Is the 'off the grid' still off the grid?

Trisha Brown is looking back to her groundbreaking early works. Photo courtesy Vincent Pereira

Avant-garde US choreographer Trisha Brown revisits her maverick works

(Monaco) From a distance her ground-breaking works, dating back over four decades, seem as obscure and esoteric today as they must have been when she created them. But the legendary New York-based choreographer Trisha Brown is now revisiting the curious productions of her youth, when as a young woman not only did she challenge gravity: but her quirky performances may well have redefined notions of dance today.

Before founding The Trisha Brown Company (TBDC) in 1970, Brown worked with the Judson Dance Theatre – a group of avant-garde artists who rejected the confines of modern dance, creating their own aesthetic which marked the world of dance of the 1960s.

These performances, she says, were sometimes « off the grid » for their disrespect for previously accepted assumptions of what was considered choreography or dance itself. Her works were performed on roof-tops and walls, like Man walking down the side of a building, in which a dancer was literally repelled from a building in central Manhattan. And she called it dance.

Some of her eminent contemporaries include the likes of Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs and Steve Paxton. During this same period, TBDC performed at alternative sites in Manhattan’s SoHo district. In later years, Trisha Brown moved on to create contemporary opera, works that were performed in landmark opera houses around the world, including New York, Paris, and London.

In late September of this year a sampling of Trisha Brown’s early works will be performed in Budapest at the Trafó House of Contemporary Art, opening their fall season as they look back at the works of leading figures in new dance. Andrew Princz caught up with Trisha Brown hours before the European premiere of her latest work, How long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume in the principality of Monaco at the biennale dance festival, the Monaco Dance Forum.

Andrew Princz: What is your instinctive reaction when revisiting the esoteric works that you created at the outset of your career?

Trisha Brown: I don’t even know who that woman was it has been such a long time. The equipment pieces were made in the end of the 1960s, and were completely unique. It is hard to imagine having both the concept – since we all have ideas all the time – but to actually do them! It was either courageous or foolish. Courageous it turns out, because nobody fell or got hurt.

Andrew Princz: What was it that made these ideas so exciting at the time?

Trisha Brown: Man walking down the side of a building is not just an idea to do something spectacular. It came out of a realization that modern dance has a method of choreography. You break down that boundary through a workshop with John Cage called indeterminacy, and give up total control because things become improvised or indeterminate. Then you realize how interesting it is because indeterminacy is more arcane and turns logical organization on its head. When you look at it, it is just as beautiful as the logical version. What it is is something new! At the time it was a new world.

Man walking down the side of a building was about breaking down the rules to begin something new. When you know that you have the right of creating a new way of making post-modern dance – as they call it now – then what do you do? There are too many choices, a million things. I was asking myself: and somebody put out the thesis that dance has a beginning, a middle and an end. I thought where do I begin? You start at the top of a building, and you tell them to walk down. Then when you are halfway there it is the middle of the dance. And when they reach the ground, it is the end. It had a structure to it, albeit a very spectacular dance.

Andrew Princz: What was the role of the audience or the people watching the performance?

Trisha Brown: There were so few people, and I knew them all. I even have all of their names on a piece of paper. This was very early in the 1960s, and they really made a mark on visual arts. I told Richard Serra, a very powerful sculptor and he wanted me to tell him what I was going to do. We were friends – this was SOHO in the 1960s – but I told him that was not telling anyone. He said that he would be out of town, and that I must tell him. I told him that someone will start standing at the top edge of the roof they will be belayed out. The rope will be sent out so that he can tip out and when he is cantilevered out at a straight right angle to the surface of the building, then he begins walking down. Richard then said that he wished that he would have thought of the idea. It was so new, coming out of me. Had it been an exhibition at a museum with other sculptors you would know the context, but there was no context for this.

Andrew Princz: Does the contemporary art that you represent have a past? Does the relevance change?

Trisha Brown: History has its own powerful desires. I worked with the Judson Dance Theatre, but with these works I was on my own and outside of the group. My close friends told me that I was so far ahead of everyone, that nobody understood what I was doing. I later learned that young French choreographers were referencing these works and that they began re-inhabiting the notions of that period and found richness in it. I then realized how interesting it was: we didn’t do everything.

Forty-five years later, that period has been written about and documented. Not with video, since there was only film at the time and nobody had any money for that. Man walking down the side of a building actually was filmed because a friend believed in it, and she had the money to do it. Babette Mangoldt, a French-American film-maker also asked me to do the dance Watermotor, which is quite short, but rather disruptive of the air around it. She said that she wanted to film it, and I said, « Babbette, I’ll show it to you anytime you want to see it!”

That is how naive I was! I thought that we were forever frozen in this beautiful youthful phase of our lives.

Andrew Princz: What is the meaning in looking back at your older works? Many choreographers are doing this. I wonder of Beethoven or other great artists felt this need at a later point in their lives? Is it prestige?

Trisha Brown: Prestige, yes there is a generosity to that. There is a whole makeup of my mind and body, and what I do. I was trying to find what to do with it in those years, in relation to the structures. The reason why I am so interested in revisiting it now is that too many people have said things to me where they are wrong.

For example, Floor the forest is a grid, originally suspended from the ceiling. It was a very large pipe construction with ropes going through both right angled directions. I threaded clothes onto it with instructions to two performers to jump up on the grid, sit there and cite an outfit that you would like to put on. Then they walked across the ropes, which were unstable, and would belly down to find the shirt you were looking for.

At one point a man asked me when I did that « installation ». I said that it is not an installation, to which he asked what I called it. At first I made a mistake and said it wrong, because nobody has asked me these things in forty-five years. Then I remembered that they were called equipment pieces. And I built those objects.

Andrew Princz: Your equipment pieces, or the installations of others have become a part of the dialectic of contemporary art – are also now being reviewed again, would you not say?

Trisha Brown: Yes, they became popular, known, hip. Those are again being re-examined. I was in the dance world, Edwin Denby came to see this performance, but he did not review it. I think that he would have had language for it, and I am sorry that no critics came. At the time it was off of the grid.

Andrew Princz: Do you think that people understand those experimental works more today than when you originally performed them?

Trisha Brown: They desire it now because they know what it pre-empted. They understand their position in history. They are sorry that they didn’t treat me better! I am just kidding! But I do get exhibitions in museums and galleries, because I also make drawings. People are now also recognizing that I am also a visual artist. They are recognizing what I was doing. I am a player!

Andrew Princz: In Monaco you were delving into new technologies. Where do you look for new inspiration now?

Trisha Brown: I just couldn’t say no to the subject of digital dance. It is absolutely new, I love a challenge and didn’t know anything about it. I trusted the people who were developing the materials for it. But I learned a lot and I know exactly what I would do if I would have another opportunity to work at that level with those artists. It was just too short of a time. In actual physical process of development of the piece: I had less than three weeks, and dance takes time to get bodies up there and to teach the material. And for me to understand what the performance looks like and interface with the technology. What is my role here? Am I just a subject for them to make an environment for? Can I also play in the environment, and can they come into the choreography? There is a screen in front of the stage and the infrared camera capture, goes through a series of computers. All of that information is transferred back into a central computer. Then the music, the dance, the lights and the graphics all are programmed with some choices. So you don’t know what is going to come up.

Andrew Princz: How did your interest shift from your earlier experimentations, to the opera?

Trisha Brown: I got invited to do Carmen with Lina Wertmüller, as a choreographer. She is a film-maker and has a very different style. It is a time consuming way of working on stage because when she would set up as if it was a cinematic still-shot. You can’t use stage-time like that! You have to learn how to roll through everything, and everything has to be there in front of you and let the singers access it and move onto some other place.

I was only the choreographer, she was the director. She had interesting ideas and I really loved that a lot, listening to her talk about them. But in the end it was her aesthetic that was represented on the stage, not mine. I learned a lot, it was a great experience. I was bit, and burned from the opera stage. Also a lot of sponsors came from New York to see how I did and every one of them said that ‘Trisha you have to direct, because then you can control the context, the aesthetic.’

It took me a while to mount that and to tool my dance company to be theatrical and narration. Especially because I am an abstract choreographer.

Opera is much easier than choreography to tell you the truth. You have everything, history, the styles, the music, the libretto, character. But I had to bring it out from where it had been living on the library shelf of my imagination and haul it back out into the light of modernity because I was definitely not going to do a traditional opera.

Andrew Princz: What you are working on now?

Trisha Brown: I am working on a choreography, developing a new piece. Laurie Anderson is the composer, this is my third piece with her. She is putting together examples of music that she thinks would be good, and we will sit down together and decide what to use. Right now it is called I love my robots. The costume designer has made robots that are manually operated from off-stage, and I just love them. This is my second technology piece.

To be honest, this is the best time of my life as an artist. I have explored so much material and I readily can go from a gesture with meaning without heralding it, and get an element of emotion into my choreography which is ostensibly abstract but with a little bit of emotional commotion to it.

Montreal-based journalist and cultural navigator Andrew Princz is the editor of the travel site ontheglobe.com. He is involved in country awareness and tourism promotion projects globally. He has traveled to almost sixty countries around the globe seeking to communicate the stories of the diverse peoples and cultures that he comes across; from Nigeria to Ecuador; Kazakhstan to India.

* Text by Andrew Princz
* Photos courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company
* Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved