LITMIR.BIZ

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just physical feats.”¹⁶

      Through the idea of memory as a mental/physical construct—available to reactivation—Brown sought to counteract the mindless repetition and practice of choreography as a deadening of the vitality of dance performance. Some years later, she reflected on the pernicious effect of memory on the process of keeping movement alive and enlivened during a choreography’s repetition in performance: she described how remembering and repeating a dance meant that she “lost it or ground it down or memorized it to death.”¹⁷

      Homemade explores a counter-method for animating and reanimating movement and choreography: by envisaging it as an experience of mind-body integration, requiring in-the-moment retrieval of mental, physical, and emotional residue stored in and retrieved through the body. As in Trillium (1962), she emphasized the dancer’s active mind, not dance’s imitated physical shapes. The connectivity of mind and body in sourcing movement forms—her performance concept—underscores distinctions between Homemade’s vitalized iteration and the film, its pictorialized counterpart, absent a breathing three-dimensional body.

      Brown’s use of film in Homemade recalls her recording of Simone Forti’s improvised vocalizations in Trillium (1962), where the memory and recreation of a lost example of improvisation had an artistic function related to the work’s meaning. Similarly, Homemade’s use of film serves her work’s artistic aims. It is not merely documentary, but contributes to visualizing choreography as a repeatable structure, seen both live and recorded. This idea intersects with competing theories about dance and its archivization.¹⁸ Some argue that the body is an archive and that dance is transmitted body-to-body (much as stories live on through oral history).¹⁹ This model emphasizes dance as an ephemeral art whose identity remains separate from its inscription through notation or in film or video. Other writers see dance as inseparable from its representation in documentation.²⁰ Brown’s work refuses these distinctions while recognizing the time-bound historicity of each performance (as contrasted with fixed choreography). For the device to work, the same dancer must be seen simultaneously as alive on stage and recorded on film.

      Brown’s evolving vision regarding the dynamic between choreography and improvisation is recorded in her statement “The transition from improvisation (you’ll never see that again) to choreography (a dance form that can be precisely repeated) required great effort…. The ideas take a visual presence in the mind and one must find the method to decant that vision.”²¹ If this concern and challenge would significantly inform her work with improvisation throughout her career, the combination of film and dance in Homemade extend and amplify Brown’s definition of choreography as a repeatable structure, imbuing this idea with new implications. Analog phonographs and film not only alter human perception of the “live.” Preserving the past through reproduction also impacts how we remember it.²² Homemade’s film clearly occupies a past (a performance preceding the live performance) that the audience witnesses;²³ the temporal gap between the two events implies the work’s always having a history, almost as if, as an artwork, it escaped temporal limits to imaginatively occupy a “forever” as a self-contained artwork—so long as the rules for the combination of dance and film are respected.

      It is only Brown’s instructions for Homemade that make it obvious she is visualizing a contrast between the body conceived as an archive (of memories/movements) and the functioning of film as a different method for providing dance with memory through inscriptive archivization. Homemade demonstrates that any choreographic idea is only and always reproduced, whether in a live performance or in a film record. This concept’s articulation in Homemade contests the notion that performance happens only in the moment.²⁴

      As an artwork, it presents audiences with the complicated experience of watching and comparing two different iterations of the choreography, making visible choreography’s consistency, coherence, and repeatability. The film, as a tangible artifact, announces Homemade’s choreography as that absence which is present, materialized in the body of the performer and on film; choreography is highlighted as a representation made manifest in two simultaneous, nearly identical performances.²⁵ The relationship of the live to the film brings attention to the slim distinction between each of choreography’s iterations, showing choreography, as defined for Brown, by the idea, if not the actuality, of a permanent model.

      The cinematic artifact announces a permanence to which choreography and dance aspire—but can only ever partially achieve, because they disappear and vanish.²⁶ Brown’s showcasing of each dance movement’s ephemerality in performance, as compared to the cinematic recording, paradoxically reinforces the priority given to choreography’s relatively unchanging logic, her work’s center. Rather than being destined to immediately disappear, each individual, ephemeral performance of choreography encircles the idea of choreography’s potential to endure.

      Homemade solidifies this concept of choreography’s permanence and performance’s originality in its apparatus. As a choreographic work defined by the marriage of performance and filmed reproduction, Homemade questions performance art theory’s separation of live performance from its documentation, instead applying this inquiry to question choreography’s definition, one of her works’ themes and concepts.

      Her “double-exposed” dance compares to Robert Rauschenberg’s creation of two nearly identical but slightly different paintings, Factum I (1957) and Factum II (1957). (See figures 2.4 and 2.5.) As he said, “I painted two identical pictures, but only identical to the limits of the eye, the hand, the materials adjusting to the differences from one canvas to another.”²⁷ As Branden W. Joseph notes, “At issue for Rauschenberg was not the exactness of reproduction but the difference within repetition.” He adds, “Though the differences between Rauschenberg’s two Factums thwart the viewer’s mnemonic capacities they do not simply disappear in the observation of one canvas alone. Rather, they continue to haunt each individual work, rendering it incomplete and defeating any claim to full self-presence. Thus neither canvas can any longer attain the solidity and self-identity that can privilege it as an original against which the other can be judged as a copy.”²⁸

      The same is true for Brown’s Homemade—albeit with an important difference, which concerns the property of artistic originality in its specific pertinence to choreography. As Rauschenberg does in Factum I and Factum II, Brown requires the audience to make choices regarding their focus on the dance or the film, implying a similar problematization of originality through these two mediums’ juxtaposition. However, if the duality of Rauschenberg’s two nearly identical Factums overturns conventional notions of originality in painting, Homemade insists on the idea of originality’s possibility for choreography, a concept manifested through the function of the singular (and original) dancer whose body/performance mediates between Homemade’s two reproductions—a precise and true understanding of the way any individual dance performance is a unique interpretation.

      Figure 2.4 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I, 1957. Oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas, 61½ × 35¾ in. (156.2 × 90.8 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

      Figure 2.5 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957. Oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and painted paper on canvas, 61⅜ × 35½ in. (155.9 × 90.2 cm). Purchase and an anonymous gift and Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest (both by exchange). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of

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