As one of the most influential dancers and choreographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Trisha Brown’s artistry has left an impact in both performing and visual arts. Her exemplary career spanned more than four decades before she retired in 2008.
Early Life
Trisha Brown was born on November 25, 1936, in Aberdeen, Washington, and drew from the natural environment around her to inspire works later in her life. In 1947, Brown began her movement studies with Marion Hageage, studying acrobatics, jazz, ballet, and tap. Brown then attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she majored in dance, trained in the Martha Graham technique and Louis Horst composition, and was taught African dance by Ruth Beckford. Brown spent several summers in Connecticut studying with the American Dance Festival and working with Louis Horst, José Limón, and Merce Cunningham. Between 1958 and 1960, Brown taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and was exposed to ideas of improvisation. Her interest in improvisation deepened during a summer workshop led by Anna Halprin in 1960. At the prompting of fellow dancers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, Brown moved to New York City in early 1961.
Early Work/Improvisations 1961–1968/Trillium
Many of Brown’s early works were performed only once and occurred in what were viewed as untraditional locations such as galleries, churches, and the outdoors. Influenced by the composer John Cage, Brown’s early improvisations were set to breath, silence, and the sounds of footfalls; without strong aural components, audiences could focus more on the movements than on the accompaniment. In 1962, Brown performed her first professional piece of choreography, Trillium, debuting the work at the interdisciplinary Poet’s Festival at New York’s Maidman Playhouse on 42nd Street. Using Ann Halprin’s method of task instruction, the dance was executed using only three simple instructions: “stand, sit and lie down.” These three task behaviors were a tripartite composition echoing Brown’s upbringing in Washington and the wild three-petaled trillium flower. The piece was accompanied by Simone Forti, who performed a series of sounds including pitches, screeching, and scraping. Brown continued to create structured improvisations and improvised floor works throughout the 1960s.
Cycle: Equipment Pieces
In 1968, Brown’s work Planes marked a shift in her practice. While Brown’s work was constantly evolving, it came together in groups of works which Brown referred to as “cycles.” Though many of these cycles overlapped, Brown named them (either retroactively or concurrently) in order to shape how the works were understood. Planes was one the first in the cycle Equipment Pieces. The set, created by Brown, is a false wall that is very slightly slanted with hand-and foot-holds. During the piece, three performers move across the wall’s surface in slow motion while a film by Jud Yalkut is projected onto the wall. The layering of moving image and moving bodies creates the illusion that the performers are falling through space. In Planes and other Equipment Pieces, pedestrian movement is influenced by the architectural structures and the forces of gravity.
Glacial Decoy
After 1979, Brown’s work made another departure, as exemplified in her creation and performance of Glacial Decoy at the Walker Art Center. The piece also marks Brown’s first collaboration with a visual artist—Robert Rauschenberg—who designed the set and costumes. Experimental in her approach since the beginning, Glacial Decoy was described as Brown’s most “dancing-est” dance and it was her first choreography created for the stage: most of her previous works had taken place in urban spaces. In this work, four dancers in semitransparent, white, A-shaped dresses pose, bend, and slide in angular lines to enact the glacier metaphor. The women’s quartet slides back and forth across the stage, creating the illusion that each dancer is being pushed or pulled off stage.
Later Work in Visual Arts and Operas
Though most celebrated for her work as a dancer and choreographer, Brown also was an accomplished visual artist. Her intentional improvisations required planning and revision that was often documented through her drawings. These drawings involved text, human figures, repetition, and printmaking. Works like Footworks #1(1995) and Footworks #2 (1995) function as references for choreographies as well as capturing moments in dance that are usually lost once the performance is over. After performing in Lina Wertmüller’s 1987 production of Bizet’s Carmen, Brown also became interested in directing operas. In 1998, Brown was invited by Bernard Fouccroulle to direct Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Over the next 14 years, Brown directed four more operas, Luci mie traditrici (2001), Winterreise (2002), De gelo a gelo (2006), and Pygmalion (2010). Drawn towards more interdisciplinary and collaborative pieces, Brown also later created a ballet, O zlozony/O composite (2004), for the Paris Opera Ballet at the request of the director, Brigitte Lefèvre. Brown also worked with visual artist Vija Celmins and composer Laurie Anderson.
Awards and Recognition
Across the course of her career, Brown received nearly every award available to contemporary choreographers, making her one of the most acclaimed and influential figures in the field. In 1991, Brown was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for choreography. She also received five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, and Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Medal in Dance (1982). In 1983, Brown received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Oberlin College, and in 1988 the government of France gave Brown the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Brown received the Capezio Ballet Makers Dance Foundation award in 2010. In 2011, she was awarded the New York Dance and Performance Lifetime Achievement Award.
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