Trisha Brown: In Plain Site

Trisha Brown 1936 -2017

Excerpt from Susan Rosenberg's book, "Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art."

One of the most acclaimed and influential choreographers and dancers of her time, Trisha forever changed the arts landscape with her groundbreaking work. From her birthplace in rural Aberdeen, Washington, Brown-a 1958 graduate of the Mills College Dance Department-arrived to New York in 1961. A student of Ann Halprin, she participated in choreographic composition workshops taught from Robert Dunn - from which gave rise to the Judson Dance Theater, which contributed greatly to the fervor of interdisciplinary creativity that defined 1960s New York. Expanding the physical behaviors that qualified as dance, he discovered the extraordinary in the everyday and brought tasks, rule games, natural movement and improvisation into the creation of choreography. With the founding of the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, Brown embarked on her own distinctive path of artistic research and relentless experimentation, which spanned four decades. The creator of more than 100 choreographies and six works, and a graphic artist whose drawings have won recognition in numerous exhibitions and museum collections, Brown's early works drew their impetus from the urban landscape of downtown SoHo, where she was a pioneer. In the 1970s, as Brown strove to invent an original abstract movement language-one of her singular achievements-it was the art galleries, museums and international exhibitions to that offered her work the most important presenting context. Indeed, contemporary projects introducing choreography into the museum environment are unthinkable without the exemplary model established from Brown.

Brown's movement vocabulary, along with the new methods she and her dancers adopted to train their bodies, remain one of her most impactful legacies within international dance practice. However, for Brown, these techniques were a means to an end: the creation of choreography, which she performed serially. In Equipment Dances (1968-1971), he explored gravity, perception and urban space. Brown introduced new rigor and systematicity in the Accumulations (1971-1975), dances derived from mathematical sequences common to the work of minimalist and conceptual artists of his generation. When Brown developed what he called "memorized improvisation," he discovered the fundamental approach that would inform his dance for the rest of his career. First announced in her solo Watermotor (1978)-a dance immortalized in the film shot from Babette Mangolte-Brown's extraordinary, extravagant virtuosity as a dancer became the touchstone for her mature movement vocabulary. It also served to to demonstrate that among the many components of Brown's genius was her ability to forge, approach and represent the inseparability of intelligences between mind and body.

Working in the studio with what was, until 1980, an all-female company, Brown became a master orchestrator of collaborations; she used her own body, language and imagery to elicit and catalyze the improvisations of her dancers, which she assembled and structured as choreography. A major turning point in Brown's career occurred in 1979, when she shifted from working in nontraditional and art world settings to assume the role of a choreographer working within the institutional framework associated with dance-the proscenium stage. With this decision, she embarked on a broader collaborative process, inviting her contemporaries to to contribute visual presentations (sets and costumes) and soundtracks to her choreography. In her initial work with Robert Rauschenberg on Glacial Decoy (1979), she established the parameters for their artistic dialogue from the outset, drawing inspiration from the geometry and sight lines of theater. Moving forward, in his work with artists Fujiko Nakaya, Donald Judd, Nancy Graves, Terry Winters and Elizabeth Murray, and composers Robert Ashley, Laurie Anderson, Peter Zummo, Alvin Curran, Salvatore Sciarrino and Dave Douglas, Brown identified collaborative processes as a manifestation of interacting and intersecting artistic intentions -- and worked to closely with these artists to bring to completion to each new production.

Brown's best-lovedopera , 1983's Set and Reset, a collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg and Laurie Anderson premiered as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's "Next Wave Festival," propelled Brown to international fame. It represented the culmination of the series of pieces known as "Unstable Molecular Cycle" (1980-1983), all based on memorized improvisation. In "The Valiant Cycle" (1987-1989), Brown pushed the limits of his dancers' athleticism and endurance, elevating the abstract dance to theatrical proportions in his masterpiece, Newark (Niweorce) (1987), for which Donald Judd did the sets, costumes and soundtrack. With "Back to Zero Cycle" (1990-1994) Brown entered new terrain, investigating "unconscious" movement, also bringing new inflections to her longstanding preoccupation with themes of visibility and invisibility as well as visual deflection.

After performing in Lina Wertmuller's 1987 production of Bizet's Carmen, Brown -- to mid-1990s -- set her sights on directing operas. In preparation, he initiated the "Music Cycle," in which he collaborated with what he described as two dead, i.e., " timelessly alive," composers: Johann Sebastian Bach and Anton Webern. With a new knowledge of polyphonic musical forms, he accepted an invitation from Bernard Fouccroulle, director of the famous theater atopera La Monnaie in Brussels, to to conduct Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1998, the first of six operas he would direct over the next fourteen years. In addition to to engaging with this venerable interdisciplinary art form, Brown created a single ballet, O Zlozony/O Composite (2004), at the behest of Brigitte Lefėvre, director of the Paris Opera Ballet, a project in which he worked with three of the company's most esteemed étoiles, artist Vija Celmins and composer Laurie Anderson. During the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, Brown worked simultaneously to create new choreography by working with contemporary artists and composers, direct works, and further develop her work in the field of drawing.

Brown's official retirement from dance came in 2008, when she performed in I Love My Robots, a collaboration with Kenjiro Okazaki and Laurie Anderson. Her latest works include two works by Jean Phillippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aracie and Pygmalian (2010), produced together to William Chrystie and Les Arts Florissants, as well as the only male duet from she created, entitled Rogues (2011). From the 1970s to the present, Trisha Brown's drawings have been widely exhibited in international museums and art galleries, including the Yale University Art Gallery and the Leo Castelli Gallery (1974), the Venice Biennale (1980), The Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia (2003), White Box Gallery, London (2004), Documenta XII (2007), and The Walker Art Center (2008). In addition, his drawings are held in major museum collections, including the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others. Brown is represented from Sikkema Jenkins & Co. to New York.

Today, the Trisha Brown Dance Company carries on Brown's legacy through its "In Plain Site" initiative. Through it, the company draws on Brown's model to reinvigorate its choreography by relocating it in new contexts that include outdoor sites, staging and museum collections. The company is also engaged in an ongoing process of reconstructing and reassembling the major works Brown created for the proscenium stage between 1979 and 2011.

During her lifetime, Trisha Brown has received nearly every award available to contemporary choreographers. The first woman to to receive the coveted MacArthur "genius" fellowship (in 1991), Brown was awarded from five National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and Brandeis University's Creative Arts Medal in Dance (1982). In 1988 she was appointed Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government. In January 2000 she was promoted to Officier and in 2004 she was again appointed, this time to the level of Commandeur. Brown received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award in 1994 and, at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, served on the National Council on the Arts from 1994 to 1997. In 1999 she received the New York State Governor's Arts Award and, in 2003, was awarded the National Medal of Arts. She received the Capezio Ballet Makers Dance Foundation Award in 2010 and had the prestigious honor of serving as a mentor for the Rolex Arts Initiative for 2010-11. She has received numerous honorary degrees, is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded the 2011 "Bessie" Lifetime Achievement Award from New York Dance and Performance. In 2011, Brown received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for making an "outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to the enjoyment and understanding of life from part of humanity." In 2012, Brown joined to the United States Artists Simon Fellow. After receiving three Foundation for Contemporary Arts awards (1971, 1974 and 1991), she was awarded the Foundation's first Robert Rauschenberg Award in 2013.