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dancer who appears in the film, Homemade cannot function: the film was not conceived as independent of the artwork for which it was created. While exploring the issue of a dance’s longevity (through its recording), Homemade also invites reflection on choreography’s death and ephemerality. If a successful production or reprisal of Homemade depends on the participation and life of the performer, the dance pre-envisions its own expiration as contingent on the life or expiration of the dancer who embodies the choreography in both of its iterations.

      Early in her career, in 1964, Brown expressed a powerful dedication to the notion of authorship and originality in the realm of live performance. Writing to Yvonne Rainer she reported that Ann Halprin had asked Brown and her husband “to do the undressing bit we did in Whitman’s FLOWER. I don’t get that attitude,” she wrote. “I told her we would if Whitman gave her permission and I guess that was the end of that.”²⁹ In other words, she deferred to Whitman’s authorship, ownership, and rights to his performance as an original artwork and believed that her re-presentation of it, without his authorization, would be an act of theft and forgery. Homemade consolidates her ideas about a performance’s authorship, authenticity, and originality.

      Marking the first of many instances when Brown explored the visual experience of “split perception,” or what she later described as “visual deflection,” Homemade’s format relates to instructions for performance announced in John Cage’s lecture “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?”: “A performance must be given by a single lecturer. He may read ‘live’ any one of the lectures. The ‘live’ reading may be superimposed on the recorded readings. Or the whole may be recorded and delivered mechanically.”³⁰

      In Cage’s “45′ for a Speaker,” he questioned the division between listening and watching, envisioning the theatricalization of musical experience and conditions wherein the audience’s attention would be divided: “Music is one part of theater. ‘Focus’ is what aspects one’s noticing. There is all the various things going on at the same time. I have noticed that music is liveliest for me when listening for instance doesn’t distract me from seeing.”³¹

      Brown re-opened this question of split focus, superimposed performances, as well as Homemade’s perpetuation (or potential loss) when she reprised it in 1996. In an especially poignant rendition of the work, presented on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Brown reconstituted Homemade (1966) as a dance between her sixty-six-year-old self and her former self, aged thirty, whose image (in Whitman’s original film) accompanied the live performance (see figure 2.6).

      Her continued fascination with the idea that a particular choreography owes its origin and provenance to the choreographer who originally made it and to the dancer who performs it was evident in Brown’s contribution to Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project’s Judson Revival program, “Past Forward” (2000–2001). For that occasion, she invited Baryshnikov to re-create the work and filmmaker Babette Mangolte to contribute its cinematic component, this time filmed in Super 8 mm in a studio at P.S. 122 in New York’s East Village.³²

      In a film by Charles Atlas screened as the prologue to the “Past Forward” performance program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 7, 2001, Brown’s voiceover accompanies footage of Baryshnikov rehearsing Homemade. We hear Brown, unseen, instructing, “Physicalize a memory … You know there’s that purity of the first time you try something … It’s beautiful … It’s almost the same … but more from your experience.”³³ The clip captures Brown’s use of the “live score” idea in welcoming Baryshnikov to introduce his memories to the work. Her approach to including Homemade on a program devoted to reviving artworks made in the 1960s speaks to Brown’s convictions regarding the impossibility of any truly authentic revival, offering, through Homemade’s a contemporary re-rendering, a demonstration of the inseparable dynamic between originality and repetition.

      This new original combination of dance and film substituted for Brown’s performance, with Baryshnikov’s appearance bringing the work alive again, and at a particular moment (see figure 2.7). This attitude regarding her “Judson works” reflects Brown’s conviction that all but Homemade (a work exploring repeatability as an idea) should be assigned to her juvenilia as unique original dances. From that period she let go of her improvised solo (Trillium), her improvised duet with Steve Paxton (Lightfall, 1963; discussed in chapter 3), and Rulegame 5 (1964), which used dancers and nondancers and a simple game structure. Her remaking of Homemade in a 1996 version bypassed the notion of a “revival” or “reprisal” to insist on its integrity as contemporary artwork.

      Figure 2.6 Trisha Brown performing Homemade, 1996. Photograph © Vincent Pereira, Trisha Brown Dance Company Archive, New York

      Figure 2.7 Mikhail Baryshnikov performing Homemade, 2001. Photograph © 2015 Stephanie Berger

      Brown’s insistence on preserving Homemade as the sole example of her work of the early 1960s is evident in her responses to various efforts to revisit, and canonize, the work of Judson Dance Theater. The first, in 1980–1982, organized by Wendy Perron, Tony Carruthers, and Dan Cameron—the Bennington College Judson Project—was a multi-year, multi-part enterprise (which included an exhibition, Judson Dance Theater: 1962–1966, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, as well as extensive interviews with Judson participants). As part of the “Judson Project” residency/performance element, held at Bennington College on April 11, 1980, Brown presented Homemade but ignored the project’s historical premises, instead performing dances dating from 1975 and after, including (in this order) Accumulation (1971) with Talking (1973) plus Water Motor (1978) (1979), Locus (1975), Solo Olos (1977), “Message to Steve” (a work-in-progress that would become part of Opal Loop, 1980), as well her most recent work, “a fragment of Glacial Decoy (1979).”³⁴

      She declined to participate in any of the Bennington project’s New York performances at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, citing her focus on her current choreography.³⁵ For Baryshnikov’s 2000–2001 “Past Forward” project, she remade Homemade for him to perform and also insisted on including a recent work in the program, emphasizing the priority of her present artistic concerns over nostalgic reminiscence.

      Brown refused to participate in Danspace’s 2012 Judson Revival project, again insisting on her belief in her works’ historicity—an issue to which she remained closely attuned.³⁶ In this case, Brown’s nonparticipation was also related to the fact that Homemade had just recently been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As to the status of her improvisational duet with Steve Paxton (Lightfall, 1963)—performed twice in the 1960s—Brown never reprised it, although in 1994 she reunited with Paxton for a new performed duet improvisation, Long and Dream, seen first at the Volkstheatre, Vienna (on August 12, 1994), and again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (on October 2, 1996), as part of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration.

      For the 2012 Trisha Brown Dance Company program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Homemade was executed by Vicky Shick, a choreographer and former Trisha Brown Dance Company member. It included a new film (actually a digital videotape) by Babette Mangolte. Shick (working with Carolyn Lucas, Brown’s choreographic assistant since 1994) not only studied Whitman’s film but revisited Brown’s notes on the dance’s original memory images. Her exquisite performance struck a sensitive and precise balancing of the theatrical, the actual/everyday, and the dramatization of nonchalant inner focus

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