LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 1.5 “Percussion Band,” John Cage and Marian van Tuyl, Oakland Tribune, 1941. Photograph © Don McDonagh, Special Collection, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland, California

      Brown fondly remembers attending Sunday dinners at the home of the émigré composer and director of the Mills Music Department, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), who in the 1920s, in Paris, had been a member of “Les Six,” the most avant-garde musical composers of the day. During these gatherings Brown would assist his wife, the librettist Madeleine Milhaud, in the kitchen.⁶⁹ When Brown studied dance off-campus, she did not go to Halprin’s workshop, as did other students, but instead went to Ruth Beckford’s studio.⁷⁰ She claimed that at Mills improvisation was considered taboo, a point she made by paraphrasing Horst: “Louis Horst thought it [improvisation] was comparable to turning out the lights and announcing happy hour.”⁷¹

      After graduation Brown became a dance instructor at Reed College: A 1958 college press release announced that “Patricia Brown, an outstanding young choreographer and dancer from Mills College, will conduct a series of classes of young children of varying groups during the day, and separate classes for beginning and advanced students during the evenings. Miss Brown will continue during the academic year as an instructor in physical education.”⁷² Reed’s Dance Department was part of the Division of the Humanities and Arts in 1949; in 1953, it moved to the Department of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, remaining there until 1967, when it came under the umbrella of the Department of Arts.

      Brown’s decision to teach at Reed was influenced by the example of her teachers at Mills, especially van Tuyl, who was hired for a tenured academic position in 1938 in the midst of the Great Depression. Both Van Tuyl and Lauer described themselves as choreographers/dancers torn between the security of academia and the wish for recognition in the professional context of New York dance.⁷³ In light of Janice Ross’s study of the split between academic dance and concert dance in 1950s America, these women’s desire to bridge this divide is exceptional and had an impact on Brown’s outlook as she embarked on her career.⁷⁴

      Mills College emphasized teaching, based on the 1950s supposition that women would want to balance dance with family life and children. Teaching was “an auxiliary skill, after graduation, to reinforce my conventional life,” Brown said. “Remember, this was the 1950s, a very closed era. I had been brought up to think of marriage, being a mother and a housewife as the most important thing.”⁷⁵ Nevertheless, at Mills she was surrounded by impressive role models, “Doris Dennison, Becky Fuller, Marian van Tuyl and Eleanor Lauer … women of achievement.”⁷⁶

      At Reed, Brown said her students had no dance training. Liz Thompson, a nineteen-year-old Reed College student when she first met Brown (and who performed in Brown’s Roof Piece, 1971, years before they worked together when Thompson became director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 1980, a post that enabled her to become a major supporter of Brown’s work, as is discussed in chapter 9), recalled Brown teaching a highly eccentric version of Graham’s technique and alignment.⁷⁷ Brown said she mostly used improvisation. This led her to seek the knowledge necessary to do her job, by studying with Halprin. She recalled, “The nature of the student body [at Reed] at the time was irreverence mixed with a complete lack of training and discipline.”⁷⁸ Faced with teaching dancers “who didn’t fall into the categories of dance I had been taught at Mills,” she began improvising.⁷⁹ “I needed to give them a dance experience without having to rely on these kinds of techniques and … so that’s why I went to Ann.”⁸⁰