You Can Still See Her Left: Trisha Brown, Brown dance any of her signature solos. It stopped Accumulation, 1971. Performance me short, saddened me—and then my sadness was view, Tate Modern, dissipated by Sandra Grinberg’s fine performance. London, October 17, 2010. Leah In the intervening three and a half years, as Brown Douglas Crimp on trisha brown Morrison. Photo: has devoted herself to restaging many of her early Summer Hung. works, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing her former Below: Trisha roles taken by other members of her company. At Brown, Floor of the Forest, 1970. the same time, a younger generation of viewers has Performance had the opportunity to see for themselves the rele- view, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY, vance of Brown’s radical reinvention of dance to the February 12, current vogue for performance in art institutions, 2010. Samuel von Wentz and Todd beginning with the inclusion of Floor of the Forest, Stone. Photo: 1970, and Accumulation in Documenta 12. Together Stephanie Berger. with her Judson Dance Theater peers (and under the influence of Minimal and Conceptual art), Brown originated ordinary movement and talking as dance, On the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of site-situated dance, and dance structured by the fol- Love, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival cele- lowing of simple rules. As these gave rise to what we brated the “spirit of the ’60s” with a series of con- now know as performance art, Brown moved unex- certs by musicians Dave Brubeck, Arlo Guthrie, and pectedly to the supple improvisatory choreography Pauline Oliveros and performances by choreogra- that her company now dances with such virtuosity phers Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor. The Trisha but that, scaled down, can also be taught to opera Brown Dance Company’s evening ended on a poi- singers working alongside her dancers. gnant note with a performance of PRESENT TENSE, The past year’s fortieth anniversary of the Trisha 2003, whose set and costumes were designed by Brown Dance Company has occasioned a great pro- Elizabeth Murray. Murray had died on August 12, fusion of performances of Brown’s dances, both old 2007, just two days before the performance—so weight, lifts of the leg, steps backward and forward, and new. 1 The high points, for me, have been the seeing her immediately recognizable painted forms swings of the arms—and you see that lexicon with early work incorporating film, Planes, 1968; the behind dancers so vibrantly alive brought tears to absolute clarity through Accumulation’s simple addi- legendary equipment pieces Man Walking Down the the eyes. It wasn’t the only moment of sadness. Also tive structure: A gesture is performed and repeated Side of a Building, 1970, Walking on the Wall, on the program was Canto/Pianto, 1997–98, a suite several times; a second gesture is added to it, and 1971, and Spiral, 1974; Brown’s first proscenium of dances from Brown’s extraordinary production these are repeated; another is added; and so on. I piece, Glacial Decoy, 1979; and, most of all, the of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. The mood of those dances have watched Brown perform the dance many unannounced work that Brown danced with four progresses, like the Orpheus myth itself, from joyous times—to the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band”; of the women in her company at Dia:Beacon on to mournful. while talking; interwoven with Watermotor, 1978; May 1. When I arrived at the museum that day, A sorrowful note had already been sounded telling two different stories—A, B—plus Watermotor. Steven Evans, then managing director of Dia:Beacon, momentarily, for me, in the program opener, Accumu­ Whether seeing it at its simplest or at its most com- whispered conspiratorially, “Be sure to stay for the lation, 1971. For this hallmark work, Brown invented plex and demanding (for the performer, that is; the second performance, because Trisha might dance.” It a wholly new lexicon of ordinary movement per- audience experiences the prodigious mnemonic feat was moving to see her dancing again, but more mov- formed with effortless directness—twists of the simply as a dance), I always marveled at its concep- ing still to see the intimacy between her and the wrist and torso, turns of the head, shifts of body tual economy and beauty. But the performance of women in her company concretized. Compressed Accumulation I saw at Lincoln Center Out of Doors within the relatively brief improvisatory dance, was unlike any I’d seen before: Brown wasn’t doing it; a member of her company was. Of course, Accumulation’s series of distinctive phrases, not technically especially difficult, is eminently teach- able. But never having seen the work danced by anyone but Brown, I guess I thought I never would. Accumulation’s movement seemed to emanate straight from her person. More than that, I’d watched Trisha Brown performing Brown continue to dance so well over the years, into Roof Piece, New York, 1971. Photo: Babette Mangolte. her middle age and beyond: Beginning in 1994, year after year, with her back to audience and looking Trisha Brown, Present Tense, 2003. Performance view, Lincoln Center upstage, she danced, wonderfully, If You Couldn’t See Out of Doors festival, New York, August 12, 2007. Sandra Grinberg, Hyun-Jin Jung, Tony Orrico, Tamara Riewe, Judith Sanchez Ruiz, Todd Me, the solo that Robert Rauschenberg “invented” Trisha Brown, Spiral, 1974. Performance view, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, Lawrence Stone. Photo: Nanette Melville. for her. So I wasn’t prepared to see anyone but NY, February 12, 2010. Nicholas Strafaccia. Photo: Stephanie Berger. 154 ARTFORUM JANUARY 2011 155 it seemed, were the entire forty years of Brown’s Mangolte’s film of Brown dancing it the year it was working with, teaching, learning from, supporting, made. Because she seems to dart in two directions at and depending on generations of women dancers. once, spring into the air with no preparation, and “Trisha, what are you going to do with those two keep every part of her body in continuous motion, men?” Yvonne Rainer asked in a 1979 interview you can believe Brown would be capable of miracles. with Brown about Glacial Decoy.2 (Brown had just Mangolte must have felt this sense of awe, because begun to admit men into her company, although she filmed the dance twice, the second time slowing Glacial Decoy was still danced exclusively by it down to forty-eight frames per second. The slow women.) Brown’s reply: “I’m going to dance with motion allows us to apprehend details of the move- them.” Indeed, she did; and, no doubt, adding men ment we see only subliminally in real time, but it to the company changed the kinds of dances Brown also exaggerates the dance’s luscious fluidity so that went on to make. But you can understand Rainer’s it looks like it’s happening underwater. question, and you could see again what occasioned it—in the qualities of trust and touch, of genuine Mangolte’s full understanding of this brand- Babette Mangolte, Watermotor, 1978. Still from a film in 35 mm, accord, of each dancer’s differentiation of Brown’s 7 minutes 32 seconds. Performed and choreographed by Trisha Brown. new dance in 1978 and her ability to translate that movement style—in what Brown and Elena Demya- understanding to film with such success became nenko, Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, and Laurel all the more obvious to me when I saw Jonathan Tentindo did that afternoon, as Brown performed in 1962. (I didn’t witness either of these wondrous Demme’s film Trisha Brown’s Accumulation with duets with each dancer in turn while others impro- events, but those who did—Simone Forti, Rainer— Talking plus Watermotor, 1986. The contrast with vised solos that reflected the movement of that are trustworthy sources.) But Brown’s overcoming Mangolte’s film is instructive. Like too many film- central pair. of gravity in the equipment pieces has nothing of the makers, Demme apparently doesn’t trust dance’s quality of miracles, since the equipment that makes capacity to create its own story. As a result, he pro- In February, I had already stayed through both the “walking on walls” possible is so fully visible in vides a narrative frame for the dance, setting it in the 1 and 3 pm performances of Brown’s works at these works. In Spiral, for example, no part of the Brown’s studio and having members of the company Dia:Beacon, because I had no intention of missing apparatus that gives the dancers the ability to walk arrive throughout and sit down to watch Brown the opportunity to see Spiral done a second time, so parallel to the ground is hidden. What is hidden quickly did it go by the first time around. To perform from the spectator is the strength of the body’s core Spiral, each dancer climbs a ladder and attaches that allows the dancers to stay perpendicular to the her- or himself to a harness, which is in turn attached columns and walk down and around them at an to a cord that circles around the column from top to even, determined pace. We see both gravity’s force bottom. Once the dancers are in place and the signal and its defiance. It is, after all, that force that pro- is given, assistants pull the ladders out of the way pels the dancers so quickly and thrillingly in their and the dance commences. The dancers use the ten- downward spirals until all ten of them are lying on sion of a connective cord to achieve a perpendicular the ground, feet still on the columns. orientation and thus to walk down and around the But the image of Brown “lying down in the air” column. The forest of columns in Dia’s enormous returned—and persists to this day—after she stopped lower-level galleries seemed made for this work (orig- using equipment. Watermotor, the dance she made inally performed in a SoHo gallery space with a row before Glacial Decoy and one that once again initi- of four columns down the center). All ten of Brown’s ated a new language of dance movement, makes it dancers could spiral around and down a single line believable in ways that the equipment pieces had not. of columns simultaneously at Dia, making for a Lasting only two and a half minutes, Watermotor is, breathtaking sight. Done twice in each cycle of dances whether in spite or because of its brevity, a master- at Beacon—first in flawless unison, then in canon— piece. (Or is that a word that the dance contradicts?) Trisha Brown, Shot Backstage, 1998, stills from a black-and-white 8 mm video, 31 minutes 40 seconds. each performance whizzed by in just a few seconds. Will it ever be danceable by anyone but Brown? If Spiral shares something of the excitement of a not—even if so—there is the consolation of Babette daredevil stunt, yet it couldn’t be more different. One of the stories that circulates about Brown’s beginnings has it that, while improvising with a push broom on dance. The opening shot is a close-up of Brown’s feet, Brown. The splicing of shots and angles through in New York in March.3 “The movie part of it,” Anna Halprin’s Marin County outdoor dance deck The point—or at least one accompanied by the sound of her off-camera voice: which Demme constructs the dance film is superim- Brown told Rainer, “has to do with making a figure in 1960, she thrust the broom in front of her so hard point—is that there is no right “Start . . . starting . . . starting to talk while doing this posed on the dance’s own splicing device. Brown materialize in the space the way you can when you that she propelled herself right into the air horizon- way to perform a movement, or, dance.” Demme cuts to a close-up of Brown’s arms borrowed filmic montage to interrupt one dance edit a film. You can go from a fork to a face with a tally, a willed self-propulsion that turned into a better, that the right way is the on the opening gestures of Accumulation and holds with another and story A with story B, like the cross- blink of the eye, to quote you [i.e., Rainer].”4 It is moment of flight. The legend of Brown defying the the close-up as Brown herself cuts to the first moves cutting between present and flashback in a movie. interesting, given that the dance referenced film and force of gravity continued with her “levitation”— way it’s performed. Trisha Brown, For M. G.: The Movie, 1991. Performance views, ca. 2002. of Watermotor. A close-up of a company member Brown made explicit her interest in film’s capa- was called a “movie,” that Brown also made a film Kathleen Fisher, Kelly McDonald, Stanford Makishi, Dianne Madden, what she called “lying down in the air”—while Niki Jaralewicz, Kevin Kortan, Mariah Maloney, Wil Swanson, Keith opening the door to let herself in is followed by a bilities in her dance For M. G.: The Movie, 1991, of it—actually a video—Shot Backstage, 1998. dancing Trillium at a Judson Dance Theater concert Thompson. Photos: Mark Hanauer. POV long shot, then a cut back to a close-up on which will be revived at Dance Theater Workshop Brown’s video begins with For M. G.: The Movie 156 ARTFORUM JANUARY 2011 157 already in progress. We hear a few seconds of Alvin notably Locus, 1975, led her to make diagrams to Curran’s music, then see a close-up of two dancers, map out their ordered movements. Giving herself a one male, one female, standing perfectly still. The set of strict rules within which to choreograph, she woman is slightly farther from the camera than eventually came to apply structuring devices to the the man and is partially hidden by a wing curtain. drawings themselves, now freed from their relation- Right away we see another woman running through ship to any particular dance. This method also the space behind the pair in close-up, and Brown seems to apply to Shot Backstage. The rule in this dissolves to a medium shot that follows this dancer case is a simple one: Film the entire dance from the as she runs forward and backward in wide arcs wings stage left. Not only will this give the viewer a across the stage. Spotlights shine straight at the cam- new perspective on the dance—the choreographer’s era from the opposite side of the stage. In close-up or dancer’s or crew member’s perspective—but it will again, Brown moves her camera slowly left, past also obviate the illusory transcendent or synthetic the wing curtain that half-obscured the standing viewpoint that filmmakers so often impose on dance. Trisha Brown, Planes, 1968. Performance view, Walker Art Center, woman. What we’d already gleaned is now made Minneapolis, June 5, 2008. Black Label Movement. Photo: Gene Pittman. (BBC dance-film maker Ross MacGibbon claimed explicit: We’re watching the dance from the wings. that filming a ballet would require at least eight What is not yet clear—and for me wouldn’t become cameras placed throughout the auditorium in order clear until the dancers took their curtain calls at the from glacial slowness to lightning speed to stock- to show a dance ideally.5) It’s hardly surprising that end of the film—is whether we are watching from stillness. There’s a one-leg balance that is held as long Brown would repudiate idealism; she does so here stage left or stage right. This undecidability is partly as anything in early Merce Cunningham. The dance with the same conceptual rigor and improvisational the effect of the standing dancers (who we eventu- ends with this solo, although in its final moment it flair that she brings to her dances. ally learn are facing upstage); the male dancer will again becomes a duet danced in perfect unison. The structural limitation of the spectator’s view- remain there, standing still, throughout the entire Trisha Brown, If You Couldn’t See Me, 1994. Performance view, Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, April 7, 2010. Leah Morrison. point in Shot Backstage reminds me of a work by dance. For a long time the running woman consti- Photo: Julieta Cervantes. When the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York Brown that I know only from Mangolte’s well- Above: Trisha Brown, Compass, Below: Trisha Brown, Untitled tutes the only movement. She seems to trace a series showed Shot Backstage in its inaugural bac Flicks known photograph of it: Roof Piece, performed on 2006, etching, 25 1⁄2 x 22". (Locus), 1975, ink and graphite on paper, 20 3⁄4 x 16 1⁄8". of different paths around, across, and along the his resolute presence there is emphasized by several away from the camera and off the stage. Occasionally series, in June 2009, I had just finished teaching a loft-building rooftops over a half-mile stretch in borders of the stage. Occasionally she hops or cuts to the close-up of him that opened the video. It the camera moves past a dancer to focus on nothing course on dance film at New York University, so see- SoHo and NoHo in 1971 (and set to be re-created swoops or stops; often she changes direction and is at about this point that you might begin to notice much at all—the side of the stage, a wing curtain; at ing Brown’s achievement in the genre struck me in the vicinity of the High Line in Chelsea and the runs backward, but though the camera follows her as that the dancers’ unitards look oddly blotchy. You other times it focuses on things in the dance that the especially forcefully. The canon of first-rate dance meatpacking district in June). As Brown’s impro- best it can, you cannot make out the pattern of her might not notice it or you might think nothing of it, audience could never see the way Brown’s camera sees films is small. Some had appeared in the bac series, vised movements were relayed from one dancer to trajectory, so persistently does the camera’s location both because the backlighting from the opposite them, like a tight close-up of a woman very tenderly presented in conjunction with La Cinémathèque de the next, down the line and back again, as in a non- backstage cut it off from a comprehensive view. stage wings makes the black-and-white video look placing her hand on the chest of the stationary male la Danse in Paris, including Jérôme Bel’s Véronique verbal game of telephone, there was no single van- After several minutes, other dancers appear. They grainy—solarized, almost—and because it’s not dancer. The cut from her hand moving slowly away Doisneau, 2005, and George Balanchine’s Midsummer tage point from which anyone could see the whole seem just suddenly to be onstage; we’ve missed their unusual to see dancers sweat through their costumes. from him to the face of another dancer is confusing at Night’s Dream, 1966. Mangolte’s Watermotor cer- event, including, of course, the dancers themselves. entrances. The woman we first saw in close-up is But once you’ve noticed it, it becomes more insis- first. It looks like it should be the same dancer, but it’s tainly belongs in their company, as does Alexander Indeed, it was the inability of performers along the now dancing too. The camera, at close or medium tent. In fact Brown, who designed the costumes, had not. The first has long hair pulled back, the second Hammid’s film of Martha Graham’s Night Journey, route to see the original version of the moves trans- range, locates a duet here, a trio there. But you can’t them dyed darker in the areas where each dancer close-cropped hair. The second dances the solo that 1960, Rainer’s film of her own Trio A, 1978, and mitted to them that produced the work’s intended be sure of these configurations either. We see two didn’t sweat, according to his or her own sweat pat- Brown would be dancing were she not behind the a number of Charles Atlas’s collaborations with devolution, and the place from which a spectator dancers dancing in unison and then just one of them terns, so that as the dance progressed, the costumes camera, although calling it a solo might seem impre- Cunningham, and Thierry de Mey’s with Anne Teresa watched determined what version of the inevitably continuing the sequence; the other has disappeared. would become monotone. What a strange and witty cise, since there is another dancer onstage dancing de Keersmaeker. Shot Backstage also belongs in this changing movement she saw. For most of us, that We don’t know whether the sequence has become a way to individuate a dancer! (At one point in a ver- along with her, occasionally even in unison. company; Burt Barr calls it, justifiably I think, “the version will necessarily be Mangolte’s photograph. solo or whether we just can’t see the second dancer sion of Accumulation with Talking, Brown says, “I The solo—for indeed it is one, and one of Brown’s best video ever shot on dance.” The point—or at least one point—is that there is no or—who knows?—maybe even a third. Eventually, did not want them to think I was the Jerry Lewis of great ones—is full of Brown’s characteristic odd ges- Brown was one of the first choreographers to right way to perform the movement, or, better, that the second of the duo reappears, and we know their modern dance.” My response: Don’t worry, your tural movements, things she does with the hands incorporate film into dance, famously dancing in the right way is the way it’s performed. location for the moment because they’re on either humor is far nuttier than Jerry Lewis’s.) and arms that are utterly distinctive, things that seem sync with Robert Whitman’s film of her performing This is not to say that Brown’s choreography isn’t side of the dancer who stands in place throughout; About halfway through For M. G.: The Movie, the to be representational but aren’t, or at least aren’t the same dance, as the film was projected onto the exacting in what it requires of her dancers, but rather running dancer returns to the stage. In direct contra- in ways we can read. (Brown has made it clear that walls of the performance space from a 16-mm pro- that, like the sweat patterns dyed into their costumes diction of Brown’s intention for the dance itself to her improvisational means of inventing movement jector strapped to her back (Homemade, 1966); and in For M. G: The Movie, the dancers’ individuality Brown borrowed filmic be like a movie—insofar as dancers suddenly appear involves gestures that have private meanings that using aerial footage by Jud Yalkut projected onto both shows itself and finally blends perfectly with that montage to interrupt one onstage without our noticing how they got there—we aren’t intended to be legible to an audience.) The three wall-climbing dancers in Planes. But Brown’s of the other dancers. That seemed to me the very dance with another and story watch this performer in the wings, flexing her feet, solo is also full of her characteristic combinations of making a film was unexpected. We’d known from essence of the improvisatory dance Brown performed preparing to go onstage, then taking off on her run. walking, hopping, skipping, bounding, leaping, fall- the Walker Art Center’s exhibition of her drawings with her four company members at Dia:Beacon last A with story B, like the cross- She seems to repeat the patterns with which the ing, crouching, crawling, and lying down; extending, in Minneapolis in 2008, and from another at Sikkema May. It is also the ineffable quality in the experience cutting between present dance began, but this time she shares the stage not balancing, folding, shifting, twisting, and changing Jenkins & Co. in New York in 2009, that Brown is of dance, and one that no film can fully reproduce— and flashback in a movie. only with the motionless man but briefly with the directions. The movements seem to come from the an accomplished draftsman. And perhaps the draw- nor perhaps should it aspire to. couple dancing the duet we’ve been watching and extremities one moment, the core another, the joints ings provide a clue to why Shot Backstage is so Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History with a dancer lying down, who will eventually roll another—all done with unexpected shifts in velocity, successful. Brown’s early structured pieces, most at the University of Rochester. For notes, see page 242. 158 ARTFORUM JANUARY 2011 159 NOTES 1. In New York State alone, thanks to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (in the spring of 2009), the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dia:Beacon, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, there were reconstructions of the leg- endary equipment pieces Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970, and Walking on the Wall, 1971, together with Floor of the Forest, 1970, Leaning Duets I, 1970, and II, 1971, and Spiral, 1974; the mathematical pieces Accumulation, Group Primary Accumulation, 1970, Group Primary Accumulation with Movers, 1973, Spanish Dance, 1973, Sticks, 1973, Figure 8, 1974, Locus, 1975, and Line Up, 1976; Brown’s first proscenium piece, Glacial Decoy, 1979; and her collaboration with Fujiko Nakaya, Opal Loop: Cloud Installation #72503, 1980. In addition, there were four works from the 1960s, La Chanteuse, 1963, Planes, 1968, Falling Duets, 1968, and Skymap, 1969; the 1990s works Foray Forêt, 1990, and You Can See Us, 1995; and finally L’Amour au theater, 2009, dance selections from Brown’s production of Jean-Philipe Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie. 2. Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer, “A Conversation About Glacial Decoy,” October 10 (Autumn 1979): 37. 3. “M. G.” stands for Michel Guy, who was France’s minister of culture in the first administration of Jacques Chirac and was the founding director of the Festival d’Automne in 1972. He was a supporter of Brown’s work and the commissioner of this work. 4. Yvonne Rainer, “Trisha Brown,” Bomb 45 (Fall 1993): 31. 5. Brendan McCarthy, “The BBC at the Ballet: Don Quixote, Royal Ballet,” Ballet.co. Magazine, December 2001. 160 ARTFORUM