Brown considered John Cage her most important influence.7 Revisiting his effect on her choreographic concepts and creative processes does not merely serve to subsume them under the ever-expanding “Cage effect”—the corpus of musical, performative, and visual artworks that have recently been shown to be unthinkable apart from his teachings and writings.8 Rather, recognizing how Cage’s thought and writings provided Brown’s work one of its most significant throughlines goes far to explain the uniqueness of her artistic journey and the unprecedented situation at the crossroads of dance and visual art and their histories, which her work occupies.
Reassessing Brown’s response to Cage’s ideas, and in particular what he described as his “exploration of non-intention,”9 contributes to an understanding of the seemingly counterintuitive route by which she subjected choreography to incremental analysis, bringing a visibility to differences separating choreography from improvisation, from gesture, from movement, and from dancing. Instead of making movement and organizing it into dance, Brown discovered movement as an effect of choreography. While in the early 1960s she, together with her peers in Judson Dance Theater, expanded the physical behaviors that qualified as dance, Brown subsequently embarked on an inquiry into choreography’s particular component parts, leading her to invent her own original abstract movement vocabularies. As this book reveals, according to Brown’s nomenclature, it was only in 1978, at the age of forty-one (and after sixteen years as a professional choreographer), that she introduced what she considered “dancing” to her choreography.
The stringency of Brown’s artistic discipline was such that most of the works she made during her early years are of extreme brevity: the majority are less than five minutes long. Most important, and so obvious as to go unremarked, is that apart from two works of the 1970s, all of Brown’s abstract dances (until 1981) were deliberately set to silence, breath, and the sound of footfalls, thereby embracing Cage’s concept of music: silence ensured undistracted attention to movement forms without their subservience to other sources—musical, character-based, or narrativizing. In their succinctness and self-containment, these early works emulate properties of objects with the visibility of their concepts and forms enabling these concise (and often transparently concept-driven) dances to persist in the mind and memory. Ultimately, dancing’s emergence from within explorations internal to Brown’s work and development announced a turning point that paved the way for her 1979 transition to working on the theatrical stage.
Part of a generation of artists who rejected biography as the basis for understanding their art, Brown held dear her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest (in Aberdeen, Washington), to which she often referred as the source of her “natural movement” language. She joked that a high school aptitude test predicted career success as a music librarian;10 in fact, her two great-aunts were renowned scholars of American–Native American relations and among the first American women to receive PhDs in the 1920s (at Yale University).11 When, in the 1970s, dance critics called her a “brainy choreographer,” she was not necessarily being paid a compliment. But she wore the characterization lightly, translating this identification of her discipline and systematicity as an artist into a publicly accessible self-description: “bricklayer with a sense of humor.”12 Brown’s ideas, gleaned from many interviews in the 1970s, reveal her mission to educate audiences about her creative processes and how to look at her work—as well as her effort to make more accessible the legacies of experimental dance in which it remained grounded.
By contrast, with her ascent as a great American choreographer working on the stage, she remained cautious about sharing the faceted complexity underpinning the crafting of her dances. This choice, an outward distancing of her work from visual art ideas, still a touchstone, deprived audiences of valuable information, but reflected Brown’s evolving desire for her work to be perceived and assessed as choreography/dancing and awareness that her obsessively conceptual, as well as research-based, working process had become a means to an end: no longer essential to engaging her public or to asserting the seriousness of her artistic enterprise.
Brown started her career in 1962, introducing a work created in the experimental context of the downtown New York avant-garde to the conventional context of the American Dance Festival, a deliberate challenge to established institutional values and assumptions. Similarly, in the initial 1979 choreography (Glacial Decoy), created specifically for the theatrical stage, she adopted a critical attitude toward expected uses of theatrical space—as Craig Owens was the first to point out.13 Having derived her work over the previous decade from the “white cube,” she re-sited a dance created in one context, the loft-studio, to that of another, the “black box.” Taking to the stage, Brown invited her contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg, Fujiko Nakaya, Donald Judd, and Nancy Graves to intervene in her choreographic processes, with Brown orchestrating a multiplicity of interacting artistic intentions, much as she did while working with her dancers in the studio, eliciting their contributions to her work’s realization. Her increasingly ambitious theatrical productions, from 1979 to 1987, all share proximity to artistic values of 1960s and 1970s art, with their unity of concept and result reflecting Brown’s continuous exploration of visual experience within the temporal and ephemeral terms of her discipline, choreography. From fascination with the effect of dancing and choreography as seen in relation to the theater’s apparatus, structure, and sightlines, she transformed her path through visual art to establish principles that defined her mature work as a choreographic artist.
Throughout her career Brown strongly resisted categorization. A rare statement on the subject is documented in a 2001 interview with the New York Times. Asked about “her legacy and how she would like her work to be seen fifty years from now,” she replied, “My purpose is to communicate through choreography that meets the standards applied to visual art.”14 The comment was prompted by the particular legacy-making venture announced in the report: her designation as one of “America’s 100 Dance Treasures” and inclusion in “a commemorative booklet featuring descriptions and photographs.”15 Raising awareness about the need for dance documentation, the tribute implied the vulnerability of her choreography as contrasted with visual art (objects) through which art makers’ tangible contributions to history live on.
Invoking visual art as the criterion for assessing her work’s significance, Brown aligned her artistic production and ideas with a value of permanence that is inevitably elusive and impossible for dance. This declaration of her exceptionality in the dance field invites reconsideration of concerns that permeate her work: these include her consistent preoccupation with the dynamic between choreography and improvisation; the search for means to imbue her choreography with durability, visibility, and transparency of intent; her fascination with memory as a source of dance making and as a choreographic-specific problem related to dance’s transmission and preservation; and ultimately the exposure of her own artistic originality through a consideration of originality’s meaning in choreography as an art form.
Starting with an extensive reconsideration of Trillium (1962)—the choreography that marked her debut as a choreographer—this book calls attention to Brown’s self-positioning as an artist poised between dance experimentalism and dance tradition. In announcing Brown’s concern with the relationship between choreography and improvisation,