In the midst of all of this work, Brown retired from dancing, making an unexpected appearance in her final choreography, I Love My Robots (2007), on the first night of its presentation at New York’s Joyce Theater in 2008. This work merits a detour, since it thematizes precisely the same concerns with choreography as lament, loss, and mourning that were announced at Brown’s debut 1962 performance when she was twenty-six years old—the subject of chapter 1. Her collaborator, the artist and architect Kenjiro Okazaki, conceived a simple visual presentation of two mobile cylindrical column-like cardboard “robots” set on movable boxes and embedded with computer equipment enabling their movements’ manipulation by offstage controllers. His design’s inspiration, what he referred to as “poltergeist-type robots,” came from Greek funerary grave markers (lekythos) representing scenes of departure or encounter between the living and the dead.
Embellishing his cardboard, artlessly pedestrian figural facsimiles with the notion that “when the wind blows the hair of the woman sitting on a chair, her mind travels far away to a distant land. Her soul, in other words, is transferred to another world,” Okazaki saw “the robots and the human dancers belong[ing] to different orders … as if they were ghosts and human, angels and men, or different species belonging to different environments.”21 Furthermore, the robot’s patterned movement on the stage was based on the technologically captured motion of Brown’s hand’s drawing—just as Brown’s choreography included hand movements, some executed on the floor, taken from patterned motions etched in her body during this period when she continued to make large-scale drawings using the approach first established in It’s a Draw/Live Feed (2003).22 Okazaki’s project had two parts. The first, performed solely by Brown’s company, “is this world, the latter is the afterworld. In the first part, the dancers in this world are sensing the presence of some otherworldly thing, but continue dancing without knowing (being conscious of) it being alive.”23
Okazaki integrated two generative concepts. Considering how “the figure of Deknobo (robot) resembles that of a Greek temple pillar, but its movement traces that of a pen, we [used] a pen tablet as the controlling device, so that the movement of the pen is transmitted directly to the Deknobo. Since we can also record the movement of the pen, playing it back with a delay is also possible. Thus, Trisha on stage can dance with her own movement of the pen in the past. The present Trisha dances with her past self.”24 So, Okazaki said in a statement presuming Brown’s immortality and her work’s transcendent significance, “one cannot see Trisha herself directly; but can feel her presence. That is the meaning of Trisha existing (continuing to exist forever) as a choreographer, and not as a dancer.”25
Okazaki discussed artificial intelligence in terms of “Memory Substitution Machines,” ideas that assumed greater resonance with Brown’s late decision to perform a trio with the two robots (an improvisation that was unassuming, human, funny and poignant in its modesty and spontaneity).26 She marked the stage’s revealed brick wall and its right-hand wall—moving toward the audience but facing sideways—as if she were referencing the set that Aeschlimann had conceived for L’Orfeo as an abstractly spatialized rendering of the division separating the terrestrial realm of Orfeo from the underworld, occupied by Eurydice, who, owing to Orfeo’s absence of visual restraint, condemned her to death rather than returning her to life. In her exit Brown vocalized her mother’s voice, calling out to Brown’s childhood self to come inside from playing outdoors, a touching reminiscence of nature as the source of her earliest enthrallment with movement.
Overjoyed by Brown’s decision to dance again, Okazaki described her as “coming back to the stage as a phoenix,” emphasizing the second part of the dance when “the Deknobos (robots) play around in another world with Trisha who can directly see and talk with them … [and which] appeared as the afterworld, or heaven.”27 With Trisha’s dancing incorporated into the set’s concept, I Love My Robots—whose title also seems to suggest Brown’s withdrawal from dancing to a role of solely molding her dancers to make choreography—the piece’s theme, the memento mori (and Brown’s final public appearance on the stage) bookended with finality that of her first work, Trillium, the subject of this book’s first chapter.
Seeing the Score
Trillium (1962)
1
Hers was the most original material. Could we suggest she try and make a dance?— Bessie Schönberg1
On March 13, 1962, Trisha Brown made her choreographic debut with her first professionally presented choreography: Trillium (1962).2 It was included in an interdisciplinary Poet’s Festival at New York’s Maidman Playhouse on Forty-Second Street: the event featured experimental music, happenings, visual art, and dance by artists who embraced composer John Cage’s ideas.3 Four months later, she presented the dance to be assessed for possible inclusion in a performance scheduled to take place at the center of the modern dance establishment: the American Dance Festival (ADF) at Connecticut College in New London. On July 30, she was one of sixty dancers who auditioned for an August 7, 1962, juried “Young Choreographers” program that aimed to showcase work by representatives of America’s most important dance departments—those at Bard College, Bennington College, Juilliard, and the University of Wisconsin—along with one artist from Sweden and two from New York, including Trisha Brown.
At Maidman Playhouse, Trillium—a dance executed according to the three simple instructions “stand, sit and lie down”—was singled out as “the high point of the evening … a taut construction and a nice performance.”4 The ADF jury (Louis Horst, Bill Bales, Bessie Schönberg, and the festival’s director, Jeannette Schlottmann) initially rejected it, later reversing their decision.5 This owed to Bessie Schönberg’s change of heart, recorded in a note to Schlottmann: “Last night I must have been too tired to think straight. But Trillium kept haunting my early hours. Now if we permit Nancy to work on her eccentricities and show [in] the finale … why can’t the ‘Trillium’ girl not enjoy the same privilege? Hers was the most original material. Could we suggest she try and make a dance?”6
Brown has revisited this controversy on many occasions, deriving from it an iconic avant-garde origin story of misunderstanding, a scandale of refusal, and ultimately acceptance and triumph: “I think some stories are emblematic of how I got where I am and that’s why I go back to them.”7 In a letter to her friend Yvonne Rainer, she explained that the dance had been rejected for its absence of form (choreography) and its music. She also affirmed her steadfast defense of her work: with other students’ support, jurors at ADF agreed to include her work on the “Young Choreographers” program, although Brown refused to eliminate Trillium’s musical accompaniment as a condition of its acceptance.
This contretemps, Brown told Rainer, marked an unprecedented student rebellion against the festival’s authorities. “There was something quite extraordinary that happened for a week … Turned down. No form,” she wrote. “Louis H. said it was dull and acrobatic and that I was barking up the wrong tree in NY… and I am irresponsible [and] without dignity … And music made him sick and was not beautiful. But the students, Sally Stackhouse in the lead, started a petition and hounded the judges [who] reconvened and said, ‘Yes, but no music’—so I said