditions made for a fictional re-creation of mundane behavior. The performance depends on the dancer’s physical memory and the organization of (or failure to organize) walking’s elements: legs, arms, back, hips, and head are adjusted in relation to a known activity, encompassed in language, in an effortful