Trisha Brown Research Articles

The Shifting Axis of Symmetry

When Babette Mangolte moved to New York from Paris in 1970 she quickly involved herself with the city’s most progressive circle of artists, choreographers, filmmakers, and directors. The group of images and films included in the gallery exhibition at Broadway 1602 contextualizes this particularly fecund period of artistic innovation. In much of her collaborative work, Mangolte is the one hidden behind the camera. She has been the photographer and cinematographer for seminal artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Robert Whitman, and Richard Foreman. Several photographs from her joint work, as well as stills from the 1975 What Masie Knew, Mangolte’s first feature, are part of the Broadway 1602 exhibition. The show also includes a short looped film portrait of Richard Serra, and a screening of The Camera: Je / La Camera: I, both from 1977. Throughout this body of work, content materializes in several sets of dichotomies. By extracting differences between oppositional pairs—such as the photographer and her subject—Mangolte paradoxically reveals their similarities, illuminating more complex relationships than at first glance.

Philosophy and the Bodily Arts

and I wouldn't know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want than to be a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety […]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Th...

Who's There?—Community of the Question

It used to be, in the clamorous sixties, when with all the enchantments of dissidence we were shattering language, abandoning texts, and going for broke with the body, or extolling body language, that dance was preferred to theatre, or at least the bourgeois theatre, burdened as it was with words—or the words, words, words that are, in their Hamletic disposition, an impediment to action. But if dance and theatre were sometimes merged or conflated, as in the tradition of Martha Graham, we have now seen a generation of choreographers, like Alain Platel in Belgium or Jerome Bel in France, who merge them too, but with street arts or social action, or with a high-tech guerrilla strategy, on rooftops with satellite disks, as if in some radicalized extension of that other tradition, from the Judson Memorial Church, with its offbeat anti-aesthetic, during the years of the counterculture. The Judson was not especially political, and there were trained dancers there, like Yvonne Rainer or Trisha Brown, but in renouncing virtuosity, mere dance, in favor of “found” movement or task-directed events, there was another kind of activism, which might change the site of performance or the spectator’s relation to it—and sometimes in public spaces, where if there was anything like a public, they’d have sure been surprised to see it. Thus, if in the church itself they might have performers upside down on a ceiling or, in autistic slow motion, crawling on a floor, they might elsewhere in the city have them in a spidery web (with rather tenuous ropes) coming down from the top of a building. In their affinities, meanwhile, with new music, Cage’s silence, Rauschenberg’s collage, and the interplay of performance with all the visual arts, the Judson choreographers initiated still other ideas: exploring everyday movement, the gestures of eating or dressing, with barely a humming sound; and in the relation of movement and time, testing the viewer’s endurance, as in a matrix of no-time, monotonic at long duration, with the boredom as conceptual; or, breathtaking, breath-catching, the sonic propelling motion, as if danced on the vocal tract. Such ideas were taken up by or inseparable from alternative modes of theatre that, with rock music and blue jeans, soon came over to Europe—along with the

Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001. Edited By Hendel Teicher. Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2002. Pp 340. $35 Pb

Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001. Edited By Hendel Teicher. Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2002. Pp 340. $35 Pb

The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (review)

Reviewed by: The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool Charles O. Anderson The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. By Brenda Dixon Gottschild. New York: Palgrave Mac-Millan, 2003; pp. 352. $29.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Brenda Dixon Gottschild charts a "geography" that maps a unique, yet startlingly ever-present, region of influence in the history of American dance: the black dancing body. The author says on the front cover of the book, "[t]he black dancing body (a fiction based on reality, a fact based upon illusion) has infiltrated and informed the shapes and changes of the American dancing body." The Black Dancing Body is Dixon Gottschild's third installment in a series (after Waltzing in the Dark and Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance) considering and analyzing the influences and acculturation of Africanist dance movement—as the result of the African Diaspora—into the gestalt of American performance. It is a personalized cultural study in which she examines/questions/confronts the taboo references to the physical aesthetics of the ethnically African body. Dixon Gottschild makes clear that this work is not meant to be read as a comprehensive study of black dance. It is, rather, a representative one, aiming to surface issues sorely absent from the heated debate about what is or is not "black dance" and when and where black dance and dancers enter the argument. She charts a segmented analysis of the black body, "which like the African continent, has a history of literal and figurative dissection" (xiv). The Black Dancing Body walks around its subject, looking at it from new angles, carefully knocking down clichés and stereotypes. Dixon Gottschild allows dance practitioners to take the forefront in the discussion; she makes a space for their voices to be heard even when the voices run contrary to the very premise of the book. Dixon Gottschild's exploration of the geography of the black dancing body begins with her own story. She recounts being a young dancer in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her short-waisted, long-legged, slim-hipped body "got me in trouble," she recalls, when more "feminine" bodies (i.e., shorter, rounder, more conventionally proportioned, white-skinned bodies) were in fashion (3). Recounting experiences of auditioning time and again for Broadway shows knowing full well that African Americans rarely, if ever, made the cut, this very personal exploration ranges from the question of what black dance is to the role and perceptions of various body parts. To remind us that she is not alone in her musings, the author interviews twenty-four leading dance practitioners (not all African American), including Fernando Bujones, Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Ronald K. Brown and Ralph Lemon, representing a variety of dance eras, idioms, and traditions. Through these personal accounts and interviews she takes us on a journey along the physical terrain of the black dancing body, making stops at such contested physical attributes as feet, skin, soul/spirit, buttocks. (These terms, among others, are actually chapter titles.) During this promenade she reveals that society sees her and other black dancers as a sum of their parts: in other words, not whole. She offers an in-depth look at the world of dance while illuminating the obvious notion (at least to many black artists) that the dance world is a microcosm of the complicated and racially charged history of American society itself. This is not a linear, academic study but rather a living, breathing, literary batik . . . a modern-day kinte cloth. With its multiple voices and rhythms, it honors the Africanist aesthetic of embracing the whole, embracing the conflict—telling it like it is. By applying a blend of oral history methods and critical theory, interviews with black, white, and brown dance practitioners, as well as performance analysis and personal recollections of her own life in the world of dance, she charts the endeavors, ordeals, and triumphs of "black" dance and dancers. [End Page 774] She explores with new eyes the contours and importance of the black dancing body and exposes perceptions, images, and assumptions past and present. Dixon Gottschild acknowledges early on that "using race...

Against Expectations: Trisha Brown and the Avant-Garde

Against Expectations: Trisha Brown and the Avant-Garde

Against Expectations: Trisha Brown and the Avant-garde

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.

Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown: Falling in the Dynamite of the Tenth of a Second

In the fall of 1950, Hans Namuth filmedJackson Pollock painting on a sheet of glass. Filming from below this transparent 'canvas', Namuth captures Pollock moving back and forth above the glass, throwing paint, cigarette in mouth, in the artist's famous manner. According to Barbara Rose, 'Pollock's repeated rhythmic steps as he worked his way around the four sides of his canvas were interpreted as a kind of ritual dance; as a result, the word choreographed began to be used to describe the compositional mode of Pollock's classic poured paintings. Largely because of Namuth's film, people frequently talk of Jackson Pollock's 'dancing'. But what of the paint falling, being flung? What if we watch the paint through Namuth's glass, and view it as the body doing the dancing? During the 1960s and 1970s, dancers experimented with weight, improvisation, and falling in unprecedented ways; perhaps one could even say they positioned themselves as Pollock's paint, exploring what it meant to be matter falling through space. As with Pollock, people were there to record it. In 1983, Steve Paxton, in conjunction with Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson, and videographer Steve Christiansen, made Fall After Newton, a videotape tracing eleven consecutive years of contact improvisation, starting with Steve Paxton's Magnesium (1972) and ending with Contact's 11th Anniversary Concert Series at St Mark's Church, New York City. In this paper, I examine Fall After Newton, as well as Babette Mangolte's 1978 film of Trisha Brown's Water Motor, both documents of dancers who challenged modernism's obsession with verticality by experimenting with gravity. What interests me most about these two documents is their use of slow motion. Much in the way that Namuth, filming through glass, enabled viewers to see Pollock in new ways, Mangolte and Christiansen used slow motion to make visible dance that was impossible to see with the naked eye. Intrigued by the beauty of slowness made possible by technological means, this paper explores the significance of mechanically slowing down the fall of dancing bodies.

Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown: Falling in the Dynamite of the Tenth of a Second

Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown: Falling in the Dynamite of the Tenth of a Second

Doing your thing? Trisha Brown's object lesson

Doing your thing? Trisha Brown's object lesson

Trisha Brown: dance and art in dialogue, 1965-2001

A retrospective that explored the career of this legendary choreographer highlighting the collaborative process she fostered with visual artists. Organized in collaboration with the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. -- Publisher's website.

Rauschenberg’s Photographies

Review| April 01 1998 Rauschenberg’s Photographies Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain November 20 , 1998-February 26, 1999Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany June 27-October 11, 1998 The Menil Collection Contemporary Arts Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas February 13-May 17, 1998Guggenheim Museums, New York, New York September 19 , 1997-January 7, 1998Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective by Walter Hopps essays by Trisha Brown, Ruth Fine, Billy Kliiver, with Julie Martin, Rosalind Krauss, Steve Paxton, Nancy Spector and Charles F. Stuckey, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997 632 pp./$75.00 (hb), $45.00 (sb) Ingrid Schaffner Ingrid Schaffner Ingrid Schaffner is an independent curator and critic. Her exhibition “DEEP STORAGE: Arsenale der Erinnerung” will be held at P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York, July 4-September 7, 1998. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1998) 25 (5): 15. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1998.25.5.15 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ingrid Schaffner; Rauschenberg’s Photographies. Afterimage 1 April 1998; 25 (5): 15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1998.25.5.15 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1998 by The Regents of the University of California1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A study on dance works of Trisha Brown from the 1960's through the 1980's

A study on dance works of Trisha Brown from the 1960's through the 1980's

The tail of the dragon: new dance, 1976-1982

In The Tail of the Dragon, Marcia B. Siegel and Nathaniel Tileston track the evolution of new dance in New York during the rich and crucial transitional period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Siegel, one of America's most important dance critics, and Tileston, an accomplished dance photographer, focus on the choreographers who were propelled into rebellion against conventional modern dance by the Judson Dance Theater and other countercultural movements born of the 1960s. This collection of Siegel's writing, compiled from reviews in Soho Weekly News and New York Magazine, as well as from longer essays and notebook pieces, forms an insightful commentary--occasionally wry, always perceptive-on the absorption of a radical art form by the mainstream. From minimalism, improvisation, street dancing, body awareness, and poor theater experimental strategies, these young rebels identified and adopted personal styles of movement and dancemaking; from that, they turned gradually to tamer, more accessible work, marked by virtuosic dancing, proscenium-ready repertoires, and touring companies. Included in this story are the principal players in the postmodernist dance movement-Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, David Gordon-now well known internationally as leaders of dance in the 1990s. Siegel also looks at artists who worked steadily but less visibly, influential ones who drifted out of dance, and unknowns who have gained prominence. The dances described here are formal and outlandish, scruffy and beautiful, endearingly fallible and icily perfect. In rightfully celebrating the importance of dances long forgotten, The Tail of the Dragon produces a vibrant portrait of a generation of dance.

The Play of Dance: An Introduction to "Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb,..."

At 50, Deborah Hay is one of the few original postmodern choreographers still actively exploring an antitechnical aesthetic. While the likes of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Twyla Tharp have turned to increasingly virtuosic dancers and movement styles, Hay is still interested in the aesthetics of the lived-rather than the mastered-body. She still exists (both literally-in Austin, Texas-as well as metaphorically) at the margins of the art, refusing to buy into the conventional standards of beauty that have reentered the field in the last decade. She simply has eliminated that kind of hierarchy from her vocabulary. By calling 'dance' we are then making a judgment about stuff we are not calling 'dance.' I have an unquenchable thirst to present that area of movement not recognized as dance-to pull it back into the world of dance (I990). The choreographer's model remains John Cage, whose insistence that anything-including noise and silence-could be music, revolutionized the fate of late-twentieth-century art. Hay grew up in Brooklyn, feeding on the Rockettes and the New York City Ballet. She did indeed learn to well enough to join the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in I964, but soon quit that in favor of the avantgarde community of the Judson Dance Theatre. She discovered in its fondness for nontrained performers a whole new world of possibilities. She never took another class (it felt limiting); instead, she explored tai chi chuan, whose centered, grounded, smooth way of moving is still rec-

The Wexner Fragments for the Visual Arts

The Wexner Center for the Visual Arts opened to the public on November 16, 1989 with lavish ceremonies, including the J.D. Steel Gospel Singers, dancer Trisha Brown, the Kronos Quartet, and Laurie Anderson, and moderated by Colleen Dewhurst.A debate considering Elsenman and Trott's facility was opened by Philip Johnson and moderated by Kurt Forster, and included Henry Cobb, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Robert Siegel, and Stanley Tigerman. The first exhibition is scheduled to open in the Wexner Center in February.

Trisha Brown: "All of the Person's Person Arriving"

Trisha Brown: "All of the Person's Person Arriving"

Reviews & resources

Theatre Speech (The Predicament of Three Women in the Nuclear Age), written and directed by Avram Patt, Theatre for the New York City, October 1983, New York City Fen, by Caryl Churchill directed by Les Waters, London Joint Stock Theatre Group's production presented by Joseph Paff at the Public Theatre, New York City Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Max Stafford‐Clark, Royal Theatre Court production presented by Joseph Papp at The Public Theatre, New York City Sophie, by comedienne Judy Sloan, October 1983, at the Gay Women's Alternative, New York City. Awake Sleeping Heart, a collage for five women based on the life, journals and paintings of the Mexican artist Fri‐da Kahlo, conceived and directed by Emma Missouri, October 1983, Northampton, Massachusetts Antigone Too: Rites of Love and Defiance, written and directed by Martha Boesing for At the Foot of the Mountain, August 1983, at the People's Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo, by Dario Fo and Franca Rame, performed by Estelle Parsons at the Public Theatre, New York City, Fall 1983. Dance Celebration of Traditional Cultures, La Mama Annex, November 11–13, 1983. History, An American Dream, by Anne Bogart, St. Mark's Church, October, 1983. Vamot A Andar (Let's Get Going), Wallflower Order and Grupo Raiz, October, 1983, Symphony Space, New York City Testimonies, New York City Political Dancers, Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, August 1983. Set and Reset, Trisha Brown and Company, Brooklyn Academy of Music, October 1983. Books The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970–1980, edited by Moira Roth. Los Angeles: Astro Ariz, 1983. 149 pp., bibliographies. Cloth: $25.00; paper: $12.50 Woman and Spirituality by Carol Ochs. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983. 144 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Cloth: $16.95 Women In Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Carol Neuls‐Bates. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. 332 pp., selected bibliography, index, illustrations. Cloth: $18.50 American Women Composers Before 1870 by Judith Tick. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983. 233 pp., appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth: $44.95 Louise Farrenc, 1840–1875 by Bea Friedland. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1980. 177 pp., appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth: $49.95 Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History by Lou Taylor, Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983. 287 pp., appendices, chapter notes, select bibliography, index. Cloth: $24.50 Listings

A Portfolio of Photographs of Trisha Brown's Work

A Portfolio of Photographs of Trisha Brown's Work

Choice/form in Trisha Brown'sLocus: A view from inside the cube

(1978). Choice/form in Trisha Brown's Locus: A view from inside the cube. Dance Chronicle: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 117-130.