Defying gravity
> Choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown will be remembered for her groundbreaking work that forever changed the landscape of art
spending hours on stage pushing a broom.
“I make radical changes in a mundane way,” she explained in a widely-cited essay on the meaning of ‘pure movement’.
“I also use quirky, personal gestures; things that have specific meaning to me, but probably appear abstract to others,” she wrote.
Brown, in an interview with artists’ magazine Bomb, said she believed in the value of improvisation and would incorporate apparent mistakes by dancers if they proved effective.
“I will do anything to get a good dance, invent new methods, employ trickery, endure experimentation – basically, I create new phrases on them or me or somewhere in between,” she said.
Brown collaborated with other artistes, including composer Laurie Anderson and painter Robert Rauschenberg, in an effort to create pieces that defied categorisation as dance, visual art or music.
But Brown for years also choreographed works that lacked music entirely – as well as other traditional elements such as plot and a clear setting.
Some of her most distinctive pieces are her ‘unstable molecular structure’ works, in which she likened the dancers’ movement to molecules under a microscope.
Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Brown graduated in 1958 from the Mills College in California, and arrived in New York three years later in search of new directions.
She became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theatre, an influential collective of avant-garde performers, setting up her own company in 1970 and going on to create more than 100 dance works and six operas.
Brown herself danced past age 70, in 2007 performing in I love My Robots, a collaboration with Anderson and Japanese artiste Kenjiro Okazaki in which humans and robots interacted on stage.
Her final two choreographies came in 2011 – Les Yeux de l’ame (The Eyes of the Soul) and I’m Going to Toss My Arms – If You Catch Them They’re Yours.
She had a particularly strong following in France.
Dancer Aurelie Dupont, now the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, recalled showing her pointe work on her tiptoes when Brown composed 2004’s zlozony/O composite.
“She had never seen that in her life. She burst out laughing when I showed her all the possibilities,” Dupont said.
Brown’s husband, the artist Burt Barr, died in November. Brown is survived by a son, four grandchildren, a brother and a sister. – AFP
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