Trisha Brown. Susan Rosenberg

      Figure 3.22 Trisha Brown, Walking on the Wall, Opposites, 1971. Photograph by Carol Goodden

      Writers discussed the strange perceptual effect of staring at the tops of dancers’ heads as if one were positioned above them.¹¹¹ With distance from the horizontal activity, the dancers could be seen climbing ladders and entering harnesses, much as contemporary sculptures’ hardware mechanisms were unconcealed. During repeated and returning walks, a dancer was required to step over the ropes suspending a dancer approaching from the opposite direction,¹¹² making for a performance exemplifying process in time, echoing Anti-illusion’s premises.

      Brown’s simplest explorations of gravity were displayed in Leaning Duets II (1971), Falling Duet I (1968), and Falling Duet II (1971; figure 3.23). In the 1968 version, one dancer falls over “like a tree cut down (dead weight), and the other dancer gets (scrambles) underneath and makes a soft landing with the total body surface, not hands. Stand, change roles, and repeat until too tired to continue.”¹¹³ Deborah Jowitt described the second version, a duet between Brown and Steve Paxton, as “less friendly, almost painful … involv[ing] lifts and carries in which the lifter … deliberately tosses or tumbles both people to the floor.”¹¹⁴

      Figure 3.23 Trisha Brown, Falling Duet II, 1971. Trisha Brown Archive, New York

      Skymap (1969), a dance that had no danced element, was inspired by Brown’s wish to locate choreography on an inaccessible surface, the gallery’s sixth wall typically used for mobile art’s suspension. She said, “I didn’t want to hang upside down with blood rushing to my head. It was just a way of getting onto the ceiling.”¹¹⁵ Her solution was a voice-recorded sound score: her calm, clinical recitation of a prewritten text, taking listeners on a guided, imagined tour of the United States as a cosmic map, during which she instructed audiences to envision and mentally enact words being moved, tossed, and placed on the ceiling.¹¹⁶

      Brown’s idea has several sources: it looks back to Simone Forti’s radical proposition that talking is dance in Halprin’s and Dunn’s workshops. Brown had not seen “the work where Simone Forti read something off a piece of paper and called it a dance,”¹¹⁷ but she had danced an improvisation based on text, in 1963. As part of the YAM Festival, Brown appeared on a May 12–13, 1963, program at the Hardware Theater for Poet’s Playhouse on West Fifty-Fourth Street, presenting 2 Improvisations on the Nuclei for Simone by Jackson Mac Low (1961), a work created for Forti (who had performed it in 1961 at George Maciunas’s short-lived AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue).

      Figure 3.24 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown in Two Improvisations on the Nuclei for Simone by Jackson Mac Low (1961), 1963. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY

      Mac Low typed a series of short texts on 3-by 4-inch index cards, sentences generated by chance procedures to inspire improvisations;¹¹⁸ the cards—what Mac Low referred to as an “action pack”—originated in his play The Marrying Maiden: A Play of Changes (1960), performed by the Living Theater (with music by John Cage). For that event he produced 1,200 cards, instructions for random disruptions of the play’s narrative script. He reduced the number to 108 for Forti, and Brown’s 1963 rendition included only 3 cards.¹¹⁹

      Photographer Peter Moore documented Brown’s performance, about which she recalled, “I was in such fear … such dread dread dread … I started out by saying this dance is called Nuclei for Simone Forti. I’m not Simone Forti. Then I combusted somehow, I was sitting on a chair … I got up on it and I was sort of squatting on the … heavy … well-built chair—and I leaned over and I licked the back of the chair,” as is seen in one of a series of Peter Moore’s photographs. Brown continued, “That was insane … It was beautiful, but it scared me to death … because you have nothing to hide behind. And you know the audience is squirming.”¹²⁰

      Figure 3.25 Postcard sent by Earle Brown to Trisha Brown, 1965. Trisha Brown Archive © The Earle Brown Music Foundation