Trisha Brown - Susan Rosenberg

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Holes of Water—3 (1966), presented at “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” (1966).48 Brecht said that Rauschenberg’s comments on a public panel at New York University inspired his work, whose score was published in An Anthology.49 Brown’s activation of the wheels of the skateboard, car, and headlights in relation to (undocumented) time structures echoes Brecht’s work, created for “any number of vehicles arranged outdoors” in which “there are at least as many sets of instruction cards as vehicles.” His score includes a list of possibilities for activating cars’ mechanisms—including headlights, parking lights, footlights, directional signal, inside light, glove compartment light, spot lamp, special lights, horns, sirens, bells, motor, windshield wipers, radio, seats, and doors—according to precise time structures.

      As part of A string (1966), presented in the contained indoor setting of Judson Church, Brown replaced the car with a motor scooter. Jill Johnston compared it to a happening, implicitly relating it to Rauschenberg’s dance. Johnston wrote of Motor: “The use of objects in the second section achieved a dramatic impact much closer to the metaphorical license of the painter-happenings than the phenomenological approach to objects of many dancer happenings. In a blacked out space Miss Brown used a child’s skateboard to scoot on, run with, fall over, etc., as she was followed closely by a man on a motor scooter.”50

      The final component of A string—Outside (1966)—defines its concept and movement source in relation to the architectural site of its making. Its premise connects to Brown’s exploration of frames and contexts in Motor and Homemade—albeit in a far more literal fashion. Its realization followed from Brown’s adoption of a loft-studio’s walls as the basis for a movement score, a situation she re-created when she presented the work at Judson Church.

      She explained the importance of Outside’s geometric framework, how movements’ invention followed from cues delivered by a loft-studio’s wall surfaces. As Sally Banes reported (while renaming Outside “Inside,” as Brown did for a 1978 text published by Anne Livet), Brown “read the hardware, fixtures, woodwork, and various objects stored around the edges as instructions for movement,” explaining “Outside organizational methods force new patterns of construction.”51 Brown said she faced her studio wall “at a distance of twelve feet and beginning at the extreme left … read the wall as a score. While moving across the room to the far right,” she gleaned information about “speed, shape, duration or quality of a move [from] visual information on the wall … the architectural collection of alcove, door, peeling paint and pipes,” correlating these incidents with physical actions.52 “After finishing the first wall,” she said, “I repositioned myself in the same way for the second wall and repeated the procedure, [then] for the third and fourth.”53

      This use of “structured improvisation”—a phrase coined by Simone Forti, whom Brown considered a most important mentor—had begun after Brown’s arrival in New York in the winter of 1961. Steve Paxton recalled watching Trisha and Simone demonstrating ‘improvisation’ in weekly workshops in James Waring’s space on Eighth Street and Third Avenue.54 Together with Paxton—in an illicit artistic behavior—they commandeered an unauthorized space on Great Jones Street as a studio.55

      Brown recalls, “Simone would point blindly into the space and then follow out the end of her finger. From whatever there was, she would derive a set of rules about time and space that were complete enough to proceed with an improvisation.”56 Forti’s and Brown’s method of sourcing improvised movement dates to their participation in Ann Halprin’s 1960 workshop. Don McDonagh reported in Artforum in 1972 that Ann Halprin “began to work toward a type of dance activity that would draw upon its environment…. It was improvisation in which the resistance of materials … dictated the activity that the dancers would devise”; this approach to dance was unique in its time.57

      There was a contextual element to Halprin’s teachings: improvisation was practiced on an outdoor dance deck conceived by Halprin’s husband, Lawrence Halprin, an architect/landscape architect (and former student of Walter Gropius at Harvard University’s School of Design in the 1950s). Located in the shadow of northern California’s Mount Tamalpais, the deck allowed for improvising in real space and time. Its structure, Lawrence Halprin said, was “conceived as a plane on which dance could be performed.” “Since it is not rectangular,” he added, “it generates a different influence on dance than does a space based on right angles.”58 Ann Halprin emphasized, “Walls are replaced by trees. Confining ceilings are nonexistent and the sky is a long way up…. There is a basic envelope of deep silence—punctuated by soft wind noises … the air is in constant movement.”59

      Discussing “the powerful influence of the spatial structure,” “the non-rectangular form of the deck forc[ing] a complete reorientation of the dancers,” Halprin emphasized a natural relationship between the body, space, and movement.60 The setting informed movements’ scoring: “The customary points of reference are gone and in place of a cubic space all confined by right angels with front, back, sides and top—a box within which to move—the space explodes and becomes mobile. Movement within a moving space, I have found is different than movement within a static cube.”61

      Forti, a longtime Halprin student and former member of Halprin’s company, felt the grid of New York City to be tiresome and confining. She writes Handbook in Motion, “It seemed to me that in New York my grid requirements had been structured by certain elements of human potential, of human function, of life function. But in a sense it tended towards closed systems. It lacked certain channels of openness to systems we cannot comprehend.”62 Forti’s outlook is consistent with her interest in movement’s organic dimensions.

      When Brown transposed Halprin’s improvisational model to New York, it was in reference to the static cube and grid that she originated her choreography and on which its presentation depended. Taking inspiration from incidental aspects on a wall surface, Brown’s movement was, she said, “concretely specific to me, [but] abstract to the audience.”63 A circumscribed physical structure solved the problem of the choreography’s start and finish; the objective geometric frame constrained subjective choice making in movements’ generation. Brown underscored the wall’s importance as an external impersonal touchstone: “I remember being surprised when my right foot would be activated by a valve sticking out of the wall. I would not have selected the distribution of movement across my body on my own.”64

      The sole reviewer of Brown’s performance of Outside at Judson Church, Jill Johnston described Brown’s “silky kinetic ease and presence.”65 She wrote, “I’d like to call it electrifying if the term can be understood in some subtle sense of a charge emanating from someplace inside what the thing looks like, which is warm, direct, calm, unself-righteously confident.”66 As with Trillium (1962) she expressed appreciation for Brown’s talent as a dancer, calling her “one of an almost zero number who can make ‘dance’ movement unconventional by seeming to exert no effort in letting it come alive,”67 an achievement that Johnston singled out as a “power manifest in the third part of A string”—that is, Outside.68

      When Brown presented Outside at Judson Church, she placed the audience’s seats around her dance in a configuration that reproduced the studio’s original framing context, applying a method for improvising outdoors and in nature (California) to New York, where her concern with movement’s structural framing was an element internal to the work. In Outside the relationship between the soloist (Brown) and her audience was intimate. She recalls “mov[ing] along the edge of the room, facing out, on the kneecaps of the audience, who were placed in a rectangular seating formation, duplicating the interior of my studio. I was marking the edge of the space, leaving the center of the room empty.”69

      Brown has stated that she cultivated a performance affect different from that of her peers in Judson Dance Theater: “Up until that time,” she said, “dancers in dance companies were doing rigorous technical steps and one of the mannerisms was to glaze over the eyes and kick up a storm…. Many people used that device

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