LINEAR PERSPECTIVE: Trisha Brown

A much younger Trisha Brown hovers above a white, horizontal canvas. Her hands are covered with blue gloves and paint, and her feet are smeared with charcoal; her whole body is employed in drawing as she moves on all fours. The Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts falls silent as the contemporary dancer stops talking about her choreography for the opera “Carmen” and turns towards the image of herself defying countless classical definitions of visual art and dance.

“I nabbed the gloves from intensive care at Fort Myers hospital,” she told the audience conspiratorially.

Brown­—who spoke last Wednesday and Thursday evenings at the MFA—pilfered them while visiting friend, ally, and artist Robert Rauschenberg. She had been unsure at the time of whether or how she would use them but packed them in her suitcase regardless. In her choreography, her drawing, and her life, Brown disregards rules and regulation; she does what she must to make art.

“I don’t like to be tied down. I don’t like to be pegged,” Brown said. “I don’t like to be told who I am.”

As part of the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lectures Series, Brown spoke about art and dance with Richard Colton, a local dance instructor. What could have been a structured interview became an intimate discussion concerning her movement, her aesthetic theory, and her career.

“You never have enough opportunity to hear artists talk. They interview more athletes,” lamented audience member Martha Armstrong Gray, Dance Director at the Cambridge School of Weston. “But I’d rather see Trisha move than talk.”

In hushed tones, Brown alternated between casually speaking about her experiences with dance and enacting those encounters. In one such moment, she started talking about her transition from aerial work on rooftops back to grounded movement. The 71-year-old woman then suddenly got up with a smile.

“I’m sorry I’m laughing, but I’m happy,” she said. “I’m one of the happiest people I know.”

She lengthened the arch of her back and began to dance on the stage. She extended her hands, she pulled them in. She stepped back to the right, she stepped forward. A rhythmic sequence unfurled while she told the spellbound signer translating on stage right to stop staring and continue signing.

She continued to glide through the sequence of steps, the beginning of her work entitled “Accumulation.” After the improvised performance an audience member asked how she could do something so beautiful. She waved her hand modestly and sat back down.

“I think it’s very important to act on instinct, and I try to do that,” Brown said.

Though Brown’s movement has often been described as structured and geometric, she highlighted the element of improvisation that is so integral to her work. During the late 1960s she choreographed a series of gravity-defying dances now known as “equipment” pieces—in which harnessed dancers walked down the sides of buildings and on rooftops—that received little critical attention at the time.

“No one knew what I was doing because there was no name for it,” Brown said. “It was a kind of stupid tragedy. What do people say to you when they see a dance with no genre?”

Yet Brown’s creative process is one that intentionally challenges categorization and constriction. She deconstructs movement. She reads poetry while choreographing. She draws with her feet. Brown cited the recently deceased Rauschenberg, who has designed her set and costumes, as one of her major influences.

“I could talk for about 28 days about Bob. But I’ll spare you my memories,” Brown said.

Thankfully, she did share some of those memories. While she was choreographing “Set & Reset”—an iconic, post-modern piece with music composed by Laurie Anderson—Rauschenberg called her up with an idea. She had been having what she described as writer’s block and was struggling with her solo in the center of the stage. As she told the story, she again left her chair and re-enacted her pacing.

“I never told anyone, but then Bob calls. He said ‘You are just standing there at the edge of the stage. You will just be sloshing back and forth from side-to-side. I will light you from the feet up and the audience will see sparks.’”

It was an inexplicable moment of artistic telepathy—one Brown did not care to explain but simply accepted. Therein lies the beauty of her life and work: she embraces the illogical and the unpredictable.

At the end of the evening I asked her if she had any advice for pragmatic Harvard students. “Go where the energy is,” she said. “That helped me a lot.”

—Staff writer Ama R. Francis can be reached at afrancis@fas.harvard.edu.