Trisha Brown was born in 1936, in Aberdeen, Washington. She studied with Anna
Halprin, another famous dancer, while a dance major at Mills College. Trisha Brown went
to New York in 1960, and in 1962 became a founding member of the Judson Dance
Theater. A few years later she organized her own company, which was incorporated in
1970. In that year she also became a founding member of the Grand Union, an
improvisational dance theater company.
In her dances, Brown used ordinary movements in extraordinary circumstances.
She works in structured improvisation and describes her choreographic approach as
similar to that of "a bricklayer with a sense of humor".
One of Trisha Brown's first dances was called "Falling Duets" (1968). This piece
demands alertness, ingenuity and good reflexes as two performers take turns falling and
` One of Trisha Brown's techniques is called "accumulation." This is dancing like
adding links to a chain. Each movement is a new link and then the whole sequence is
repeated again from the beginning. Later on, the dancer rotated gradually, eventually
making a 360-degree turn. The dancer also performed the chain in different positions
(propped up against the wall, on the floor). Then, sometimes, she would "de-accumulate"
by eliminating movements from the beginning of the phrase with each repetition.
In 1971 Brown's "Roof Piece", another famous piece, spread out over a twelve-block radius in lower Manhattan. Stationed on rooftops, the dancers relayed movements
from one to another trying to reproduce them with the least amount of distortion. The
unusual locations in her dances were used because they had effects on not only the
choreography but on the audience's perception as well. From 1968 to 1972, Brown
experimented with "equipment pieces". These enabled her to exploit neglected
performance spaces, such as walls and ceilings. Supported by ropes, pulleys, mountain
climbing...