Sally (now Sarah) Stackhouse recalled, “I was there at the audition.… Her Trillium was so stunning … inventive of course, but also spatially such a contrast from what I was used to that it latched itself into my mind. The movement was … danced with all the skill and beauty one would expect.… I was shocked that it wasn’t accepted and then really annoyed…. I must have made a big enough fuss that finally Bessie Schönberg (1906–1997) agreed to meet in the cafeteria with Trisha to let her know why the committee had rejected her piece. I don’t know who else was on the committee but probably all traditionalists. Trisha told me … that Bessie said there was no structure to the solo.”9
Speaking in 1993 to Charles Reinhart (ADF’s director from 1968 to 2011), Brown recounted that Schönberg “didn’t understand the logic of how I organized this dance … she made the assumption that there was none.”10 Brown remembered sitting “at the table in the Connecticut College cafeteria” and Schönberg saying, “You just can’t take things and put them together in an order, any old order, like this pepper shaker and this ashtray and this napkin, and, well … this is looking rather nice.”11 In Brown’s telling, Schönberg changed her opinion, realizing that Trillium’s lack of structure was apparent, not actual. It was choreographed. Stackhouse described the meeting, “in the midst of which [Schönberg] stopped—and got quiet while she observed what she had done—and her face changed—with recognition—that there was an organization! Just not what she expected. And so—she did a 180 and accepted Trillium: that was a powerful encounter of the flexible, enlightened mind of a teacher and the marvelous work of the brilliant young Trisha Brown.”12
Figure 1.1 Trisha Brown, Trillium, 1962. Photograph © 1964 Al Giese
At ADF, Brown was an emissary of experimental dance and new pedagogical approaches to choreographic composition, outcomes of her recent participation in two post-Bauhausian interdisciplinary experimental workshops: that of Ann Halprin (b. 1920) in Kentfield, California, in the summer of 1960 (focused on improvisation) and that of Robert Ellis Dunn (1928–1996) in New York in the winter of 1961 (focused on choreographic composition).13 Trillium integrates Halprin’s use of task instructions and improvisation with John Cage’s methods, absorbed through Dunn’s class, taught (at Cage’s behest) to transmit Cage’s ideas on music’s composition to choreographers.
Embodied in Trillium are artistic concerns that eluded ADF’s jurors, including the dance’s basis in three task behaviors—stand, sit, and lie down—a tripartite composition derived from Brown’s memories (from her upbringing in Aberdeen, Washington) of the wild three-petaled trillium flower. Executed in an unplanned, changing order, without transitions, Trillium included these actions as well as extemporaneous dancing, the latter related to its music, which proved so offensive to ADF jurors: a recording of Simone Forti’s vocal improvisations, “a composite of all the different sounds that could come out of [her] mouth, including pitches, screeching and scraping.”14
Brown’s introduction of an experimental work to a context other to it challenged assumptions, predispositions, and prejudices of modern dance, an act closely related to what came to be known in the 1970s as the art of “institutional critique.”15 This opening of Trillium to judgment by modern dance experts suggests Brown’s wish to participate in artistic experimentalism in New York without relinquishing an interest in conventional modern dance models. The story also intriguingly predicts Brown’s later career, when, after two decades of showing her work only in nontraditional or art world contexts, she embraced the conventional institutional setting associated with dancing: the theatrical stage.
Trillium evidences Brown’s tenacious commitment to the discipline of choreography, instilled in her by her teachers at Mills College, in Oakland, California: Eleanor Lauer (1915–1986) and Rebecca Fuller (b. 1929). Both based their composition classes on the writings of Louis Horst (1884–1964), Martha Graham’s musical assistant and the most important pedagogue of modern dance composition in the 1950s.16 Brown studied directly with him over three summers (1956, 1959, and 1961) at ADF.17 Horst’s insistence on choreography as based in repeatable formal structures became Brown’s standard against which she measured her work.
While she would reject Horst’s emphasis on choreography’s subservience to music, she nonetheless referenced Horst’s impact many times, even as she was applying Halprin’s and Cage’s ideas to choreography in Robert Dunn’s class, which he devised, in part, to challenge the dominance of Horst’s methods.18 To her formative education in Horst’s teachings she grafted John Cage’s different ideas about a composition’s structuring. Rather than take a musical score as her choreography’s inspiration, Brown adopted Cage’s approach: much as he established the parameters or (durational) frames that enabled sound material to be heard and recognized as music, Brown applied three tasks as a structure to generate movement as material, producing a new understanding of what constitutes a dance.
Her 1962 visit to ADF was her fourth. Now she faced a jury. “The reason that I went so many times,” she said, “was that Mr. Louis Horst was unforgiving about how I was making choreographies then. And he rejected me more or less, partially. So that’s why I went back, to make an impression on him about my kind of dancing and try to link it up with his kind of structured choreographies.”19 Brown’s inclusion in the “Young Choreographers” program was a victory for her, in that she was seeking validation for her experimental composition, the legitimizing imprimatur of choreography. In the Robert Dunn workshop, where Trillium was created, conventional ideas about dance movement and choreographic composition were discarded—in what some might identify as an anti-dance position. Brown recalled that in Dunn’s class judgment was eschewed, in alignment with Cage’s approach: “The students were inventing forms rather than using the traditional theme and development or narrative, and the discussion that followed applied non-evaluative criticism to the movement itself, and the choreographic structure, as well as investigating the disparity between the two simultaneous experiences, what the artist was making and what the audience saw.”20
Brown’s point echoes one made by John Cage, in which he differentiated a work’s maker from its viewer, a point that is also relevant to considering Brown’s dual siting of her dance in New York and New London and to content-based meanings inspirational to her dance (but not necessarily apprehensible, or meant to be transparent to its audience): “A composer knows his work as a woodsman knows a path he has traced and retraced, while a listener is confronted by the same work as one is in the woods by a plant he has never seen before.”21 Brown’s “plant,” presented to two different listeners/lookers, invited New York critics and America’s reigning modern dance experts to weigh in on the very question that Dunn’s teaching of Cage’s ideas had put into play: “What is choreography? What is dance?”
Figure 1.2 Trisha Brown, Mills College Dance Studio, 1964. Photograph, Trisha Brown Archive, New York
Trillium’s “transplantation” to two different contexts is not an element external to it (part of its reception), but a concept Brown instilled in her dance at the outset. This is obvious from an examination of what is known about Trillium: Brown’s ideas for its choreography and performance, as recorded in two photographs, the firsthand testimony of Brown’s peers, two published reviews, and a 1964 photograph of Brown rehearsing in a studio at Mills College. It captures her in the air, elevated in a horizontal position above the ground—the hallmark movement in her controversial dance.
Steve Paxton, a participant in Dunn’s workshop, who practiced improvisation with Brown and Simone Forti outside of the class, offered important testimony about Trillium. In a 1981 interview, he interpreted its title’s relation to its content (not its form), recalling,