Against Expectations: Trisha Brown and the Avant-garde

Abstract

This essay gives an overview of recurring themes and concerns in Trisha Brown's work through close readings of three dance pieces from three very different periods in her career:Trillium(1962), from the early stages of Judson Dance Theatre;Roof Piece(1973), when Brown was working in close proximity with visual artists in SoHo; andNewark(1987), from the period when the Trisha Brown Company had begun performing in major international theaters and arts festivals. Throughout the successive phases or cycles of her choreographic career, Brown has continually pushed the boundaries of her work as if never satisfied but always restlessly needing to move on. Nevertheless, looking back from the first decade of the twenty-first century, two artistic concerns emerge that have remained in constant, productive tension throughout Brown's long career as a dancer and choreographer. On the one hand, she has searched for new ways of moving by working with improvisation and by investigating through body images the neuro-skeleto-muscular sources of movement. But the ways in which she has set innovative new movement nevertheless exemplify a radical, often conceptual approach to choreographic structure. Her work thus forecloses safe, known, predictable aesthetic experiences and pushes the spectator to find and appreciate new, previously unknown qualities.