When reprised at the Whitney Museum of American Art in September 2010, each performance started with the walker cantilevering forward in space with the soles of the feet barely touching the point where the building’s face joined the roof. One performer, the choreographer and first male dancer in the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, described “reaching [his] head into space and lengthening [his] body, to create tension against the building, while trying to hold onto space at the molecular level, even as the body [was] telling [him], ‘This should not be happening—don’t do this.’”73 The choreographer Elizabeth Streb, the first woman to perform the walk, recounted of her Whitney performance, “I felt like an idiot savant: like ‘I don’t remember how to walk.’”74
Edgar Degas’s preparatory sketch for the painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879)—on view at New York’s Morgan Library during the 2010 performance of Man Walking—is an antecedent of Brown’s dance. A woman is suspended, like a caught fish, from a high wire gripped in her mouth, and her body made strange by its role in a circus act. It details the apparatus of the performer’s suspension, a wooden plaque hollowed to hold her bite, attached to a simple hook—the mechanism of her upward lift to the tent’s heights.
Man Walking—particularly the 2010 version—likewise revealed the apparatus that made movement possible: this was because a new, highly visible metal rigging system was provided by a company that serves primarily the entertainment industry. Their technology was not optimal for the performances, but it would have been impossible to know that. However, when BANDALOOP’s Amelia Rudolph performed the work at UCLA in 2013, a less visible and simpler apparatus was used, and this made for a seemingly more natural performance.75
One could see the walker being held/lifted while trying to exert her or his weight/force to descend. The most natural of human acts is shown to be a function of gravity. The body becomes a material altered by structure, and choreography appears to be self-contained, self-generating, and object-like. Realized two years after Neil Armstrong’s historic, televised walk across the moon’s surface on July 11, 1969, Brown’s work resonated with popular interest in antigravity situations, which showed bodily experiences of weight, spatial coordination, and movement to be contingent, unnatural. A 1976 letter from the editor of Astronautics and Aeronautics sent news of her works’ resemblance to space-exploration research; Brown was invited to visit NASA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to observe simulations of zero-gravity conditions in a scientific laboratory context.76
Man Walking condenses a vast legacy of postwar art, not only redefining dance, but also asserting choreography’s place in visual art tradition. In its transparent analysis of choreography’s elemental components, the work opens to cross-comparisons with visual artists’ works. Brown’s shift of walking from horizontality to verticality echoes Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955): a readymade object transformed by a 90-degree shift (plus the addition of paint) into an art object. Literally presented “off the wall,” Man Walking bears connection to Rauschenberg’s combines such as Canyon (1959), where an object suspended from the canvas’s frame enters real space, and Elgin Tie (1964), presented at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (see figure 3.8).
Rauschenberg’s descent from ceiling to floor anticipated Brown’s vertical walk, just as it built on Simone Forti’s Slant Board (1961; figure 3.9), in which a wooden platform mounted at a 45-degree angle against a wall is attached with ropes that provide a movement score, inciting performers’ actual energy expenditure to perform the repeated tasks of climbing and descending this surface plane, negotiating gravity. Whereas the duration and number of repetitions in Forti’s dance are a matter of choice, Brown adopted the framing device of architecture to establish the parameters for her choreographic act.
Brown’s work resonates with La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #1 to Bob Morris: Draw a Straight Line and Follow It (1960) and with Richard Long’s performative photograph, A Line Made by Walking (1967; figure 3.10).77 Her rigging of the body and intervention into urban space anticipate Gordon Matta-Clark’s site-specific, sculptural interventions into architecture and his 1973 Vassar College Tree Dance—and also coincide with Richard Serra’s rigging of his large-scale sculptural works.78
Carol Goodden, Matta-Clark’s companion, performed in Brown’s Leaning Duets [I] (1970) in the “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” program, presented on the street by five pairs of dancers: one version without “equipment” and the other using “rope devices with handles … to achieve a greater angle.”79 (See figure 3.11.) An elemental statement about gravity’s role in movement’s production, Leaning Duets pairs two dancers side to side, with feet planted adjacent to one another. Using their bodies as ballast, they cantilever away from one another and from gravity’s center. This precarious balance gives way, propelling their bodies’ forward momentum to repeat the task. Physical negotiation was accompanied by verbal communication: “Give me some weight” or “Give me a lot” or “Take a little.”80
Figure 3.8 Robert Rauschenberg, Elgin Tie, 1964. Image © Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photograph by Stig T. Karlsson. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York
Figure 3.9 Simone Forti, Slant Board, 1961. Photograph 1982, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969; figure 3.12) mobilizes gravity through the contingent, choreographed act of setting up four self-supporting lead slabs, unfastened and leaning against one another, to create a precariously balanced cube.81 Each lead square’s great weight implies falling’s potential danger, while exemplifying Serra’s idea of “choreography in relation to material.”82 Serra acknowledged dance’s influence as prompting him to consider the idea of “the body passing through space, and [its] movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.”83 Brown had written the dance critic Edward Denby hoping he would attend her performance84 whose gender-crossing dangerous act challenged a 1970s situation described by painter Susan Rothenberg: “The women were all dancers; the men were sculptors”85—a statement that captures period-specific thinking but not the fact that there were men who danced and women who sculpted. Brown later said that Yvonne Rainer, who missed the performance but had heard about it, remarked to Trisha, “That sounds tough.”86
Figure 3.10 Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967. Photograph and pencil on board, 375 × 324 mm. Tate Gallery, London, purchased 1976. © 2015 Richard Long. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London / ARS, NY. Photo: Tate, London / Art Resource, NY
Figure 3.11 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Leaning Duets, 1970. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY