How to Make Modern Dance When the Sky’s the Limit

Learning how to dance starts young, even in the small town of Aberdeen, Washington (20,000). There was, of course, the first teacher, Marion Hageage, who taught tap, ballet, acrobatics, and yes, I could do a front roll and end up with my ass on my head. It was my specialty. Some days Marion would play the piano all to herself, cigarette in mouth, coffee cup and ashtray above the keyboard, then rise to take the floor in a slinky, bluesdrenched style, eyes closed. This prepubescent girl, perhaps ten, not knowing what I was supposed to do, tagged along behind, more a puppy than a dancer, trying to catch those moves. I spent hours in her studio, agog. Not exactly the academy, but then, neither were the movies. Mitzi Gaynor, Cyd Charisse, Marge and Gower Champion, Carmen Miranda, Esther Williams. There I was in the movie theatre, a death grip on the armrests. What? Holding myself down in fear of popping straight up into the chandeliers?

Aberdeen has two dazzling edges, the Pacific Ocean due west and the Olympic National Forest due north, and almost nothing in the center of town anymore. The forest was my first art lesson. I learned to look there. Sitting in a small clearing, my eye fell first on the big things, the base of a forty foot cedar tree, perhaps, then it periscoped down to the creek and over to an ancient tree trunk rotting on its severed roots, and then, oh lord, the whole world would open up to layer upon layer of teeming ecosystems on legs, or many legs, or wings, or belly-feet to crawl upon or buzz the myriad mosses attached to trees and rocks or other florae made lush and large by rain. All of this lit by shafts of light in a state of constant change.

On the less contemplative side, I climbed trees, pole vaulted, played football and basketball under the tutelage of my older brother, dug razor clams, hiked, hunted geese, duck, pheasant, fished the local rivers, the Queets, the Quinault, the Hoh for salmon, steelhead and cut-throat trout. I did all this for all of my childhood and then went away to Mills College to major in modern dance, whatever that was.

I received a traditional modern dance education based on Graham technique and Louis Horst composition guided by four extraordinary women, Marion Van Tuyl, Eleanor Lauer, Doris Dennison (music), and Rebecca Fuller. Beyond the study of choreography to music and story, they taught me that I was not tired, I had enough time, and I could do it.

Add into this brew two summer sessions with Louis Horst, the formalist at the American Dance Festival located at Connecticut College, and one with the improvisation wizard Anna Halprin located in Marin County, California, on an outdoor dance deck. Here I encountered, for the first time, the mercurial surges of an intuitive process where physical proposals and responses were dished and dashed on a whiz-by playing field. She also introduced ordinary task as formal structure, which found me sweeping the deck with a push broom for hours until I crossed over into levitation. Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, the brilliant ones from the Northeast, urged me to come to New York City to study composition with Robert Dunn. It was January 1961. Goodbye, my beloved Northwest, the sweep was total.

The story goes that John Cage asked Robert Dunn, a musician and accompanist at the Cunningham studio, to teach a dance composition class based on Cage’s legendary series at the New School for Social Research, “Composition of Experimental Music.” It was in Dunn’s class that I was introduced to the notion that a chance procedure, such as the roll of the dice, can be the organising principle in a choreography. The dice usurp the composer’s role to choose, and in so doing, reposition the units of motion that make up a phrase. They become objects that can now be put together in any order, random or determined. Abstraction seeps in. The personal choice in a well-tooled phrase that a dancer is trained to create is upended. But, beyond the issue of how to transition from one disjunct unit into the next, this assignment cracked open the door of new possibilities for me. I understood, for the first time, that the modern choreographer has the right to make up the WAY that he/she makes a dance. Later that summer, I attended John Cage’s lecture, “Indeterminacy,” which blew that door mentioned earlier right off its hinges. I got it. I got the rest of it, how form interacts with content. 

A composition that is indeterminate, that is, not precisely fixed, further pries the author’s hands off the performance. Some years later, the choreography “Accumulation with talking plus watermotor”, half improvised, half choreographed, would fly off the wrist of that hand like a falcon gaining altitude in a tumultuous mix of form battling to keep on top of the measured addition of multiple elements to a point of overload and the subsequent erosion of this dancer/choreographer’s intentions.

The assignments fulfilled in Bob Dunn’s class were eventually organised into programmes that were launched at Judson Church on 6 July 1962. It was a phenomenal period of experimentation, mostly educated white people, hubris along the history chain – and olde modern dance, exhausted by the battering it took on all fronts, keeled over like an elephant, too big for me to dissect in this context, rested, then rose again, changed forever.

I was smitten by improvisation, you know, and pursued the elusive practice by working with Simone Forti outside of Bob Dunn’s class. We developed structures (a.k.a. rulegames) to impose coherence and a measure of control to the great unknown of anything goes. How to capture esprit and do it again another day. Improvisation was not a respected endeavor in 1961. Louis Horst thought it was comparable to turning out the lights and announcing happy hour. I loved the give and take between idea and physical enactment with instinct sorting out the problems along the way. The body solves problems before the mind knows you had one. I love thinking on my feet, wind in my face, the edge, uncanny timing, and the ineffable.

To this day, I exploit instinctive behavior when building vocabulary (dance phrases) for a new choreography. I put two dancers on a possible collision course, camera running to capture the masterful maneuvers the body conducts in an effort to get past an impending accident while staying on their phrase. A blend of memorised and instinctive movement occurs. The camera is there to record the event for future rehearsals. The dancer/body will never go that close to danger again. They know too much. They have to see it on videotape to recreate the harrowing interlace and proximity.

The transition from improvisation (you’ll never see that again) to choreography (a dance form that can be precisely repeated) required great effort and leaves me thinking that I am self-taught. If one is working with form and not formula, then the ideas take a visual presence in the mind and one must find a method to decant that vision. I start by describing the idea to the dancers, they query the request, I don’t blame them, I say the same thing with other words, they try, I articulate what is missing, they try again, process is in motion. We keep heaving ourselves at each other like this until one or the other breaks through. We have a beginning. The metaphor is physically in existence. Now we have a template as reference to complete the phrase (theme).

I work simultaneously on form and vocabulary. One influences the other. After working for a decade or so, I noticed that my dances tended to cluster together in cycles. I take a compositional subject that intrigues me, work on it over two or three pieces until I have my answers, and then I move on. The early sixties were about discovery in the realm of improvisation versus form. I came back to that subject in the “Unstable Molecular Structure” cycle of work, “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503” (1980), “Son of Gone Fishin’” (1981) and “Set and Reset” (1983). All of these dances were created by the dancers through a complex process of improvisation, repetition and memorisation of the aleatoric enactment of phrases according to instructions provided by me. During the choreographic process, I stepped out of the dance to view the work as it evolved, to make editorial decisions.

For “Set and Reset”, I made a very long phrase that circumvented the outside edge of the stage, serving as a conveyor belt to deliver duets, trios and solos into the centre of the stage. All of the dancers were taught the phrase and given the following set of five instructions: 1. Keep it simple. (The clarity issue.) 2. Play with visibility and invisibility. (The privacy issue.) 3. If you don’t know what to do, get in line. (Helping out with downtime.) 4. Stay on the outside edge of the stage (The spatial issue.) 5. Act on instinct. (The wild card.) We started upstage left, more or less pouring onto the stage with a feathering of gestures from the top of the phrase, and I turned, sat down on the floor and rolled up through my spine to a shoulder stand. The dancer behind me gently pushed my pelvis with her foot, I rotated 180 degrees on my shoulders, rolled back down, and stood up to join the phrase. The shoulder stand was not in the phrase. The choreographer gives a nonverbal instruction to the dancers and the gauntlet is down. 

The proscenium stage is something like a wasteland when you approach it without light, costumes and set. I turned to Robert Rauschenberg, a painter and sculptor with extensive experience in the theatre, to supply the missing elements, to create the stage picture that the audience encounters when the curtain goes up. This picture shifts in tandem with the reeling out of choreographic forms over time. In our collaborations, I was a lightning rod for Bob’s theatrical projections. He described them to me as they occurred to him, often calling in the middle of the night. I would, in turn, picture the descriptions proffered, and in some cases choreograph with the spatial notion of the set he described to me in mind. Inevitably, each new design would be replaced by another, in an elegant procession of visual ideas, until he saw a rehearsal of the piece. At this point, galvanised by what he had assimilated through more systems than just sight, the final design would become manifest.

In “Set and Reset”, Laurie Anderson, music, and Beverly Emmons, lighting design, joined Rauschenberg in the rehearsal process from the beginning. There were many ideas and proposals along the way, but not until the nature of this new choreography could be identified, felt, did the alchemic brew begin to cook. Early on in the choreographic process, Bob saw some scrappy pieces of black velour hanging along the sides of the studio, trying to look like the legs (the lengths of fabric that form what are commonly called the stage’s wings). They were placed there to dispel in the dancers the usual sacrosanct behavior required by theatre stagehands, who admonish performers not to touch them, as if they were glass and might break. One of my choreographic themes was visibility/invisibility, and the more familiar we became with the legs, the more opulent were the opportunities. In fact, in the end, with Bob’s help, they became props. The stage’s velour legs have been reconstituted as see-through black scrim edged with a vertical stripe of ice-white satin, which demarcates the difference between onstage behavior and off. Our sanctuary is gone, invisibility dashed, downtime on display. To this situation Bob added gorgeous filmy white transparent costumes, silkscreened with palegray-to-black urban industrial images. No blue jeans. No underwear either. He did not want lingerie lines to interfere with the body as a body.

Laurie mixed the sound tracks in her studio while she watched a videotape of the nearly completed choreography. A clang is constant throughout, so is the lyric “Long Time No See,” along with instrumentation and sound effects that fit the dance like a gauntlet to a hand, or not. There are wry correspondences between music and dance, the sound of plates breaking at the moment dancers collide, an embellished reference to the impact, but also to the phrase itself, which was fragmented by the uncanny overlay of gesture and improvisational high jinks now memorised.

“Set and Reset” was the sweetheart of my work in the 1980s and a hard act to follow. Now what? Shall I put the formula into production? Or shall I try something new? “New” was the answer, but “what” was the question. In general, I had been creating vocabulary based on the simple vertical and horizontal of the spine, arms and legs, perpendicular or parallel to the floor. All gestures traveled to and from that infrastructure in a sequential, ongoing flow with democratic attention to equal air time to all parts travelling in all directions, high, low, front, back, side, side. The initiation of a gesture could come from any place on the body, unlikely or obvious, fingertips leading or the whole arm. All of this was spiced with the drama of balance, “Will she fall, or won’t she?”

Transition pieces, between one cycle and the next, are interesting because they necessarily bring along the old patterns as I attempt to forge an entire new system of choreography. I decided to investigate the opposites of “Set and Reset”, to foreground the infrastructure, interrupt the sequential flow of gestures, drop improvisation and “construct” a number of phrases, each of a different character, to be “mixed,” phrase against phrase, into choreographic “units,” quartets and duets, etc. This approach led to “Lateral Pass” (1985), with the collaborators Nancy Graves, set and costumes, Peter Zummo, music, and Beverly Emmons, lighting design. The choreographic units were mixed into the final dance with a consideration of all elements active in the collaboration. This was the beginning of a new choreographic cycle, which would fully arrive with my next collaboration.

The second piece in this new cycle, “Newark (Niweweorce)” (1987), with set, costumes and music by Donald Judd, a sculptor I had collaborated with to make “Son of Gone Fishin’” (1981). In both instances that we worked together, Judd brought his Minimalist aesthetic to my stage. A residency at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France, gave Don and me, plus Peter Zummo, music production, Ken Tabachnik, lighting design, the crucial gift of time on stage to choreograph with the set and lights every day, six days a week, for six weeks. I began my search for vocabulary by pushing furniture around in the studio. This behavior translated into a resolve to push myself and my dancers into powerful movement and carefully designed body-geometries, initially similar to furniture. The Valiant cycle, which had ist beginning in “Lateral Pass”, was now fully established. Not only will she fall, the dancers will slam into the floor. 
Don’s stage design comprised five proscenium-size drops in the three primary colours plus brown and another shade of red. They split the stage into sections forming four corridors, which could alternately block and reveal the dance. Don devised three separate mathematical systems to determine what drops, in what order, would come in where and for how long. The music, which consisted of non-referential sounds found by Peter Zummo, was on yet another system all of its own. I had unwittingly allowed Judd to usurp the choreographer’s territory of time and space. He could cut off a dancer flung high in an arc, or confine us in a narrow strip on the downstage light line, five feet deep and forty wide. My choreographic solution was to visually design the dance into the motional elements of the set, albeit adapting a few aspects to my favour. Why did I put up with it? Too late to change for one, but remember that abstract modern dance, unfettered by story and music, is, necessarily, in search of a logic or rationale to reduce the proliferation of options that hang around winking at us. The “Newark” set did impose tough dialogues and severe internal limitations, but it also delivered a spatial and temporal score that forced invention and issued one of the most striking pieces in our repertory.

This choreographic method continued until music and narrative entered the process, bringing with them a new consideration of character, gender, and the play between meaning and non-meaning in abstraction. In fact, they had already arrived, concurrent with my work on “Newark”, through the experience of choreographing my role as the Maga in Georges Bizet’s opera, “Carmen”, directed by Lina Wertmüller.

I have continued the practice of question, analysis and resolution through cycles of dance throughout my career. But, in 1995, I realised that I had more years behind me than lay ahead – unless I should have the misfortune to live to be 119. So I asked myself the question: What have you not done, that you will regret in the waning hours of your end game? The answer was opera. I had not yet directed an opera. To facilitate this terrifying desire, I chose J.S. Bach’s “Musical Offering” and proceeded to teach myself baroque polyphonic composition with the assistance of Hans Theodore David’s book on the history, interpretation and analysis of that music. I wanted to make myself and my dancers accountable to the music, note by note. I worked to understand the structures in Bach’s composition, some surprisingly familiar to my own earlier inventions, and then to find relevant structures in the dance idiom to ensure a parallel dialogue with Bach. This Modus Operandi would serve as the model for my research on all of the pieces in the burgeoning Music cycle: J.S. Bach, “M.O.” (1995); Anton Webern, “Twleve Ton Rose” (1996); and “For Merce” (1997); Claudio Monteverdi, “L’Orfeo” (1998) and “Canto/Pianto” (1997); Dave Douglas, “El Trilogy” (1999–2000); and Salvatore Sciarinno, “Luci mie traditrici” (2001) and “Geometry of Quiet” (2002).

There once was an extraordinary weekend in the south of France in July of 1998. My opera, “L’Orfeo”, was playing at the Festival International d’Art Lyrique in Aix-en-Provence. A day or so later, and nearby, an exhibition of my drawings opened at the Centre de la Vieille Charité in Marseille, as my dance company prepared to open in full theatrical regalia at the Théâtre du Gymnase across town. Life has not been the same since. Actually, it has not been the same since an earlier rehearsal day of “L’Orfeo” when I walked out into the centre of my studio to improvise Orfeo’s speech to Caronte in the monumental aria “Possente Spirito.” I had sorted out my identity. I was both Orfeo asking for permission to enter Hades and the words he sang. I was primed with music, text, poetry systems, literature. I was the faithful shepherd (Guarini, Il Pastor fido), the Spirit was with me and, most of all, I could also arpeggiate my body in the clear place of a compositional mind that does operate on its own when Trisha is busy with a handful of other aesthetic concerns. I knew, at that moment, the long haul of my apprenticeship in choreography was over.

Trisha Brown, “How to Make Modern Dance when the Sky’s the Limit,” in “Trisha Brown: Dance And Art in Dialogue 1961–2001,” ed. Hendel Teicher (Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy 2002), 289–293.