Retrospectively these projects announced an integration of purely abstract movement with representational elements (from opera)—later recapitulated in Brown’s ever-forward-looking assumption of new creative challenges—all of which lie outside this book’s parameters. At once revealing the circuitry of Brown’s mind in Newark’s aftermath (and coincident with significant changes in the nation’s funding mechanisms for dance in the 1990s), Brown was thrust into a state of ceaseless productivity, undertaking simultaneous projects in multiple arenas. She continued to create choreographies (with contemporary artists and composers) for the stage from 1989 to 2007 alongside the start of her direction of operas—six in all, and beginning with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1998). Simultaneously she embraced a renewed interested in drawing on a large scale in works that ambitiously transcend this medium’s functionality in the scoring of her dances throughout the 1970s, discussed in chapter 4.
Infused with her experience of a character-based performance in Carmen, Newark’s subtle intimations of narrative and transitory but deliberately unconscious gestures were encompassed within Brown’s most athletically challenging, epic coordination of choreography, sets, and sound, born of the meeting of two extraordinary minds: hers and Judd’s. These elements became prominent in Brown’s late work (of the 1990s and 2000s), most particularly through her engagement with the most venerable of interdisciplinary art forms—opera—which necessitated a profound shift away from abstraction, as well as unfathomable degrees of artistic collaboration, given Brown’s approach to this new challenge—artistic and institutional. As she reported on what she referred to as her apprenticeship in opera, she said, “Carmen never left me. That was an extraordinary experience. The only thing wrong was not controlling the context because I was not the director.”16
She embarked on a new phase of her career by collaborating with, she said sardonically, two dead (i.e., timelessly alive) composers: Johann Sebastian Bach—his Musical Offering—in M.O. (1995) and Anton Webern—his Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5; Three Pieces, op. 7; and String Quartet, op. 28—in Twelve Ton Rose (1996). This inspired intensive research so as to read music’s polyphonic and twelve-tone forms—albeit in her own idiosyncratic visual way—as well as to understand the history, content, and interpretive responses to Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607). On commission from Bernard Foccroulle (director of the Théâtre royal de la Monnaie in Brussels), Brown directed the piece, working closely with the conductor René Jacob. The project was received to wide critical acclaim. No doubt Brown’s genius surpassed expectation in part because, as one critic observed, the “62-year-old Brown is just about the last choreographer you would have expected to turn her hand to opera … and admits she knew zero about opera until recently—which makes her production of ‘Orfeo’ all the more extraordinary.”17
Despite an almost incomprehensive distance from the austerely abstract works that are this book’s focus, her capacity to excel in this new genre is consonant with her work’s foundation in John Cage’s methodologies, another of this book’s foci. As Brown said in answer to critics’ mystification at her success, “The classes I took with Robert Dunn when I got to New York gave me a concept of how one might make art. And I use that word purposely, as applied to all disciplines. My training is in dance and choreography, but my connection is to form and content, as for any artist. Once I understood that, it was just a matter of time before I could flesh it out.”18
Inseparable from her beginnings, her late career followed from analysis and intelligent reorganization and reintegration of every aspect of opera within her own abstract approach to the genre’s component parts: music, narrative, character, and libretto (text and image). Most foundational for L’Orfeo was Roland Aeschlimann’s almost telepathic comprehension of Brown’s artistic concerns in a set design that functioned to abstractly spatialize a story grounded in the chasm between the world of the living and the ambiguity of the underworld of the not-yet, yet dead. In this the set compares to Brown’s negotiation of the opera’s content through her abstract movement language, as infiltrated by imagery and emotional coloration; it was created with her company members and transmitted to opera stars and chorus members. Their demanding vocal performances were enhanced by their dancing of Brown’s contribution of movement, rendered through her reading of Alessandro Striggio’s libretto (based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Virgil’s Georgics) in terms that were not literally representational, but intermittently connotative. This reversed Brown’s early derivation of her abstract movement languages through a relation to memory images and her fundamental investigation into choreography.
Most ingeniously she opened the work—with Aeschlimann creating for her a vast lit orb of light (as if a Tiepolo ceiling painting had been reset on the vertical)—portraying the character “Musica” (performed initially by Diane Madden) as an angelic flying figure whose capacity to travel through space beyond the otherwise tangible divisions (walls) of the set’s structure is comprehensible only in light of her extraordinarily reductive investigations of choreography in the gravitylessness and flying announced in her “Equipment Dances” (1968–1974).
Opera’s necessitation of Brown’s response to content inflected the sole ballet that she created on commission from the Paris Opera Ballet’s director Brigitte Lefèvre, who had first seen Brown dance in 1976.19 This 2004 work was inspired by Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Ode to a Bird” (1962), whose first lines, “O zlozony / O Composite,” gave the dance its title. With its score by Laurie Anderson, its set by Vija Celmins, and its initial inspiration from Edna Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence” (1917), Brown returned yet again to another origin—that of her originating a movement vocabulary, grounded in Locus (discussed in chapter 5). Now she assimilated abstract movement to ballet’s language and pointe work, with the poems’ text and image delivering a structural system of movement, but with light imagery that lends emotive punctuation to the evocative sound score, with its Polish vocalization of Milosz’s poem. (After the performance Brown was named a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters by France’s culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu, the first of three successive honors bestowed upon her in France.)
Whether by self-conscious logic or Brown’s intuition, the first and last operas she made reinstate this theme: returning to origins. Monteverdi’s work is considered to announce the beginning of opera as an art form; indeed, Brown would tell reporters at its premiere that “[she] was further reassured by the thought that the Italian composer had as little experience of the operatic genre when he created the work as she did, for Orfeo is considered to be the first opera in musical history.” Her ballet’s costuming, inspired by fencing attire and created by Elizabeth Cannon, was suggestive of that aristocratic art’s foundation for ballet’s technical language.20 Her last two (2010) operas, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aracie (1733; libretto by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, based on Racine’s Phèdre) and the one acte-de-ballet, Pigmalion (1748; libretto by Ballot de Sovot, based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis), conducted by William Chrystie and Les Arts Florissant, involved engagement with a work seen to herald ballet’s rise to independence as an art form, much as Brown worked throughout the 1970s to establish dance as an art forum, self-sufficient, independent of music, illusion, or story. With Rameau’s work Brown also returned to even deeper beginnings—as a dance student at Mills College who was taught choreographic composition through Louis Horst’s preclassic dance forms, which are intrinsic to the Rameau works and which Brown retranslated through her own language and wit, even as these investigations uncannily brought her career full circle—and in more ways than one.