the air.”22 Paxton, a master of improvisational performance—dance that is “not historical. Not even a second ago”—saw Trillium as emblematic of Brown’s love of dancing’s unruly ephemerality.23
Paxton’s attachment to, and investment in, improvisation’s creative potential informed his retrospective reading of Trillium as an elegy for the fading perfume of the wildflower—of movement and dancing. Other meanings of Paxton’s story emerge if its valence shifts from the issue of movement’s evanescence to the problem of choreography’s structural survival. This is what riveted Brown and inspired Trillium’s concept. Transplantation, an idea imbued in Trillium’s story, was an act that Brown made real, re-siting her dance from one context—“natural” and organic to it to another that was “domesticated” and defined by convention/tradition. In actualizing Trillium’s concepts of decontextualization and transplantation, Brown revealed a precociously acute understanding of how an institutional context, or performance situation, affects the way a choreography is seen and how it produces its meaning, as well as its import.
Brown came to join Dunn’s class through the recommendations of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer.24 Having learned of the Fall 1960 workshop being offered by Robert Dunn, a composer and former musical assistant to Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham (at whose space on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue Dunn’s class was taught), they encouraged Brown to relocate to New York. In the winter of 1961 she traveled to the city by Greyhound bus to join Dunn’s class, living for a short time at a YWCA near the Port Authority, then with family members on Long Island, and finally in the borrowed apartment of Steve Paxton at 529 Broome Street.
Brown’s first appearance as a performer in New York was in Robert Whitman’s March 1961 Mouth at New York’s Reuben Gallery, a venue known as the first to showcase “happenings” (the expansion of painterly ideas with new materials and the body into three-dimensional space, environment, and time). Brown recalled, “Someone said, ‘Would you like to be in a happening?’ I said, ‘What is a happening?’ I found my way into the midst of a Robert Whitman happening across the Bowery. Yes, middle class values, very young, 23, maybe 22, going into a small, dilapidated space like the lower floor of a tenement building.”25 Brown’s choice of Trillium’s title (based on a living object/image) relates to titles’ function in Whitman’s visually poetic, imagistic works, which he called “moving sculpture.”26
Writing about Flower (1963)—in which Brown also performed—a critic focused on his “distinctive form … massive and quiet, primitive and sensuous, integrated by a central idea in which all the occurrences relate to the title of the piece.”27 Whitman celebrated the roles of title and image in his 1966 Prune Flat: “Titles are always appropriate and … usually very important. They do acquire, if they have any sense, you know, they become a metaphor, part of the image of the piece.”28 In his abstract theater, Whitman said, “I conceive of each piece as one image, and by the end of the piece the image is revealed through exposure of its different aspects.”29
He also said about his performances that “you might think of them … as an object. An object of consideration for the mind.”30 In a 2002 conversation Brown mirrored back to Whitman his notion of a poetic image as a work’s unifying principle and basis for its temporal unfolding, recalling Trillium: “It’s about realizing an image, and it’s non-verbal.”31
She too worked from an image to an abstract structure, transposing the flower’s three-part structure to a three-part composition. Attributing her approach to Halprin’s teachings, she conveyed how Trillium distills and encapsulates in her work a particular moment in her training in a fashion that was a precise as well as a strikingly literal response to innovations then being introduced to contemporary dance. Brown identified the use of “task” and “improvisation” as specific to Halprin’s workshop. “Anna [Halprin],” Brown said, “had identified a normal task as a form for performing…. Her work is primarily improvisational. Nevertheless a task was something quite ordinary, like sweep the floor, stack cardboard boxes or dress and undress. That notion was like a found form, and it came into New York through this class.”32
For Halprin, tasks were “systems that would knock out cause and effect,”33 “open[ing] up the possibility that movement can come from a more functional basis.”34 Task is a tool for generating movement that appears to be objective by avoiding subjective compositional decisions, including approaches to choreographing based on narrative, characterization, or self-expression. Task enables movements’ discovery in the act of improvisation—not by imitating already-given movement techniques or forms.
Brown recalled Trillium’s making as “working in a studio on a movement exploration of traversing the three positions, sitting, standing and lying. I broke these actions down into their basic mechanical structure, finding the places of rest, power, momentum and peculiarity.”35 Describing Trillium as a “structured improvisation,”36 she invoked Simone Forti’s influence—her technique for improvising movement in relation to scores and structures, practiced outside of Dunn’s workshop. Describing Trillium as a “kinesthetic piece,”37 she credited Halprin’s anatomically based teachings, the legacy of Halprin’s teacher, Margaret H’Doubler (1889–1982).38 Retrospectively describing it as a “serial composition,” she recognized its connections to mid-1960s art and music.39
To Halprin’s use of task Brown introduced John Cage’s compositional methods, delivered to her by Robert Dunn, who had studied in Cage’s class at the New School for Social Research in New York (1958–1960), a laboratory that spawned the rise of “happenings,” Fluxus, and other performative practices.40 Dunn was especially alert to one of Cage’s newest principles: indeterminacy. While offering his workshop, he undertook, at Cage’s invitation, the editing of the first published catalog of Cage’s musical scores. Cage’s foreword to this slim 1962 volume commended Dunn’s organization of his oeuvre according to a logic that was not chronological, but defined by “categories of sound production … to clarif[y] differences in performance requirements, which Cage delineated.”41 The catalog brought Cage’s work up to date—for example, including scores since 1958 that Cage described as “composition indeterminate of performance.”42
Cage had introduced his concept of indeterminacy in a 1958 lecture in Darmstadt, Germany, in lectures and performances in the United States, and in the publication of his collected writings, Silence (1961). He related the idea to that of an experimental composition in “Composition as Process: II Indeterminacy”: “This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance. That composition is necessarily experimental. An experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen…. A performance of a composition which is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was.”43
Dunn implied Brown’s acute response to his delivery of Cage’s ideas in the workshop: “The Trisha Brown I remember from the 1960s was quiet, keen and penetrating…. It is very possible that she, more than anyone else, had the mental grasp and subtlety to retain the more recondite points I was trying to make at that time; for example, the insistence on a constant renovation of working methods in the contribution that could make [a] permanent continuing revolution, both in form and content.”44 Trillium manifests this form–content relation joining experimental composition, indeterminacy, and a further Cagean principle: the organization of sounds side-by-side without transitions.
Trillium’s three movement tasks reveal Brown’s penchant for reductive simplicity: she narrowed her choices to the most elemental forms through which the body encounters space. “Task” enabled her to overcome a challenge of choreographing in the absence of a movement vocabulary, a problem that she later said had limited her creativity early in her career when “the mode of teaching choreography was to use the Louis Horst forms of theme and development. I never understood it. I always had difficulty because I hadn’t