Turning Toward Trisha Brown: Valiance and Fragility in Beth Gill's

Turning toward Trisha Brown Valiance and Fragility in Beth Gill’s New Work for the Desert Danielle Goldman In January 2013 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Trisha Brown Dance Company performed the final two works of Trisha Brown’s career. Well-known as an experimentalist who participated in the Judson Dance Theater during the early 1960s, Brown founded her own company in 1970 and created more than 100 dances over the following four decades, ranging from solos to lavish operas. Her retirement meant a significant loss for the world of contemporary dance. But Brown’s departure from her company and from New York City remained relatively hushed. The reasons were understandable. Brown, aged 76, had undergone a number of mini- strokes, and had been suffering from vascular dementia, a decline in thinking skills that results when blood is unable to flow properly to the brain (Cooper 2014). As a result, shortly after the BAM season, Brown moved to Texas to be near relatives. Her company, now directed by long- time dancers and collaborators Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas, began a three-year inter- national farewell tour in February 2013. The company now conducts workshops and master Figure 1. Heather Lang and Stuart Singer in New Work for the Desert by Beth Gill at New York Live Arts, 2014. (Photo by Alex Escalante) TDR: The Drama Review 59:3 (T227) Fall 2015. ©2015 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 17 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00469 by guest on 25 September 2021 classes and is charged with treating Trisha Brown’s archive as a “living organism to be used to better understand her work” (TBDC n.d.). In 2016, they will offer a range of documentary screenings, exhibitions, and performances in museums and site-specific locations. As the Trisha Brown Dance Company grapples with how to move forward, several questions emerge: “Which Brown works can and should survive in performance? Which works deserve to become more widely known and loved? How well can they be passed on to dancers who did not know or see Ms. Brown herself?” (Macaulay 2013). Although these are important questions that any dance company outlasting its founding choreographer must face, perhaps it is more compelling to think about how Brown’s work has been surfacing in other ways, beyond the direct purview of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In my view, a particularly interesting engage- ment with Brown’s work comes in the form of Beth Gill’s New Work for the Desert, which pre- miered at New York Live Arts in 2014.1 Gill’s project was not an official attempt to preserve or pass down Brown’s repertory. Nor was it a return to the Judson era, which has been all the rage in both the United States and Europe.2 Rather, through an unsanctioned yet meticulous and affectively nuanced study of Brown’s Newark (Niweweorce) (1987), Gill re-examined modernist understandings of abstraction. She also offered a deeply felt and personal homage to Brown, crafted amidst a quickening sense of loss. Revealing the Bones of Choreography Gill is not alone in being compelled by a work from the past. As André Lepecki argues in “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” a return to historical dances seems to be a defining mark of contemporary performance. Lepecki notes that there have been numerous reenactments in both Europe and the United States, including Fabian Barba’s 2008 return to Mary Wigman’s work from 1929, Elliot Mercer’s 2010 return to Simone Forti’s work 1. I started dancing with Gill in 2007, and was a performer in Eleanor and Eleanor (2007), What it looks like, what it feels like (2008), and Electric Midwife (2011). Although I withdrew from the rehearsal process of New Work for the Desert several months in for family reasons, I remained in touch with Gill and her performers and saw the premiere at New York Live Arts in March 2014, as well as in January 2015. 2. As Ramsay Burt notes in Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces, the 21st century has seen tremendous interest in “new dance of the 1960s” (2006:186). As evidence, Burt notes that the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust performed “re-readings” of Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) by Steve Paxton and Continuous Process Altered Daily (1970) by Yvonne Rainer at festivals in Montreal, Avignon, and Stockholm in 1996. Also in 1996, Clarinda MacLow presented a revival of the Judson Flag Show version of Trio A (Burt 2006:186). In 2000, the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation produced PASTForward, which included revivals of Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961); Lucinda Child’s Carnation (1964); Trisha Brown’s Homemade (1965); Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A Pressured #3 (1966); Steve Paxton’s Flat (1964) as well as newly commissioned dances by Rainer and David Gordon. More recently, in honor of Judson’s 50th anniversary in 2012, Danspace Project in New York City hosted Judson Now, a 10-week series of performances, discussions, panels, and film screenings by Judson-era artists reflecting on their current interests, as well as contemporary artists who claim Judson as a point of reference. Also in 2012, Ralph Lemon organized the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) performance series Some sweet day, which included Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) and State (1968). One of the most influential re-examinations of Judson in recent years has been Trajal Harrell’s seven-part series, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (2009–2013). Together, the works in the Twenty Looks series ask: “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball- room scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?” (Harrell 2013). Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Critical Dance Studies at The New School. Author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (University of Michigan Press, 2010), she has published articles in Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, TDR: The Drama Review,and Women & Performance. She has performed in the work of DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill. Danielle Goldman 18 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00469 by guest on 25 September 2021 from the early ’60s, and Anne Collod’s 2008 return to Anna Halprin’s mid-’60s work, as well as numerous conferences dedicated to a critical consideration of reenactments in contemporary dance. He writes: “[T]urning and returning to all those tracks and steps and bodies and gestures and sweat and images and words and sounds performed by past dancers paradoxically becomes one of the most significant marks of contemporary experimental choreography” (2010:29). Lepecki then asks a compelling question: What makes these seemingly backward-turning ven- tures experimental rather than regressive? As an answer, he proposes that readers consider what he calls the “will to archive” (29): I am suggesting that the current will to archive in dance, as performed by re-enactments, derives neither exclusively from a “failure in culture memory” nor from a “nostalgic lens.” I am proposing “will to archive” as referring to a capacity to identify in a past work still non-exhausted creative fields of “impalpable possibilities” (to use an expression from Brian Massumi [2002, 91]). (31) According to Lepecki, reenactments have the potential to “activate” these fields of possibility, which are always embedded in dances from the past (31). In other words, as cultural, aesthetic, and political landscapes change over time, so, too, do the ways in which a dance might perform in the world. A contemporary choreographer’s charge and opportunity is then to explore and build upon these unrealized mobilizations. Lepecki further argues, in a way that is particularly interesting in relation to Gill’s return to Trisha Brown’s Newark (Niweweorce), that reenactments potentially release past works from the limiting control of their authors: Thus the political-ethical imperative for re-enactments not only to reinvent, not only to point out that the present is different from the past, but to invent, to create — because of returning — something that is new and yet participates fully in the virtual cloud sur- rounding the originating work itself — while bypassing an author’s wishes as last words over a work’s destiny. (35) This is a risky venture when the original choreographer is not only still alive, but is also someone revered. How, then, might a young choreographer embrace this “will to archive,” bypassing the original choreographer’s control, while doing so out of respect, as well as love? This question was highly charged for Gill, whose admiration for Trisha Brown extended back more than a decade to Gill’s time as an undergraduate at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where students learned Brown’s choreography, including excerpts of the delicate dance, Foray Forêt (1990). After graduating, and as she began a successful and lauded career in choreography, Gill continued to study Brown’s work, and she developed a deep and abid- ing affinity for both Brown’s movement sensibilities and her fastidious explorations of choreographic structure. When Gill encountered a recording of Brown’s 1987 piece Newark at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2012, she encountered stunning movement invention and fearlessly virtuosic dancing by Jeffrey Axelrod, Irène Hultman, Lance Gries, Carolyn Lucas, Diane Madden, Lisa Schmidt, and Shelley Senter. In Newark, Gill also discovered a masterful presentation of geometric precision, unison, and abstraction — choreographic ideas that were already at the core of her work to date, but which she wanted to explore more deeply.

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