Trisha Brown: Between Abstraction and Representation (1966–1998)

Susan Rosenberg

doi:10.3390/arts9020043

Abstract

Choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017) is renowned as one of the most influential abstract artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Emerging from Judson Dance Theater and the 1960s avant-garde, Brown invented what she termed her ‘pure movement’ abstract vocabulary in the 1970s, rejecting narrative, psychology and character as bases for dance-making. Yet Brown’s notion of abstraction, when examined across the long arc of her fifty-year career, is more complicated and elastic than previously known. This essay addresses selected choreographies dating from her first decade as a choreographer, the 1960s, to the production of her first opera L’Orfeo (1998), underscoring how memories, images, language and stories fueled a previously unexamined dynamic relationship between abstraction and representation that profoundly influenced her choreography’s development.

Highlights

Choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017) is renowned as one of the most influential abstract artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Brown’s work and her contribution to contemporary dance has persisted over decades as the dances she made in the second half of her fifty-year career (Rosenberg 2017) have received scant attention, as have the processes informing her choreography’s making
Unexpected movement, or movements combining different parts of the body simultaneously—head and knee—and different levels of space, made in response to the score, resulted in a fluidity of passage through space. These new developments explain why Brown considered Locus to announce her return to an interest in “dance movement” (Haacke 1976). Her systematic transformation of a narrative into a numerical sequence that maps onto a geometric structure reveals the height of structuralism, seriality, conceptualism and minimalism in her work, catalyzing her writing the 1975 “Pure Movement” manifesto

Summary

Pedestrian Behavior

Brown’s search for a model that would generate abstract movement is recognizable in one of her earliest dances, Homemade (1966), which premiered at Judson Church as part of the tripartite dance. Discussing the dance in a 2004 interview with Klaus Kertess, Brown said that in 1966 she was “looking for vocabulary that was non-virtuosic, had significance, wanting to work abstractly, but putting in this search for new vocabulary” (Kertess 2004). She discovered a different strategy for producing what she aspired to in Homemade—the creation of “movement that was concretely specific to me, [but] abstract to the audience”5 —in choreographing Outside (1966), the third dance in A string. The dance was documented on Brown’s March 29 & March 30 program at Judson Church as one element of the tripartite work

A String

Pure Movement

88. Trisha Brown Personal

Memory as Score

Towards Representation