Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001

In 1962, at the age of twenty-six, Trisha Brown became one of the original members of the experimental Judson Church Dance Theater in New York, and in 1970 she cofounded The Grand Union. The dancers of these radical groups, such as Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, embraced improvisation and the use of everyday movements not usually associated with legitimate choreography. To bring her dance into the real world of objects and unpredictable events, Brown performed much of her early work outdoors. The book recalls the richness of those times, when poets, musicians, painters, and sculptors joined with dancers and choreographers in questioning the hierarchies and boundaries of their disciplines. By the late 1970s, Brown was looking for ways to expand and open up her dances. The desire to create large-scale, complex productions led her to incorporate stage design and music as simultaneous, independent elements in her work. Collaborating with such visual artists and musicians as Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, John Cage, Alvin Curran, Nancy Graves, Donald Judd, Fujiko Nakaya, Robert Rauschenberg, and, most recently, Terry Winters, she created visual and musical spectacles, or "movement-images." In this book, which accompanies a nationally touring exhibition co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, historians, critics, choreographers, dancers, and visual artists explore the dialogue between dance and the visual arts in Brown's work. The contributors include Guillaume Bernardi, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Marianne Goldberg, Deborah Jowitt, Klaus Kertess, Laurence Louppe, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Charles Stainback, Hendel Teicher, and Adam D. Weinberg.