In Trillium Brown’s set tasks were devised for execution in an indeterminate relationship to one another: each of its performances was a repetition of choreographed tasks and yet unique, owing to the tasks’ changing order. Brown was Trillium’s creator and performer: she separated her choreographic contribution—the score—from her role of realizing its instructions, in dancing that required cognitive on-the-spot choices about the tasks’ fluctuating arrangement. Brown’s randomizing of movements’ order refreshed—by defying—a basic tenet of modern dance composition: its dependence on music’s A-B-A structure, which Horst called “the most deeply instinctual aesthetic form: a beginning, a middle and an end…. It is the three-part form, which is the rhythm of the natural drum beat, the pattern of the common limerick verse, and also the usual basis for serious musical composition of any dimension, from a simple song to a complex symphony.”46
A-B-A produces theme and variation. Trillium’s open-ended composition enabled a different organization. As Halprin explained, “Usually in a dance program the audience views a product. By that I mean a dance demonstration, which has been worked over and fixed into a static form. This program has a new form. The form is not a static product but is a form to be found in the process. This focus demands a different way of looking at dance.”47 Trillium is an iterative artwork incorporating stable, unchanging elements and components that can be rearranged in each performance. Brown’s commitment to a dynamic relationship between fixity and variability served to keep movement alive in the moment: “One of the problems I discovered during Judson,” she said, “was that I had a hard time setting material: capturing movement, recalling it and doing it again. I could do it the first time. I could remember the image that caused me to do it, but if I codified it, I lost it.”48
A final key to Trillium’s composition lies in Brown’s refusal to create transitional movements linking one task to another, an evasion of traditional dance phrasing that avoided movements’ rigidifying into, repeatable, stable, and unchanging forms. Trillium’s unit-after-unit organization of movement material compares to Cage’s treatment of sounds as “material”: his location of sound outside of preexisting categories that filter how they are experienced so as to allow a new way of hearing music as sound material—or in the case of dance, a way of seeing movement as material. He introduced the idea of sounds’ juxtaposition without transitions in “History of Experimental Music”: “[Composers] were getting rid of glue…. Where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we … felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves.”49
Erasing “the glue” has different results in music than it does in dance, where it is an unachievable ideal: one has to get from point A to point B. In Trillium an impossible instruction incited improvisational effects in moving from one task to another. Structured elements contained these effects; improvisational moments remained repeatable set elements of the composition, expressing Brown’s vision of choreography as an objective structuring of intention. Steps are an arbitrary element of artistic decision making, subordinate to, and inserted into, the fabric of choreography: her model, based on Cage’s, deliberately avoided their introduction, and this remained, for Brown, an ongoing artistic problem. “Traveling steps have always stymied me,” she said. “Traveling steps are what dancers use to get from Place A to Place B on the stage. I have always walked. It would embarrass me to hop over there.”50
Erasing movement transitions produced spontaneous improvisation. Speaking to Deborah Jowitt about her early 1960s work, Brown said, “I always kept certain doors open to go through if I had the courage. I wanted to resolve things in performance, to have that open-endedness for brilliance times ten.”51 Trillium produced volatile dancing. Brown cantilevered off the floor into handstands and hovered above the ground: “I could stand, sit or lie down, and ended up levitating.”52 “I went over and over the material,” she said, “eventually accelerating and mixing it up to the degree that lying down was done in the air.”53
Brown’s claim of levitation might seem outrageous, if not corroborated by two participants in Dunn’s workshop, Aileen Passloff and Elaine Summers, and two especially credentialed eyewitnesses: Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, who were both dedicated to the demystification of dance virtuosity. Brown recalled, “The choreographer Aileen Passloff happened to come into the studio and just stood there in the doorway watching me. I realized I should stop because she was renting the studio … [I said] ‘I’m sorry. I’ll get out.’ She said, ‘do you know what you were doing?’ And I said, ‘well I know what I was instructing myself to do in the improvisations.’ And she said, ‘you were flying.’”54 Elaine Summers said, “When I saw Trillium I decided that Trisha didn’t know about gravity and therefore gravity had no hold on her.”55
These descriptions are reminiscent of recorded stories verifying Brown’s levitation on Halprin’s deck in the summer of 1960. Forti remembered: “She was holding a broom in her hand. She thrust it straight out ahead without letting go of the handle. And she thrust it out with such force that the momentum carried her whole body through the air. I still have that image of that broom and Trisha right out in space, traveling in a straight line three feet off the ground.”56 Rainer said, “She had this big push broom and she would push it a few feet with tremendous force and then hang onto the handle. Her body would be almost horizontal as it flew after the broom. Amazing looking cause and effect—her arm shooting out, the broom shooting out and then her body shooting out in forward propulsion.”57 Brown’s levitation is confirmed by a 1964 photograph (see figure 1.2), taken in a Mills College dance studio and witnessed by Brown’s teacher and friend, Rebecca Fuller.58
This act of concentrated kinesthetic intelligence exists as a trace in Bruce Nauman’s double-exposed photograph, Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966). It records the impossibility—not the actuality—of placing mind over matter. Given Nauman’s acquaintance with Meredith Monk (who later joined Dunn’s class) and his awareness of Halprin’s work, might his photograph echo the passed-on story of Brown’s legendary levitations? A true myth of Brown’s artistic biography and a touchstone for her subsequent investigations of gravity and gravitylessness, her uncanny physical virtuosity and understanding of the body’s logic have a rational explanation. For a time, her highly athletic older brother, Gordon Brown, a high school football and basketball star, “was training [her] to go into the Olympics as a pole-vaulter in the backyard. The yard was slanted and he had me starting on the high side. His theory was that if I could get into an arcane area of sports, and I was good at it, then I could beat the Russians.”59
Figure 1.3 Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966, black-and-white photograph, 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm). © 2015 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery
A testament to Brown’s athletic prowess, the story references vestiges of movement memories preceding Trillium’s trademark levitation. Indeed, Yvonne Rainer recognized Trillium as re-creating the earlier levitation on Halprin’s deck, suggesting that Brown’s dance returned to, and memorialized, experiences from Halprin’s class: “Two years later (i.e., in New York) Trisha would duplicate the move, without the broom, in her solo Trillium.”60
Figure 1.4 Audiotape box of Simone Forti sound score for Trillium, 1962. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
The idea of re-creating or reinstantiating vestiges of improvisational events