Trisha Brown performing “Watermotor” in 1978. Credit…Lois Greenfield
At Play With Trisha Brown | Alastair Macaulay, 21 March 2017
The sense of play is often nearer to the heart of art than we realize. Wit, so akin to ambiguity, shows how fully in command of the medium an artist truly is. With the dancer-choreographer Trisha Brown — who died on Saturday at the age of 80 — wit and playfulness came naturally, even though her work could be earnest or seemingly cool.
This photograph captures much about Ms. Brown’s essence as an artist. She’s caught right in the middle of a movement (the toss of her mane of hair says so much) and her half-smile shows that she’s enjoying it. The head is tipping forward, the arms are pulling back. One foot is raised off the floor behind her; the other is poised — very momentarily, we can guess — on its ball.
Everything about the movement from “Watermotor” (1978) is informal. This is not heroic bravura dance; the legs and arms are not stretched, the neck is invisible. It exemplifies the democratic dance of the 1960s that Ms. Brown helped pioneer. (Academics can and do argue about whether it should be labeled postmodern or radically modernist or both.) Ms. Brown catches its impulsiveness, takes a moment of childlike play, and turns it into art.
Ms. Brown’s poetic use of natural physical impulses was integral to her charm as both dancer and choreographer. As this photograph illustrates, she knew how to capture opposite impulses at the same time — forward/backward, up/down, weight/lightness, push/pull. This gave texture to her dance: You watched her movement with a sense of recognition (I could do that) even while her mastery of complex coordination made you gasp (I could never do that). It would be sad if her quirkiness made people regard her as an offbeat dance eccentric. She plucked what was profoundly natural and converted it into enchantment.
Stephen Petronio | Choreographer
The first male dancer in Ms. Brown’s company (1979-86), Mr. Petronio describes his 1982 debut in France in “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building”:
It hasn’t been performed since the ’70s, and the belay system isn’t documented. We reconstruct it on Trisha’s roof in SoHo with an intelligent group that includes a mountaineering hot dog. I do it a couple of times off an unthreatening three-foot wall, and I’m good to go.
The performance is in an outdoor courtyard of a 14th-century monastery. Behind the stage looms a four-story tower: my challenge. In the flesh it’s suddenly real, and four stories is high.
The moment of leaning out to walk becomes the most thrilling “Am I doing this?” moment of my young life. Up on the edge of a massive turret, heart pounding, spotlight blaring to call me down (no turning back), I lean out in the slowest-motion dive into the abyss. Now perpendicular to the tower, my world shifts 90 degrees. I’m standing in the wrong plane. I thrust out to keep a taut line of energy through my body to maintain the “posture of walking.” [Ms. Brown’s] instructions: “Walk normally down the side of the tower in a casual manner until you reach the ground.” It lasts minutes but is the most spectacular walk I ever take.
Mikhail Baryshnikov| Dancer
In 1996, Mr. Baryshnikov danced with Ms. Brown in her duet “You can see us”:
Other than the millions of details in Trisha’s choreography, there is no specific technique that you can learn. You have to use your brain and your eyes and try to get into the swing of things, which can take a very long time to accomplish. One of the most unusual experiences for me was dancing the piece full out onstage, right before the curtain came up — something she was accustomed to doing before the start of every performance. Trisha is a quirky person who has a strong point of view, both in her choreography and her beautiful drawings. To dance with her was a very important and memorable experience for me.
Laurie Anderson | Artist and Musician
Ms. Anderson created scores for “Set and Reset” (1983), a signature Brown work, and “O zlozony/O composite” (2004), made for three Paris Opera Ballet étoiles:
I have known Trisha forever. The first time I actually worked with her was for “Set and Reset.” She said, “This one is all about falling,” and so I started with the obvious things of falling musical phrases, and then I realized it was on a bigger level, so whole sections of the music began to fall. That was something I’d never tried before, and it was really, really fun. I would go to rehearsal with them, and she would communicate with me even through her facial expressions, her shoulder as well. For the Paris Opera piece, I didn’t want to make something bombastic, even though the dancers were the three étoiles. I decided to make a really tiny, slightly sad, warped sound that would be very quiet. Jennifer Tipton had lit the piece in a very beautiful way, but Brigitte Lefèvre [the Paris Opera Ballet’s director of dance] stormed in and said: “The lighting is all wrong. I’m going to do it myself.” Our mouths all dropped open. I thought, “This is going to be a disaster.” But she lit it with this blaring light, just like you would light étoiles, and it was gorgeous. I realized then that Trisha’s work was so complicated it could accommodate this blast of white light and this very shy little warped musical score of three drunk people in the back room just cranking away.
Elizabeth Streb | Choreographer
At the Whitney in 2010, Ms. Streb performed in “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building”:
First I told her, face to face, “I’d gladly do the walk without a harness.” I would just have to walk very, very fast and be sure to judge the angle accurately of when the wall becomes the ground. If I could be sure to do that, the harness would be unnecessary. If it were not for Trisha, when I, Streb, am asked the question “Why are you included in the field of dance?” I would not know how to answer. Trisha took the walk and the place it might occur and tamed it. The viewers’ place in space (right side up on the ground) was drawn into question. Given you (the viewer) cannot accept that this (a walk down the wall) is physically happening, you as a watcher alter your own place in space; immediately you get launched above the ground in a desperate effort to help explain how this could be happening, a person walking down the side of a building. Absurdly it seems more possible that you are floating above them, looking down. So by this single act a single performer causes an entire audience to fly.
Terry Winters | Artist
Mr. Winters created the set and costumes for “Five-Part Weather Invention” (1999) and other Brown works:
I attended Grand Union performances when I was still in school at Pratt. I remember one evening in a huge space that was like a three-ring circus of gymnastics and tag-team choreography. Trisha and her friends were directly expressing or extending their everyday lives in SoHo. Inhabiting all those vacated industrial buildings, they found a way to work that reflected their life downtown. Trisha’s development of an abstract narrative and a formal language resonated with a lot of people in the visual arts. She tells this wonderful story of growing up in the woods: As a kid she used to love to run through the forest really fast, which meant she had to avoid all the fallen trees and stones and broken branches — it was very much an uneven field. All of that really forced her to take unpredictable routes and develop asymmetrical patterns, and I think that really is the basis of her work. The shortest distance between two points in the forest is not necessarily a straight line.
