Trisha Brown – Choreography as a System that Makes Dance Happen – Näkökulmia tanssitaiteen historiaan ja nykypäivään 2024-12-23, 11:51 AM

4 POSTMODERNISM IN DANCE (1960–1970)

Riikka Laakso
Trisha Brown –
Choreography as a
System that Makes
Dance Happen
The task of describing Trisha Brown’s unique form of
dancing is daunting. Its inscrutable blend of zaniness,
athleticism, delicacy, and logic, always evading mimetic
clichés, similarly eludes language, like a half-forgotten
word or phrase that can’t quite roll off the tip of the
tongue.
[1]

American choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017) is

remembered for her work at the Judson Dance Theater and
her subsequent choreographies based on postmodern dance
aesthetics and working methods. During her career, Brown
created nearly a hundred works, one ballet, six operas and
made drawings from the 1960s onwards.

Trisha Brown studied dance at Mills College in California,

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where she learned Graham technique, and for several years

at the American Dance Festival with teachers such as José
Limón, Merce Cunningham and Louis Horst.[2]
[2] She grew

up in the context of American white modern dance

techniques of the 1950s, in which movement growing from
the torso towards the legs and arms was key to the
expressive and emotional content of the dances.[3]
[3] (see

Developments of Dance Modernisms) Brown learned

improvisation in the workshops of Anna Halprin.[4]
[4] In

addition, from the early 1960s, she practised a variety of body

techniques based on perception of physicality, body
alignment and anatomical understanding. The Alexander
Technique, the Klein Technique and the methods of Elaine
Summers focused on the release of the physical and
psychological dimensions of movement, as well as on
relaxation and a certain ease of movement happening
through understanding. The methods of developing body–
mind awareness were present throughout Brown’s career
and had a significant impact on the movement language of
the works.[5]
[5]

In 1961–1962, Brown participated in Robert Dunn’s

composition workshop, which was based on the methods of
composer John Cage. (see The Postmodern Spectrum) Dunn
did not seek specific answers to the problems he presented,
but was interested in the students’ individual solutions and
ways of approaching composition. The aim was to seek
alternatives to the established aesthetics and conventions of
American white modern dance, which the young generation
of the 1960s, interested in the avant-garde, found restrictive
and outmoded. Brown said she understood from Dunn’s

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workshop that choreographers have the right to decide how

to construct a dance: they can experiment and make dances
according to their current needs.[6]
[6]

First Choreographies and

Judson Dance Theater
Brown cites John Cage as her most important influence, and
her choreography has recognisable Cagean trains of thought.
[7] Most of Brown’s so-called early works of 1962–1978 were
[7]

abstract, conceptual choreographies performed in silence to

the accompaniment of breathing and other bodily sounds.
Many of the dances lasted less than five minutes. The
reduced form of the choreographies emphasised the “object-
ness” of the dances, where attention was focused on the
concept and the movement itself. Therefore Brown’s art
uniquely extended into interdisciplinary territory,
particularly at the intersection of dance and visual arts.
Choreographies were often performed in gallery spaces, and
the “white box” of the visual arts context supported the
internal logic and functionality of Brown’s abstract works.
[8]
[8]

Browin’s first choreography Trillium (1962) is an

improvisational structure based on three tasks: standing,
sitting and lying down. By exploring these activities, Brown
discovered resting, strength, momentum and idiosyncrasy as
the motifs of the dance.[9]
[9] The soundscape for the work was

a recording of Simone Fort’s sound improvisation. Brown’s

work relied heavily on breaking Louis Horst’s formal

approach to choreography, where the subordination of dance

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approach to choreography, where the subordination of dance

to the structure of the music was central. Brown instead
drew on Cage’s ideas about listening to sound and its
duration as a framing device for dance.[10]
[10] Brown’s next

choreography, Lightfall (1963), her first work with the Judson

Dance Theater collective, was a duet with Steve Paxton. The
work was based on the earlier experiments of partner work,
the violent aspects of which Brown had explored with
Simone Forti and Dick Levine. The structure of Lightfall was
partly based on improvisation, and the piece contained
various movement sections, including passages based on
running and turns, and a section in which one dancer
climbed on the back of the other without knowing when they
would be pushed off that dancer’s back.[11]
[11]

Many of the artists who began working with Judson Dance

Theater used everyday movement as a material for dance, for
example in Yvonne Rainer’s Room Service (1963) the
physicality of the dancers came from carrying and moving
mattresses. Later, Steve Paxton’s Satisfying Lover (1967) was
based on standing, walking and sitting. Brown’s
choreographies, however, soon began to produce their own
abstract movement languages and modes of movement.[12]
[12]

Rulegame 5 (1964), for example, was based on instructions

and rules according to which performers changed position
and height in relation to each other. In addition to Brown,
Paxton and Forti, it featured as performer the visual artist
Robert Rauschenberg, who later contributed to some of
Brown’s most important works. Brown was also a skilled and
agile improviser, which did not entirely fit with all avant-

garde ideas about questioning technique or virtuoso

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movement.[13]
[13]

By the early 1960s, Brown was moving around a lot in

different environments in the art scene, participating in
Fluxus events and Yoko Ono’s loft improvisation
performances. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she was part
of a diverse group of artists who lived, worked and performed
in what is now the SoHo area of New York City.[14]
[14] Laurie

Anderson compared this dynamic energy of early 1970s New

York to 1920s Paris.[15]
[15] It was in this context that the

Trisha Brown Dance Company was born in 1970.

Working on Gravity – Dances

with Equipment
Brown’s works can be structured in cycles, with each series
focusing on a particular theme or issue. One of Brown’s
interests was the study of the body and movement in relation
to gravity. A series of works called Equipment Pieces used
various mechanisms or supports – harnesses, ropes, spatial
constructions – to alter the effect of gravity on the body. In
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), a dancer
walked perpendicularly down the brick wall of a seven-storey
building. The event itself functioned as a kind of dance-
producing machine, as the situation gave the dancer a
starting point at the edge of the roof, instructions for the
action of walking down the wall, and an end point on
reaching the ground.[16]
[16] In all the works in the series, the

dancers performed in the situation defined by the equipment

as ergonomically as possible. The equipment decides the

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choreography of the piece on behalf of the dancer and

controls the physicality of the dance, sometimes also
deciding the soundscape of the piece when speech is needed
to reach a consensus on the use of the equipment.[17]
[17]

The dancers climbed a wall mechanism of holes built on the

gallery wall (Planes, 1968), walked horizontally on the gallery
walls (Walking on the Wall, 1971) or down a spiral path along a
column (Spiral, 1972). Leaning Duets (1970), instead, was
based on balancing outside the centre of gravity of one’s
body. It involved two dancers leaning on each other, and later
became even more challenging when ropes were used to
increase the distance between the dancers. The minimalist
choreography needed no metaphor or theatrical dimension
to support it; the movement itself was enough, while the
dance did not hide the way in which the effect of gravity was
altered.

The urban environment could also provide a setting for

dance, as in Roof Piece (1971), which placed dancers on the
roofs of 12 skyscrapers around New York City. Movement
passed from one dancer to another, travelling a distance of
ten blocks, with each dancer acting simultaneously as sender
and receiver of movement. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a
virtual version of the work was made, Room/Roof Piece
(2020), in which movement is transmitted from one dancer to
another via a computer camera.

Dances that Accumulate

Movement
The series of works that accumulate movement,
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The series of works that accumulate movement,

Accumulation Pieces, was based on the combination of
movements into a series. Accumulation (1971) begins with the
dancer’s thumbs and gradually progresses through the
elbows and shoulders to the whole body. In a precise and
minimalist choreography, the sequence of movements, that is
always done from start to finish, gradually increases in
length as one movement is added at the end of the sequence
each round. In contrast, Primary Accumulation (1972) is
performed lying on the floor, repeating soft movements in a
slow and hypnotic flow. Brown liberated the feet from their
role of holding the body upright and used them as equal
elements with other parts of the body. The work is a simple
series of 30 movements based on organic movement. Some
movements rotate the dancer 45 degrees in space so that the
next repetition of a movement sequence offers the viewer a
new perspective on the entire dance.[18]
[18] In this collection of

works, Brown’s approach to movement was very

mathematical.

Locus (1975) changed Brown’s movement language from

simple sequences of movements with a clear logic towards a
dance that appears complex, even strange. In the piece,
Brown constructed a mathematical system based on a cube
imagined by each dancer in space. The dancer stood inside
the cube, and 27 points were assigned to the sides of the
cube, corresponding to letters of the alphabet, so that a kind
of linguistic system was formed around the dancer. Brown
wrote a simple text which, when translated into numbers
(A=1, B=2, C=3…), was transformed into a spatial map. The

dancers looked for ways of moving in relation to points on the

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cube with the map, for example by touching, looking, jumping

or moving through a point. When the dance was performed,
there could be, for example, 20 cubes in the space, from
which the dancers could choose their starting point, the
direction of the dance and the movement phrase they wanted
to use.[19]
[19] Locus is geometric, complex and surprising in its

movement language, even though it takes place in a very

small space within the shape of a cube.

With Locus, Brown’s way of constructing dances changed, as

movement was no longer created in the choreographer’s
body, but was the result of the system’s action. Brown was
constantly searching for different systems and structures
that would bring forth new ways of moving and new realities.
“Merce [Cunningham] worked with chance; I worked with
structure,”[20]
[20] as Brown describes her working method.

Instead of creating movement and organising it into dance,

Brown revealed how movement is a consequence of
choreography.[21]
[21] Choreography could be a physical

situation or a mathematical system: an environment that

generated movement and thus made dance happen.

Exploring the Context of

Theatre
In 1979, Brown’s work took a major turn when she began to
work on theatre stages. Glacial Decoy (1979) questioned the
conventions of the proscenium stage, as if continuing Brown’s
artistic values of the 1960s and 1970s, but questioning the

laws of the theatre stage.[22]

[22] Moreover, from 1978 onwards,

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Brown was interested in her own body as an instrument and

the particular quality of movement it produced. The
unchained, surprising and light movement of Watermotor
(1978)[23]
[23] is inspired by Brown’s childhood memories, but at

the same time the choreography is extremely precise.

According to Brown, it wasn’t until 1978, after 16 years of
working in dance, that “dancing” became part of her
choreography.[24]
[24]

Gradually, Brown developed a way of working in which she

first created movement material and then allowed the
dancers to improvise with the given movement. The
technique was called “memorised improvisation.” In the
process of Set and Reset (1983), the technique reached its
peak, and the choreography is often called a masterpiece of
postmodern dance. The starting point of the work is a
movement phrase constructed by Brown, using a lot the
joints (knees, ankles, hips, shoulders) and proposing a soft,
articulated and flowing movement quality. The movement is
organic but precise down to the last millimetre. The phrase
contains many syncopated rhythms and sudden changes of
direction, resulting in complex and precise movement
sequences that are built up piece by piece. After carefully
learning the movement phrase, the dancers improvised with
the material – rearranging, reworking, repeating, etc. – and
the choreographer built the composition of the piece from
these improvisations, deciding the final order and structure
of the movements in space.

In the process, the working group also identified a set of

operating principles – five guidelines that dancers follow

when dancing the piece:

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when dancing the piece:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Play with visibility and invisibility.
3. If you don’t know what to do, get in line.
4. Stay on the outside edge of the stage.
5. Act on instinct.[25]

The guidelines help dancers to make quick decisions in the

moment of dancing, clarify the choreography spatially and
give them the freedom to respond to the events of the
moment.

Set and Reset makes visible the tension between improvised

and organised material, between movement happening in the
moment and learned movement. The movement is extremely
worked and refined by the dancer. The composition plays
with the movement of the individual dancer as soloist and
simultaneously as a member of the group. Each dancer has
their own movement path, but brief moments of the same
movement performed simultaneously occur throughout the
choreography. Momentarily, the dancers arrange themselves
into a line, which breaks up again into space, the stage image
alternating between ordered and unordered. The
composition is geometrically precise yet unpredictable, as is
the movement of each dancer, and this opens up before the
spectator a kind of cornucopia of movement and
composition, a multi-layered and ever-changing tapestry that
escapes univocal understanding and definition.

Set and Reset continues Brown’s exploration of the laws of

theatre, as the composition of the work explores the

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theatre, as the composition of the work explores the

relationship to the centre of the stage, the most important
point in the space. Brown chose to begin the choreography at
the edge of the space, from which the movement material
sends duets and trios towards the centre of the stage.[26]
[26]

The transparent drops of fabric, hanging ”legs” replacing

wings, designed by Robert Rauschenberg, blur the
distinction between the stage and the space at the side, as the
action at the sides – for example, the dancers waiting or
preparing – becomes part of the choreography.[27]
[27]

Composer Laurie Anderson’s music “Long Time No See”

consists of everyday found sounds such as bells, beeps,
breaking dishes and synthetic speech sounds.[28]
[28] The

artists worked in close collaboration so that Brown’s

choreographic thinking was evident in all aspects of the
piece. The aim was for each art form to be independent, but
also highly collaborative.[29]
[29] Many artists of the era such as

Fujiko Nakaya, Donald Judd or Nancy Graves collaborated

with Brown.[30]
[30] In addition, the development of art funding

systems during the period allowed for longer working

processes, and this benefited Brown’s output throughout the
1980s.[31]
[31]

Set and Reset finally brought Brown’s work to the attention of

a wider audience. It is her best known and most performed
work and part of the repertoire of the still-active Trisha
Brown Dance Company. The Set and Reset/Reset version of
the work is based on Brown’s original methods, but with a
completely new version of the choreography built each time
around the dancers’ work and movement. The choreography
is thus shaped to look like the dancers who perform it; for

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example, the British Candoco Dance Company’s version of

the work includes moving with crutches and wheelchairs.
[32] (see Ableism in Dance) The project is also carried out
[32]

for professional dance students, and in Finland it has been

immersed, for example, in 2010 and 2012 by master’s
students at the Theatre Academy of Finland.

Works from the 1990s and 2000s

Brown’s late output from 1989–2011 includes many large-scale
works, such as six operas (including to music by Monteverdi)
and one ballet O Zlozony/O Composite (2004) in collaboration
with Laurie Anderson. Brown also created works for
classical music, including compositions by Schubert and
Bach. Smaller choreographies include the solo If You Couldn’t
See Me (1994), in which Brown dances the entire ten-minute
choreography with her back to the audience. In the 1995 duet
You Can See Us, Brown collaborated with choreographer Bill
T. Jones, and in the 1996 version of the work she danced with
Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Brown drew throughout her artistic career, and drawing was

also a way for her to create choreography using different
patterns, shapes and systems. There are similarities between
the drawings and the choreographies of the same period. Her
work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, including
the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the
MoMA in New York. In It’s a Draw (2002), drawing takes
place in full view of the spectator – present on stage or in real
time in the museum space via a camera, as the case may be –
forming “a hybrid of improvised dance and automatic

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drawing.” Brown moves on a large sheet of paper (about 3 x 3

m) fixed to the floor, using charcoal and pastels. However, the
paper does not limit the dance; Brown’s movements extend
beyond it. Both standing and on the floor, the dancer seeks
contact with the surface of the paper with a soft and fluid
movement, but the dance leaves more of an imprint on the
paper than a form:

Her body, charcoal, and pastel move between the

intentional and the accidental, between forethought and
spontaneity, between marking and erasing, between
almost drawing and almost writing but never quite.
[35]

Drawing and dance coexist in space, this time critically

reflecting on the context of the visual arts, galleries and the
museum. The work has been shown at the Montpellier Dance
Festival, The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia,
and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.[36]
[36]

Brown worked in a variety of contexts from the early 1960s,

and continued to move between different frameworks
throughout her career. The public urban space, the galleries
and museum institutions of the visual arts context, and the
stages of theatre and opera are all sites for Brown’s dance –
and the smooth crossing of these boundaries is a challenge to
the rigid classification of dance art. Susan Rosenberg, a long-
time scholar of Brown’s work, also stresses the importance of
endlessly flowing, unpredictable and rich use of the body as a
choreographic legacy. Brown was a dancer interested in free
but precise movement, a trailblazer of a dance based on

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improvisation and various body techniques led by conscious

and intelligent body, which in the 21st century is an
undeniable part of contemporary dance.[37]
[37]

Notes
↑ 11 Choreographer Yvonne Rainer describes Trisha
Brown’s dance. Brown & Rainer 2017, 75.

↑ 22 Louis Horst (1884–1964) was Martha Graham’s

accompanist and composer, and considered the most
important composition pedagogue of the period. Brown
studied with him at the American Dance Festival for three
summers (1956, 1959, 1961). Brown’s teachers Eleanor Lauer
and Rebecca Fuller also taught Horst’s methods at Mills
College. Rosenberg 2017, 15.

↑ 33 Brown & Rainer 2017, 81.

↑ 44 At Anna Halprin’s workshops in San Francisco in the

summer of 1960, Brown met Simone Fort and Yvonne Rainer.
They persuaded Brown to move from the West Coast to New
York in 1961. Brown associates improvisation and kinetic
tasks particularly with Halprin, who spoke of working on a
task, such as dressing or sweeping the floor, as a kind of
found movement – a way of performing in which the task
helps to avoid subjective decision making. This creates
choreographic forms that are not based on narrative,
characters or self-expression and that propose movement in
the moment of improvisation, not by imitating given
movement patterns. Rosenberg 2017, 19.

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↑ 55 Rosenberg 2017, 212–213.

↑ 66 Banes 1993, 20–21.

↑ 77 Rosenberg 2017, 3.

↑ 88 Rosenberg 2017, 3–4.

↑ 99 Harris 2018a, 148.

↑ 10
10 Rosenberg 2017, 15–16. In Halprin’s workshops, many
choreographers got their first contact with intuitive
processes by experimenting with physical suggestions and
tasks in a playful space. Simone Fort’s sound improvisations
and the powerful sensations they revealed had a strong
influence on Brown. In the modern dance environment,
dominated by Louis Horst’s formalist approach to
choreography and composition, improvisation was not
valued. Brown 2002, 290.

↑ 11
11 Banes 1993, 100–101.

↑ 12
12 Rosenberg 2017, 3.

↑ 13
13 Rosenberg 2017, 34–35. Referring to Brown’s diary
entries in 1978. Growing up in the context of modern dance,
Brown had certain interests in movement and skill that she
says she avoided while working with Judson Dance Theater.

↑ 14
14 The buildings of a vacant industrial site on the area
of the current SoHo provided a space for a large and
enthusiastic group of artists, including dancers, filmmakers,
poets, musicians and visual artists such as Laurie Anderson
and Gordon Matta-Clark. A space for art and performance
was opened first at 98 Greene Street and later, in 1970, a
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was opened first at 98 Greene Street and later, in 1970, a

second space at 112 Greene Street. The dynamic environment

hosted exhibitions, installations and performance and dance
events. In addition to Brown, artists such as Deborah Hay,
Carol Goodden and the improvisation collective Grand Union
shared their artistic work in this environment. The artists
also opened a restaurant in the neighbourhood called Food,
which served as a meeting place and helped several artists to
support themselves financially. Yee 2011, 17–19.

↑ 15
15 Yee 2011, 17.

↑ 16
16 Yee 2011, 20.

↑ 17
17 Banes 1987, 82.

↑ 18
18 Banes 1987, 83–84.

↑ 19
19 Banes 1987, 86.

↑ 20
20 Eleey 2008, 21.

↑ 21
21 Rosenberg 2017, 3.

↑ 22
22 Rosenberg 2017, 5, 230.

↑ 23
23 There is a recording of the choreography, the dance
film Water Motor, shot by Babette Mangolte. The
choreography is performed twice, at normal speed and in
slow motion, revealing details hidden in the real time of the
dance.

↑ 24
24 Rosenberg 2017, 3.

↑ 25
25 Brown 2002, 291.

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↑ 26
26 For more on the composition of the work, see Un

entretien avec Trisha Brown, Chaillot-Théâtre National de la

Danse, 2009. https://www.numeridanse.tv/videotheque-
danse/un-entretien-avec-trisha-brown?s  Accessed
30.12.2021.

↑ 27
27 Rosenberg 2017, 267.

↑ 28
28 Brown invited Laurie Anderson to compose the
music for the piece, just after she had risen to prominence
with her album Oh Superman, which combined avant-garde
with popular music. Brown sent a video of the first
movement of the piece, a duet with dancer Diane Maden,
without sound to Anderson. It was a method Brown had used
before, for the music of her earlier works. As the
choreography progressed, Anderson received new videos,
which allowed her to create a very close relationship between
movement and sound in what Anderson called “electronic
closeness.” Rosenberg 2017, 265–266.

↑ 29
29 Rosenberg 2017, 230–231. The role of music was not
only to support the choreography, as in the works of Martha
Graham, but Brown did not seek to isolate the arts, as Merce
Cunningham did.

↑ 30
30 Rosenberg 2017, 5.

↑ 31
31 Rosenberg 2017, 263.

↑ 32
32 Set and Reset/Reset has been done for the company in
2011, 2016 and 2021. https://candoco.co.uk/work/set-reset-
reset/  Accessed 14.02.2022.

↑ 33
33 Yee 2011, 23. André Lepecki mentions the connection
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↑ 33
33 Yee 2011, 23. André Lepecki mentions the connection
between the 1970s work Locus and the Quadrigrams series of

drawings. Lepecki 2006, 68.

↑ 34
34 Lepecki 2006, 65.

↑ 35
35 Lepecki 2006, 71.

↑ 36
36 Recording of the Walker Art Center event from 2008:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7DQVW6qRq8 
Accessed 30.12.2021.

↑ 37
37 Rosenberg 2017, 211–212.

Literature
Banes, Sally. 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers. Post-Modern Dance.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Banes, Sally. 1993. Democracy’s Body. Judson Dance Theater,

1962–1964. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.

Brown, Trisha & Rainer, Yvonne. 2017. “Conversation.” In

Yvonne Rainer, ed. Moving and Being Moved. Amsterdam:
Roma Publications, 75–84.

Brown, Trisha. 2002. “How to Make a Modern Dance When

the Sky’s the Limit.” In Hendel Teicher, ed. Trisha Brown:
Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001. Cambridge: MIT Press,
289–293.

Brown, Trisha & Kertess, Klaus. 2004. Trisha Brown Early

Works 1966–1979. Conversation with Trisha Brown and Klaus
Kertess. DVD. Artpix.

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Trisha Brown – Choreography as a System that Makes Dance Happen – Näkökulmia tanssitaiteen historiaan ja nykypäivään 2024-12-23, 11:51 AM

Eleey, Peter. 2008. “If You Couldn’t See Me: The Drawings of

Trisha Brown.” In Peter Eleey, ed. Trisha Brown: So That the

Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing.
Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 18–35.

Harris, Jenny. 2018a. “Trisha Brown, Trillium, 1962; Lightfall,

1963.” In Ana Janevski & Thomas J. Lax, eds. Judson Dance
Theater: The Work is Never Done. New York: MoMA
Publications, 148–149.

Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance. Performance and the

Politics of Movement. New York and London: Routledge.

Rosenberg, Susan. 2017. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual

Art. Wesleyan University Press.

Yee, Lydia. 2011. “When the Sky Was the Limit.” In Lydia Yee,
ed. Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark:
Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s. London:
Barbican Art Gallery, Prestel, 13–26.

Contributor
Riikka Laakso
Riikka Laakso works in the field of dance as a writer,
lecturer and dramaturg. She holds a PhD in
performing arts from the Universidad Autónoma de
Barcelona (2016) and teaches theatre analysis and
dance history at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona.
Laakso has collaborated with Zodiak – Centre for
New Dance, the Theatre Academy, Helsinki and
choreographer Sanna Kekäläinen, and is responsible
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Trisha Brown – Choreography as a System that Makes Dance Happen – Näkökulmia tanssitaiteen historiaan ja nykypäivään 2024-12-23, 11:51 AM

choreographer Sanna Kekäläinen, and is responsible

for the dramaturgy of works by choreographer

Marina Mascarelli.

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