Trisha Brown
Encyclopedia
Trisha Brown is a postmodernist American choreographer and dancer.
Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A.
degree
in dance from Mills College
in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College
in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst
at the American Dance Festival
, then held at Connecticut College
. After moving to New York
in 1961, Brown trained with dancer Anna Halprin
and became a founding member of the avant-garde
Judson Dance Theater
in 1962. There she worked with experimental dancers Yvonne Rainer
and Steve Paxton
. In 1970 she cofounded the Grand Union
, an experimental dance collective, and formed the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Her company soon became one of the leading contemporary dance
ensembles. Brown received a MacArthur Foundation
“genius” grant in 1991.
Brown’s early works Walking on the Wall (1971) and Roof Piece (1971) were designed to be performed at specific sites. Accumulation (1971), which is executed with the dancers on their backs, has been performed in public spaces of all kinds, including on water, with the dancers floating on rafts as they methodically work through the piece's graduated gestures. Walking on the Wall involved dancers in harnesses moving along a wall, while Roof Piece took place on 12 different rooftops over a ten-block area in New York City
's SoHo, with each dancer transmitting the movements to a dancer on the nearest roof. In 1974, Brown began a residential relationship with the Walker Art Center
in Minneapolis, MN, that has continued to this day. With 1978's Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor, a complex solo combining elements of three other pieces, she demonstrated a mental and physical virtuosity seldom seen in the dance world, then or now. Brown's rigorous structures, combined with pedestrian or simple movement styles and tongue-in-cheek humor brought an intellectual sensibility that challenged the mainstream "modern dance" mindset of this period.
During the 1980s Brown produced large-scale works intended for the stage
, beginning with Glacial Decoy (1979) which had sets and costumes by artist Robert Rauschenberg
. This period was most notable for the slithery and highly articulated movement style which characterized much of her work during this time. The Molecular Structure cycle, which included Opal Loop (1980), Son of Gone Fishin (1981) and another collaboration with Rauschenberg, Set and Reset (1983), featuring a score
by performance artist Laurie Anderson
, solidified Brown's stature as an innovator within the dance world and as an artist of global significance.
1985's Lateral Pass began her Valiant cycle, which used larger, bolder movement phrases to articulate Brown's evolving spacial aesthetics. This led to Newark (1987), Astral Convertible (1989) and Foray Forêt (1990) with costumes and sets once again by Rauschenberg. Performances of Foray Forêt include local marching bands from the presenting city. In a March 2011 performance in New York City, the Trisha Brown Dance Company performed the piece in collaboration with The TriBattery Pops Tom Goodkind Conductor
http://www.TriBatteryPops.com, the Ground Zero volunteer citizens marching band of TriBeCa.
Brown has continued to explore the nature of motion and to choreograph dances based on everyday movements. Her style has developed from carefully built-up, repetitive gesture
s to its current fluid virtuosity. In the 1990s she turned to choreographing classical music, creating M.O. (1995) based on the Musical Offering by German
composer
Johann Sebastian Bach
, and her first opera
production, Orfeo (1998) by Italian
composer
Claudio Monteverdi
. Brown found inspiration in jazz
for El Trilogy (1998–2000), completed her second opera
, Luci mie traditrici (composed by Salvatore Sciarrino
) in 2001, and in 2002 choreographed the song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) by Austria
n composer
Franz Schubert
for English
baritone
Simon Keenlyside
. Brown worked again with Laurie Anderson in 2004 on O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet. Among her well-known disciples are Diane Madden
and Stephen Petronio
.
Brown was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame
in 2000.
In 2002, Trisha Brown was awarded the National Medal of Arts
.
Works of her choreography and drawings are included in documenta 12.
Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree
Academic degree
An academic degree is a position and title within a college or university that is usually awarded in recognition of the recipient having either satisfactorily completed a prescribed course of study or having conducted a scholarly endeavour deemed worthy of his or her admission to the degree...
in dance from Mills College
Mills College
Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...
in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College
Bates College
Bates College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college located in Lewiston, Maine, in the United States. and was most recently ranked 21st in the nation in the 2011 US News Best Liberal Arts Colleges rankings. The college was founded in 1855 by abolitionists...
in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst
Louis Horst
Louis Horst was a choreographer, composer, and pianist...
at the American Dance Festival
American Dance Festival
The American Dance Festival is a six and four-week school for dance and a six-week summer festival of modern dance performances, currently held at Duke University and the Durham Performing Arts Center in Durham, North Carolina....
, then held at Connecticut College
Connecticut College
Connecticut College is a private liberal arts college located in New London, Connecticut.The college was founded in 1911, as Connecticut College for Women, in response to Wesleyan University closing its doors to women...
. After moving to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
in 1961, Brown trained with dancer Anna Halprin
Anna Halprin
Anna Halprin helped pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to herself as the breaker of modern dance. Halprin, along with her contemporaries such as Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, and Robert Morris, collaborated and built a community based...
and became a founding member of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
Judson Dance Theater
Judson Dance Theater
Judson Dance Theater was an informal group of dancers who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, Manhattan New York City between 1962 and 1964. It grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John Cage...
in 1962. There she worked with experimental dancers Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...
and Steve Paxton
Steve Paxton
Steve Paxton is an experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown...
. In 1970 she cofounded the Grand Union
Grand Union (dance group)
The Grand Union was an improvisational dance group based in New York City from 1970 to 1976. It grew out of Yvonne Rainer's piece Continuous Project - Altered Daily. Rainer's sole authority as choreographer began to slip in early 1970 when the dancers, at her invitation, began to bring in their...
, an experimental dance collective, and formed the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Her company soon became one of the leading contemporary dance
Contemporary dance
Contemporary dance is a genre of concert dance that employs compositional philosophy, rather than choreography, to guide unchoreographed movement...
ensembles. Brown received a MacArthur Foundation
MacArthur Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the United States. Based in Chicago but supporting non-profit organizations that work in 60 countries, MacArthur has awarded more than US$4 billion since its inception in 1978...
“genius” grant in 1991.
Brown’s early works Walking on the Wall (1971) and Roof Piece (1971) were designed to be performed at specific sites. Accumulation (1971), which is executed with the dancers on their backs, has been performed in public spaces of all kinds, including on water, with the dancers floating on rafts as they methodically work through the piece's graduated gestures. Walking on the Wall involved dancers in harnesses moving along a wall, while Roof Piece took place on 12 different rooftops over a ten-block area in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
's SoHo, with each dancer transmitting the movements to a dancer on the nearest roof. In 1974, Brown began a residential relationship with the Walker Art Center
Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...
in Minneapolis, MN, that has continued to this day. With 1978's Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor, a complex solo combining elements of three other pieces, she demonstrated a mental and physical virtuosity seldom seen in the dance world, then or now. Brown's rigorous structures, combined with pedestrian or simple movement styles and tongue-in-cheek humor brought an intellectual sensibility that challenged the mainstream "modern dance" mindset of this period.
During the 1980s Brown produced large-scale works intended for the stage
Stage (theatre)
In theatre or performance arts, the stage is a designated space for the performance productions. The stage serves as a space for actors or performers and a focal point for the members of the audience...
, beginning with Glacial Decoy (1979) which had sets and costumes by artist Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
. This period was most notable for the slithery and highly articulated movement style which characterized much of her work during this time. The Molecular Structure cycle, which included Opal Loop (1980), Son of Gone Fishin (1981) and another collaboration with Rauschenberg, Set and Reset (1983), featuring a score
Score (film)
Score is the name of a sexploitation film directed by Radley Metzger that was one of the first films to explore bisexual relationships. It was part of the brief porn chic fad in the early 1970s that also included The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat...
by performance artist Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
, solidified Brown's stature as an innovator within the dance world and as an artist of global significance.
1985's Lateral Pass began her Valiant cycle, which used larger, bolder movement phrases to articulate Brown's evolving spacial aesthetics. This led to Newark (1987), Astral Convertible (1989) and Foray Forêt (1990) with costumes and sets once again by Rauschenberg. Performances of Foray Forêt include local marching bands from the presenting city. In a March 2011 performance in New York City, the Trisha Brown Dance Company performed the piece in collaboration with The TriBattery Pops Tom Goodkind Conductor
The TriBattery Pops Tom Goodkind Conductor
The TriBattery Pops Tom Goodkind Conductor is downtown NYC's first all volunteer community band in a century. The band's founder and conductor is what songwriter Chris Butler of the...
http://www.TriBatteryPops.com, the Ground Zero volunteer citizens marching band of TriBeCa.
Brown has continued to explore the nature of motion and to choreograph dances based on everyday movements. Her style has developed from carefully built-up, repetitive gesture
Gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body...
s to its current fluid virtuosity. In the 1990s she turned to choreographing classical music, creating M.O. (1995) based on the Musical Offering by German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
, and her first opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
production, Orfeo (1998) by Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the...
. Brown found inspiration in jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
for El Trilogy (1998–2000), completed her second opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
, Luci mie traditrici (composed by Salvatore Sciarrino
Salvatore Sciarrino
Salvatore Sciarrino is an Italian composer of contemporary classical music.-Biography:In his youth, Sciarrino was attracted to the visual arts, but began experimenting with music when he was twelve. Though he had some lessons from Antonino Titone and Turi Belfiore, he is primarily self-taught as a...
) in 2001, and in 2002 choreographed the song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) by Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
for English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
Simon Keenlyside
Simon Keenlyside
Simon Keenlyside CBE is a British baritone who has had an active international career performing in operas and concerts since the mid 1980s.-Early life and education:...
. Brown worked again with Laurie Anderson in 2004 on O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet. Among her well-known disciples are Diane Madden
Diane Madden
-Early life:Dianne Madden was born in 1959 and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.-Career:Beginning in 1980, she worked with the Trisha Brown Company. She was rehearsal director from 1984 to 2000....
and Stephen Petronio
Stephen Petronio
Stephen Petronio is an artistic company founder/director, choreographer, and an American dancer based in New York City.Born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 20, 1956. Petronio received a B.A. degree from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began dancing in 1974...
.
Brown was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame
National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame
The National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame, in the Saratoga Spa State Park, Saratoga, New York, was established in 1986 and is the only museum in the nation dedicated entirely to dance. It contains photographs, videos, artifacts, costumes and biographies. The museum is located in the former and...
in 2000.
In 2002, Trisha Brown was awarded the National Medal of Arts
National Medal of Arts
The National Medal of Arts is an award and title created by the United States Congress in 1984, for the purpose of honoring artists and patrons of the arts. It is the highest honor conferred to an individual artist on behalf of the people. Honorees are selected by the National Endowment for the...
.
Works of her choreography and drawings are included in documenta 12.
Works
Her works include:- Homemade (1966)
- Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)
- Floor of the Forest (1970)
- Leaning Duets (1970)
- Accumulation (1971)
- Walking on the Wall (1971)
- Roof Piece (1971)
- Primary Accumulation (1972)
- Group Primary Accumulation (1973)
- Structured Pieces II (1974)
- Spiral (1974)
- Locus (1975)
- Structured Pieces III (1975)
- Solo Olos (1976)
- Line Up (1976)
- Spanish Dance' (1976)
- Watermotor (1978)
- Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor (1978)
- Glacial Decoy (1979)
- Opal Loop (1980)
- Son of Gone Fishin (1981)
- Set and Reset (1983)
- Lateral Pass (1985)
- Newark (1987)
- Astral Convertible (1989)
- Foray Forêt (1990)
- For M.G.: The Movie (1991)
- One Story as in falling (1992)
- Another Story as in falling (1993)
- If you couldn't see me (1994)
- M.O. (1995)
- Twelve Ton Rose (1996)
- L'Orfeo (1998)
- Winterreise (2002)
- PRESENT TENSE (2003)
- O Zlozony/O Composite (2004)
- How long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume... (2005)
- I love my robots (2007)
- L'Amour au Theatre (2009)
- Pygmalion (2010)
External links
- http://www.trishabrowncompany.org/
- http://www.gradewinner.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_n4_v69/ai_16985498?pi=gdw#continue
- Archival footage of Trisha Brown Dance Company performing Set and Reset in 1986 at Jacob's Pillow
- Archival footage of Trisha Brown Dance Company performing Les Yeux et L'Ame in 2011 at Jacob's Pillow