Trisha Brown Research Articles

Can the Structuralist Subject Dance? Trisha Brown, Gilles Deleuze, and the Performative Structure-Object

This article argues that a series of dances made by choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown between 1971 and 1975 using accumulation can be understood as performative structure-objects. This is a form of art that paved the way for two current tendencies in art and dance: the generalization of dance into art and the development of the role of the dancer as artist. The concept of the performative structure-object unfolds in the article through a close analysis of Brown’s dances in dialogue with the concept of structure found in Gilles Deleuze’s essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (1967). His article emphasizes a concept of structure understood as both subject and object, as well as a site of practice. While research has been undertaken in dance studies on Brown and the importance of structures in her work, this article expands this research by reconstructing a philosophical concept of structure in her work that has not yet been explored.

Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and mourning in Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance

I sit in a theatre in San Francisco in December 2021 feeling a palpable anticipation in the air. As Gerald Casel performs a choreographic accumulation to TLC's ‘Waterfalls', my body remembers learning Accumulation in dance history class. Indeed, words are soon projected on the back wall: ‘I am performing an accumulated sequence'; ‘It's an adaptation of Trisha Brown's choreographic device'; ‘She made a dance entitled ‘Accumulation' in 1971'. This performance is Casel's response through the body to the unacknowledged racial politics in postmodern dance and is the primary study of my investigation. In ‘Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and mourning in Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance', I analyse Not About Race Dance (2021) choreographed by Gerald Casel as a queer, decolonial performance that engages with mourning as regenerative refusal. In this article, I define constructions for queer dance and decolonial performance that are foundational to my reading of Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance. I then outline the relationship between Not About Race Dance and Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance. The titles of both works use irony to emphasize that the performances are, in fact, about AIDS and race respectively. Finally, I argue that this queer, decolonial performance work encompasses interplay between refusal and racial mourning, and propose that this performance is a manifestation of queer, decolonial performance and embodying the profound heaviness of loss and mourning that occurs because of racism. This is significant because it reveals the connections between queerness and decoloniality through performance and examines their links as acts of refusal and mourning in the work of a queer, BIPOC improvisational artist.

Enacting peripeteia in Möbius Strip: Adapting Butoh principles in mixed-media performance

The article draws from the Japanese phenomenological approach (Kyoto School) concerning the embodied experience of time-space. The article aims at the distillation of Butoh principles and its creative adaptation in a mixed-media performance titled Möbius Strip. As a method of choreographic practice, the concept of qualia is the matrix of Butoh notation (Butoh-fu). The western term for qualia would be ‘image-worlds’, which is encountered in the choreographic practice of Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Michael Chekhov (). Butoh-fu is a chain of qualia (scores/atmospheres). Consisting of qualia that require full psychophysical engagement of the performer, Butoh-fu, one could dare to say, resonates with Haiku or Zen Koans (). Under this frame, the performance explores notions of temporality availing in the processual nature of qualia to address the issue of ‘politics of time in neo-liberal societies’ (). The performance borrows its title from the concept of a Möbius Strip by mathematicians A. F. Möbius and J. B. Listing; having only one side and remaining in one piece when split down the middle, characterized by alternative modalities of connectivity. Möbius Strip focuses on the effects of war upon ‘ordinary people’ who suddenly find themselves amidst a crisis that urges them to reconsider their principles and discover dormant values. This is a decisive turning point: a peripeteia. The performance is a bittersweet embodied poem that wishes to offer a crack of light amidst the deep darkness of the current warfare. This article documents part of the practice-based research that includes the creation process and theoretical framework of Möbius Strip. The performance seals the studio work, where Butoh training was deployed as a methodological tool to sensitize performers’ psychophysical compresence. Furthermore, while allowing themselves to be observed by the gaze of the audience, they eventually access shifting time perceptions through the performative experience.

Liberation study

Performance offers the chance to break through dead ways of being. Only by harnessing our longing can we unshackle from forms that no longer nourish us. Making performance means creating conditions where we can sense new possibilities for how we show up for our lives. Let the old structures shatter.Hope Mohr is a choreographer, writer, and advocate. She performed with Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance. In 2010, she founded The Bridge Project, now Bridge Live Arts, which creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. www.hopemohr.org

Not About Race Dance by Gerald Casel

Reviewed by: Not About Race Dance by Gerald Casel Kate Mattingly NOT ABOUT RACE DANCE. By Gerald Casel. CounterPulse, San Francisco. December 15, 2021. Gerald Casel’s investigations into racial dynamics take many forms. Since 2018, Casel has organized Dancing Around Race gatherings, and, in 2021, Not About Race Dance had its premiere at CounterPulse. I watched a recording of Not About Race Dance made available for free in December, the day that bell hooks passed, and sensed hooks’s description of the politics of white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal exclusion in the performance. I, as a white, cisgender woman, am aware of the access and advantages my whiteness has provided and that Casel’s multifaceted performance illuminate. Not About Race Dance, choreographed with movement collaborators Styles Alexander, Audrey Johnson, Karla Quintero, and Cauveri Suresh, vivified the racial politics of postmodern dance. The recording began with a camera situating the viewer within the white walls of CounterPulse while the sound of TLC’s “Waterfalls” filled the space. Casel walked onto the white stage carrying a speaker, accompanied by shouts of joy from the audience. Standing center stage, he faced us. His hips rocked to the rhythm. Words appeared on the back wall: “I am performing an accumulated sequence”; “It’s an adaptation of Trisha Brown’s choreographic device”; “She made a dance entitled ‘Accumulation’ in 1971.” Brown’s gestures, visible in Casel’s actions, were also transmuted. Casel’s dancing signaled Cholly Atkins’s work with the Temptations and the Pips in the 1960s and ’70s: understated cool with exquisite attention to detail and smooth transitions. The moment provoked thoughts about artists of color who are consistently written out of definitions of post-modernism. Brilliantly clear in this initial moment, Casel’s work brings into physical form the theories of Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Cornel West, who have written about the multiple influences, borrowings, and erasures of white postmodernism. Casel remained in one place. His dancing was lush and fluid. Words on the back wall connected this event to Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance from 1994, the same year that TLC released “Waterfalls” (as celebrity artists, TLC also raised awareness for HIV/AIDS). More words appeared: “Seeing this piece made HIV more visible . . . more real.” By associating his work with Greenberg’s performance, Casel highlights how both of these events are performances that intervene in hegemonic systems of erasure. As dance performances these events operate kinesthetically, communicating through our [End Page 378] senses, and offer an intimate sense of connection and vulnerability. Click for larger view View full resolution Audrey Johnson, Gerald Casel, Cauveri Suresh, Styles Alexander, and Karla Quintero in Not About Race Dance. (Photo: Robbie Sweeny.) Born in the Philippines, Casel immigrated to the Bay Area when he was 8 years old. More words appeared: “I am a brown body performing an accumulated sequence in a big white cube to TLC’s ‘Waterfalls.’” About five minutes into this hour-long event, Casel’s solo ended. Duets, trios, and group sections followed. There is a gorgeous intricacy in Casel’s choreography: craft and compositional structure highlight the subtle interactions of dancers’ joints and bodies. Shoulders swivel, elbows elongate, and hips shift to generate a refined and luscious dynamic. Elements of stillness and nuance underscore this physical virtuosity. Aron Altmark’s lighting design projected shadows of dancers on the white walls, transforming a duet into a dance of ten figures. A zig-zagging walking pattern by Casel ended as he descended to the floor, mirroring his duet partner in a reclining pose, their gazes lifted upwards, suggesting odalisques. This moment emphasized my role as a spectator, witness, or perhaps voyeur, highlighting the power dynamics between watchers and the watched. I appreciate the ways that complex questions emerge from Casel’s kinetic and kinesthetic propositions. James Frazier considers Not About Race Dance particularly resonant for its ability to foreground the physical and emotional impact of “accumulation,” and I am indebted to our conversations after watching the recording. (Frazier had seen the performance at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in November.) In postmodern dance, accumulation is a choreographic process that uses a sequence of relatively simple gestures to build...

The Original – ‘Again’ Historical and Contemporary Strategies for Writing and Re/Constructing Dance

Writing and dance have been positioned by scholars in a contraposed play throughout the chronological period from the Renaissance to today: dancing begins when writing stops. Scholars have accused dance of ephemerality and have attempted to salvage it through notation. In postmodern and contemporary dance, some choreographers challenge traditional assumptions about the primacy and stability of text and documentation. They ‘write’ with dance in both conceptual and alphabetic ways, some exploring the dimension of race. This study tests theories by Mark Franko and André Lepecki through analysis of dance reenactment strategies and interventions by choreographers Trisha Brown and Christopher-Rasheem McMillan.

Footprints: Dance on Paper by Trisha Brown

Footprints: Dance on Paper by Trisha Brown

춤에서 움직임의 흔적과 추상 이미지에 관한 고찰: 트리샤 브라운과 안느 테레사 드 키어스매커의 작품을 중심으로·

This study aims to understand the traits of dances which vibrate in diverse ways between abstract and representation, and explore aesthetic meaning and value of abstract images from dance movements. Both choreographers leave abstract images through body movements. But their images are different in terms of form, content, preservation, and display. In the works of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, abstract images play an important role of adding abstract nature to a piece of work while following the strategies of repetition and deviation used in the ‘geometric abstract’ of visual art. However, abstract images deeply relevant to human bodies are in incomplete forms showing traces of human being and therefore display unique and subtle expressive qualities in contrast with the cool geometric design in visual arts. On the other hand, in the works of Trisha Brown which can be described as ‘expressive abstract’, some of her improvisations are engraved while others naturally disappear. In her works, the movements go beyond the action of drawing abstract images and change repeatedly suggesting new relationship between movements and traces. The two choreographers accumulate natural traces which are formed over time in space by leaving movements directly. Ironically, what shows up in the process is concrete images of time and space hidden behind the movements and music faced and felt by the audience. After this research, I am planning to explain whether the abstract images in digital media should be interpreted in different ways and conduct an in-depth study on aesthetic qualities created by digital abstract images in dance.

Coming Together by Moving Apart: Contemporary Dance Scores and Communities During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper discusses Roof/Roof Piece, an adaptation of Trisha Brown's Roof Piece by Trisha Brown Dance Company and perch a dance made by Amy Voris and adapted by Voris and Katye Coe for Coe to perform in her home and online. Both these adaptations began during the Covid-19 pandemic, in contexts when the artists could not meet in person. I consider the role that the scores played in facilitating these shared practices, asking how they allowed for the development and continuation of bonds between members of dance communities during this period.

Choreographer Trisha Brown’s It’s a Draw (2002–3)

Choreographer Trisha Brown’s <i>It’s a Draw</i> (2002–3)

Investigating Theatricality in Trisha Brown’s Work: Five Unstudied Dances, 1966–1969

Trisha Brown (1936–2017) forged her artistic identity as part of Judson Dance Theater, which embraced everyday pedestrian movement as dance. Between 1966 and 1969, Brown’s work took a surprisingly theatrical turn. Five unstudied dances from this period reflect concerns with autobiography, psychology, and catharsis, influences of her exposure to trends in Gestalt therapy and dance therapy during a sojourn in California (1963–1965). Brown let these works fall from her repertory because she did not consider them to qualify as ‘art’. Close readings of these works shed light on a period in Brown’s career before she rejected subjectivity as the basis for her creative process prior to her consolidation of her identity as an abstract choreographer in the 1970s and 1980s, while raising intriguing questions as to Brown’s late-career devotion to exploring emotion, drama and empathy in the operas and song cycle that she directed between 1998 and 2003.

« Pourquoi ne pourrait-on pas danser la peinture ? »

This article, born of a reflection initiated at the research seminar conducted by Patrice Pavis, questions the forms of multidisciplinary plays. How can dancing seize painting and enrich the picture with currents meanings? Dancers, like Joseph Nadj or Trisha Brown, used to draw during the show. Sometimes, choreographer draw their inspiration from a canvas of the past that echoes the present. This is the case of Gaëlle Bourges whose play we are going to discuss here: Conjurer la peur, which evokes a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

Audience/performer re-action: an investigation into audience/performer reciprocity via a touring site-specific performance in Lebanon

ABSTRACT In the past a typical performance situation consisted of a proscenium stage, performers on the stage and audience seated somewhere in the front. In today’s technological age, audiences are prone to watching performance on their smart devices. This live-disconnect between the audience and performer/performance has affected the industry on multiple levels. The live connection between the performer and the audience was previously a primary motivator to enhance the continuation of the art but this is not the case now. Since 1970 when performers such as Trisha Brown (Rosenberg, 2017) began to move performance into the public space, the idea of the typical proscenium stage lost its dominance and highlighted the need for investigation into alternative means of reaching audiences. One of the ways we (as performing artists) are acknowledging this void in practice pedagogy is studying how site performance engages with different environments, practices and social/cultural systems. In August 2017, Nadra Assaf and Amr Selim along with Al-Sarab Dance Company performed a series of site-specific performances in Lebanon. Investigation of the outcome through use of improvisation as methodology (McLeod, 2010), the lived experience, study of videos of the performance and analysis of interviews (individual and group) is the focus of this paper.

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

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.

Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance

“Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance” explores how the choreographic turn to postmodernism twisted the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. Analyses of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and Trisha Brown's Locus (1975) demonstrate how ordinary bodies shape racially exclusive spaces and activate the biopolitical mechanisms of normalization that their choreography allegedly contests. This essay argues that the spaces activated by the bodies that shaped them carry the physical trace of the performers’ race through the enduring invisibility of whiteness.

In search of our aunts’ gardens: Choreographic reconstruction, race and bodily transfer in Black Lōkəs

Abstract This article is an analysis of a Practice as Research (PaR) project titled Black Lōkəs. Black Lōkəs (2017) is an experimental reconstruction of Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975). This article investigates the possibility of race being used as a creative lens for dance reconstruction, a lens that does not privilege accuracy or fidelity in a traditional sense but seeks to mine the possibility of dance reconstruction as a generative act that moves beyond preservation politics. This article is composed of three connected but distinct sections, including a brief overview of performance studies’ and critical dance studies’ use of the ‘archive’ in performance; a review of Black Lōkəs (2017) by a dance practitioner who also works with the body as archive; and the methodological process and theoretical underpinnings of the creation of Black Lōkəs (2017). This article consults both critical race theorists and dance theorists who, in concert, suggest novel possibilities for and through dance reconstruction and the politics that surround the archival fever in dance making.

Constructions of the moving body: drawing and dancing

ABSTRACTThis article explores the author’s practice-led approach to visualising movement through drawing. Haley approaches movement across the disciplines of fine arts and performance, with a focus on dance, drawing and diagramming. In this paper, the author explores the relation between drawing and movement through the lens of the diagram as a graphic archival form. The author proposes that the diagram – as an assemblage of information, rather than a representation of objects in space – is a material and conceptual model for ‘recording’ dance with potential for future animation. Haley’s research begins with recorded material of American choreographer Trisha Brown’s work Accumulation 1971, which is viewed while simultaneously drawing movement. In an iterative process of drawing after drawing, Haley extracts common points of connecting lines within diagrammatic structures. The structures are described by overlaying translucent layers of watercolour to form visualisations that document choreographed movement. Haley’s research creates diagrams for moving through three-dimensional space that aim to forge connections between drawn documentation and the transience of dance in performance.

Choreographic Transmission in an Expanded Field: Reflections on “Ten Artists Respond to Trisha Brown’s Locus”

The Locus project commissioned 10 Bay Area artists from multiple disciplines to learn Trisha Brown’s Locus and respond by creating their own pieces. It was the first time that the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) had allowed one of Brown’s dances to be transmitted beyond the company for the explicit purpose of inspiring new works.

Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art

Susan Rosenberg, <i>Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art</i>

A Criação entre Dança e Instalação

Este artigo busca entender as similitudes, intelectuais e práticas ao mesmo tempo, entre o conceito de instalação, muitas vezes atribuído às artes visuais, e o de movimento dançado, muitas vezes considerado como efémero e transitório. Com a ajuda desta comparação, uma definição inovadora de criação artística poderia emergir. À primeira vista, nada associa o procedimento da criação coreográfica ao ato poiético de instalação artística. E, portanto, a linha se torna porosa em certas obras exemplares concebidas por Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Christian Rizzo, Boris Charmatz e Mette Ingvartsen. Isto poderia se explicar pela influência da prática dos happenings (Allan Kaprow) sobre arte contemporânea, onde a criação torna-se processo, work in progress, evento. Seguindo essa associação entre a instalação e a dança, é possível descobrir que o elemento do ar se apresenta como verdadeira matéria plástica, fonte de inspiração para os artistas e verdadeiro processo criativo.