 It's academic and it's theater. It's the place where they both meet. We have to be audience and participant for each other. Intellectual practice is historical practice, it's cultural practice. Everyone, everybody please. Examples of women sharing what it is that you do, sharing how you do that. There's no way you can ignore Latinos anymore. Welcome all of you to come and see and talk about it. It starts out everything right today. We have to be completely open. Theater for everybody. Yes, everybody. That's just what should be done. And indeed my understanding of why relationships get has already changed. The survival of theater as an art form depends on that. But there's room for it all. There's room for it all. So welcome everybody to the Martin Siegel Theater Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY. I think most of you have been here already during the day and have been subjected a second time to our self-braiding Siegel Center propaganda video. But still it does highlight a bit what we are doing, bridging academia in professional theater, international and American theater. My name is Frank Henschka and I'm the director of the Siegel Center. So welcome everybody to part two of a very significant day. It's celebrating the life and work of Trisha Brown. We already had a fantastic afternoon session with four screenings. We showed the very rare 1969 SCUN cabbage, saltgrass and waiters. A five minute slice, five minute excerpt, which we're actually going to see again at the beginning of the evening tonight. We saw them dancing on the edge, the 1981 kind of a documentary. We set and reset the brilliant piece she did, the version one. And then Eros, which showed her collaboration with Rauschenburg and done by Borch Bahr. So we have with us members of the Siegel Company. Diane is here with us, Susan and Gwen. And we will talk about the work. We also have a CUNY Graduate Center student here who was part of the company rehearsal director. And also she's teaching a choreography at Yale. So I think it's an important night. It is after the end of the semester. But it was the only time we could do this with the Trisha Brown company. They have also been very busy. Many other events was the only possible date. So we have a smaller audience, but I think on the other hand this is a very significant one. And we always see the Siegel Center as a little gourmet shop, which you have to know about. It's hidden, but what you get there is very unique. It's rare and truly a contribution, I think, to the history of theater, kind of a living history and kind of a performed knowledge. We just had a talk with a student today here from the Graduate Center. We talk about the work which we do here. So this is really very, very much in our center. Our admiration for the company is so great. Barbara here also is with us, who runs it. And so it's an homage towards the company in Trisha Brown. And people do follow what we do, even if they don't all can come. This is a significant evening. We're also live on HowlRound. So people can look at it across America. So welcome everybody in cyberspace. And we're going to start with this very short documentary that only recently, I think if I understand it right, was it discovered that not everybody also of the company had seen it only in preparation for the evening. And it is called as concavage, salt, grass, and waders. And before we do it, just look into your pocket and get out your cell phone and make sure power is off. And the evening should not last longer than an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. There's a Q&A. We're going to have a discussion here with experts. And then very soon we'll open up to talk with all of you. And then there will be a reception at a bar close by, which is the program, the Archive Baron, 36 between Fifths and Madison. So again, thank you very much. And let's have a look at the short film. The people in front of your bar. Or Margarita, with all that new content and all that. And that the boat does it. The boat does it. The people do it. And it seems that the day is beginning and that we have to go to the dinner table. When we have our food ready, we have a few words to describe this place. Like, I want a lot of food. I want a lot of meat. Or you take that thing, I take that thing. Or you take that thing, I take that thing. Like this. And then we have to go back to our special life, which is the continuation of the house. And something like that. And then we have to go back. I think the monster is a snake. And the other one says, ah, I have the medicine for the seven monsters. And the medicine for the seven monsters is whiskey and coca-cola. Whiskey and coca-cola. The maximum amount. So I'm going to invite the panel to come over. This is Diane. And this is Susan Rosenberg, who also wrote the book where we, I think sold eight out of ten. It's just $20 instead of $40. And I think we have two or three left, maybe. And they already signed, but if you want to have a special dedication, also Susan will be happy. Susan will be happy. Susan will be happy. If you want to have a special dedication, also Susan will be happy to do that. But let me give you the microphones. I'm sure they should already be on. And maybe as in the afternoon, it is a good moment for departure. Something happened in that year, 1969, and anywhere in the world, but also with her and her work. Susan gave us a bit of an insight in Tricia Brown's state of mind, her work, and where she is in her career. Okay, so the film you just saw was an improvisation that was shot at Sargentini Gallery in Rome in 1969, but it's in 1967 piece. And on the same program, Tricia presented what was her first so-called equipment dance, which was a vertical structure, a pegboard that had projected film. And she and Simone Forte, another experimental dancer of the period who was close to Tricia, go walking on this vertical pegboard, giving the illusion of looking down in space. And it's the beginning of her use of architectural structures to generate choreographies. And so it's kind of the polar opposite of improvisation. Improvisation wasn't free. It was structured. But yet Tricia was trying to move away from improvisation to invent her own movement language. And the first way she did that was to invent systems for producing choreography that had movement as an effect. And those usually involved walking. So this was a real turning point. And also in the same year, 69, she made an appearance in the Museum of Modern Art with another semi-improvised, more theatrical piece. So it is really a turning point. In 1970, she establishes her company and she really establishes the kind of structural systems that will carry her forward. I think this film was new to all of our eyes. Maybe I saw it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I could watch it over and over again, but on the first viewing, I was stunned to see how the seeds of what was then developed in her repertory over the decades seemed to be there to my eye. The way she was using the floor, where her weight was, having a current discussion on a kind of certain points in the history of the work where there was more of an emotional backing to the gesture and then when it became more formal or more geometric and then when the emotional backing came back in again, and we certainly saw that in this solo. Yeah, so it is before the company actually was established shortly before, but also was the beginning, I think, where performance art or dance or whatever went into galleries or in site-specific places like this garage in Rome where it purposely was put by the gallery owner who said, you know, it's time to use the public spaces, the free spaces, who perhaps, as we said in the afternoon, some connection of speed and dynamism of the idea of the futurism, the Italian coming out that this is connected to the future of art or the anticipation of future. So her movement still in a way almost a bit, how would one say, aimless. She's still exploring in a way it's kind of still in a drawn internal state, but we talked briefly about where did she come from, what was her education and what was her background that brought her to this very space in that very time in Rome. What took her to Rome, okay. So the brief history is she had a traditional training at Mills College in the American Dance Festival. She's from Wisconsin? She's from Aberdeen, Washington, home of many important artists, including the photographer, Lee Friedlender, who photographed her brother Gordon doing, as an athlete in Aberdeen, when he was a young photographer, he just spoke at the New York Public Library about his life in Aberdeen. Kurt Cobain is from Aberdeen, well, it's from Aberdeen. I just learned of one other person, a recently really famous person from Aberdeen. It escapes me. Anyway, she left Aberdeen for Oakland, California, where Mills is, and then she took a teaching job in Oregon, and then she needed to improvise with her students because there was no dance department. And so she went to Anna Halpern's Kent Field, California Dance Deck Outdoors, which was the one place where improvisation was happening, and Trisha was wary of it, but drawn to it. She then learned, she met Simone Fortiene of Anne Rainer and other artists, and they convinced her to move to New York to take a composition workshop with Robert Dunn, who had been asked by John Cage to transmit his ideas on composition in music to dance. Improvisation, Trisha told me, was not on the grid in New York. I was told by Steve Paxton, one of Trisha's compatriots in Judson Dance Theater, the collective that worked out of Dunn's class, that in 1962, Trisha performed the first full-blown improvisation that was ever seen in public. Obviously, all these artists were using improvisation, but Trisha had a very strong attachment to it, and would find her way to Rome through Simone Fortiene, who was Italian-born, and who knew Fabio Sargentini. Sargentini came to New York. Simone introduced him to artists and musicians, including people like Philip Glass and Terry Riley and Lamont Young, and Sargentini brought those artists to Rome on numerous occasions, actually. Trisha performed there again in 1972. So that's how she arrived there. And I guess this was also a period when she was really in transition in a rare or a few rare occasions when she improvised in public, and then later on she developed techniques of what she called memorized improvisation, so it was choreographed improvisation. So she would improvise and choreographic and never perform anything on the spot, like you see this. So it's a very we're all thrilled, but this rare footage emerged. In a way, it's like some contemporary companies who they film their work, but it's on the screen, and they redo it. The improvisation is filmed, but she did that without the camera, and this is quite an achievement. So Diane, when you see this moment shortly before the company started, you are a member of the company, you were in many of the dances, we also saw in the afternoon. What comes to your mind when you see her working in dancing? It's really in a way a treat to see something so intimately filmed of Trisha from that far back, and kind of not know anything about it in a way, and try to figure it out. Trisha's relationship to improvisation is really strong and fascinating for me how that continued throughout her entire choreographic career. So seeing the beginnings of it here, where I think it's most I think most freely structured I think I would say. I do think that there's structure in there, and I think that she did have a kind of love-hate or discomfort with it. I mean she saw its value, but I think ultimately decided that performing improvisation was not something that she was really comfortable with, in terms of her company's work. So there's only two dances that were fully improvised in performance of all of her works. Nevertheless, that sensibility is very present not only in the process that Susan described, where there's phrase material that gets improvised with and directions and then memorized, but also in the generating of material, the dialogue that would happen in the building rehearsals between her and the dancer, that the sort of it felt like an improvisation back and forth, and yeah. So to me it's just really interesting to see the kernel of all of that development that followed, alongside what Gwen was saying in terms of the movement ideas, the movement invention, there's so, there's things that are so recognizable that appeared 30 years later, and then the other thread that I find fascinating that we see present here is what Gwen was saying in terms of what did she say, the emotion. Just on the spot, I called it an emotional backing to really keep in that way. Yeah, and how that would continue to varying degrees throughout all of her works, it's more sort of obviously recognized when she was working with narrative in all of her opera work, but I think we were talking about how when Trisha came into the studio, she came with all of herself and whatever, she left outside the door in terms of recent success or struggle or whatever, she was very connected to that. There was a kind of fullness and maturity to her presence in the creative process. I feel like this film also reminds me, we met the other night just to have a little time together and we just started talking and it just kept rolling, so we touched upon a number of things, but her Trisha's relationship to language and movement and bridging between the two of them or I forget how you talked about it and I realized that I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that because I see it here if the improvisation was uncomfortable, the presence of text was very comfortable, at least in my mind it was and I don't know if that's true or not. The text that you're hearing is an Italian translation of a text that Trisha wrote and spoke sometimes alongside the film and it tells of growing up in the Pacific north with west and a day going hunting with her father which started a waking before dawn and she describes making the eggs and the bacon and then packing the thermoses with consomme and coffee and she describes the whole day of duck hunting as a little child and one thing I think that would be interesting would be to see that doesn't exist too far the English version to what extent some of the movements correlate to some of the story that she's telling even in an abstract fashion we were speculating earlier that the fact that she begins in this wet tub because the text talks about how damp and rainy and wet it is to go in the Pacific north west so we don't know to what extent she was riffing off language but it did become an increasing preoccupation in the 70's the disjunct between movement and language and then later with the opera the diversity of ways that she could use a libretto as a source of inspiration which is really quite a reversal of much of the way she worked with language. I think I could hear nasciamento and barca like the burso and boat or something but maybe they went out so she did that and her half circle she did and as we said in the afternoon these kind of drawings with the water from her dress we also thought that she moved her feet almost like a Japanese no actor but also like putting on a typography on stage so and it is true I think also she did work for some performance with Bob Wilson who was at the time having no text at all because everybody distrusted the text it was the disappearing of the center but I think she found out perhaps even earlier that he did it could be independent and parallel and you don't have to take text too serious. You say I don't use it ever at all what was so unique about Trisha Brown what made Trisha Brown Trisha Brown and could see her handwriting and I don't know I think at least if I would have seen that it looks like her but I'm not sure but still there is something what do you all think what made her who she is what are the specifics of her work? Trisha's never created a codified movement vocabulary which sort of flies in the face of the question that her work is recognizable because how is an artist recognizable if they don't have a vocabulary that's consistent and that's because she was one of those artists there are many examples in the history of art whose work she called herself a bricklayer with a sense of humor and the idea of laying bricks was part of an idea that one's work is evolutionary I think that's one of the keys to understanding her identity as an artist is that she always built on ideas that she was developing to move forward and so her work continually expanded but there was always the kernel of the beginning in the outcome no matter what stage of her career I think you know if we single her out from the master choreographers of the 20th and 21st century she was committed to natural movement language to what she considered exploring the mechanics of the body she contrived the body as if it had its own logic which was a useful fiction that enabled her to risk again she was an artist who worked well within limitations and it was like once she found her limitations and then she was also highly systematic I would say that you know I could go on and on and give you descriptions but I mean if I were to try to lay some of the bare bones of what makes Trisha so important and then as I write about in my book her work evolved she was an abstract choreographer even though there's imagery in her work there's memory in her work her work reflects on questions of memory and choreography but she aligned herself with the great abstract artists of her time and her work was truly I want to say impregnated with visual art ideas and with a concern for the visual and so that's my own angle on what makes Trisha unique and different from other choreographers has to do with that alloy of dance and visual art that you find in so many of her pieces which cross-reference what's going on in the work of her contemporaries as the building blocks for her subsequent work which went into other places I can move directly from that I think what made her special for me was when I first encountered her work I was like what is that and comparing it to other dance artists at the time I quickly was thinking about okay well you can say there's a certain kind of line in this sort of qualified dancing but what is line in Trisha's work this is my own pursuit of trying to understand her work and very quickly I read about line visual artists talking about line and made that parallel and found out more specifically about the artist that she was working with in her era but finding writings maybe from early 20th century Russian artists like Rochenko who talked about line is not just the framework or the skeleton but line is also like cut or intersection or in these simple ways of thinking about line I immediately was able to look at her material from those skipping between those two media from visual art and into dance that's a more personal response to what makes her work special the way I think line exists in Trisha's work and it's so ever present because she is this combination of visual artists and wild intelligent mover it's line is inhabited through direction of movement it's really all about movement so when you see those in that dance her body cancellevered out from her foot stretched out on the floor that's an exquisite diagonal line from head to foot that it's about action and direction and and just something that connection I made earlier which I often find that happens in Trisha's work that there is so called logic physical logic also I feel can oftentimes be applied to her greater choreographic process so her movement invention coming from a recurring method that she would use would be to launch a physical action a direction and then allow the body to resolve it in its logical way and I feel like that can be applied in many ways to if you take a step back and look at how she would approach each dance she would come to it with all of her research from previous dances to have a desire of a direction to go in have a really clear direction to start with and then would never dictate the end point so that she was guaranteed discovery it was all about exploration and going beyond what she could see what she could figure out in advance so that was just really well maybe you can tell us what are those themes of eras or reset one what were the different because it came through in the films in the afternoon that she was exploring ideas like philosophical in a way because she was what were the different themes and are there is there an evolution in her work one thing that if we earlier this afternoon we saw a set in reset from 1983 and then astral convertible from 1987 89 lots happened a lot happened between those two dances and if you look at them at first glance they look very very different but one of the things that's present in both of them is in many of her dances is that she would have a delivery system for getting dancers on stage or across the stage and so in set in reset it was phrase material that traveled around the perimeter of the stage in astral convertible it was a phrase that lines of unison dancers that would just continually travel across the space and once she had that delivery system then it was like a machine it was a mechanism and she didn't have to she could just rely on it to deliver other dances internally within that in contrast to that that's just one structural thing that she would she liked playing with the proscenium frame as a visual artist the space that she was creating the work for was prominent in her thinking so what is it that she said that she felt sorry for the parts of the stage that were not used so she had dancers flying or walking on the back wall referencing her earlier equipment dances a dance from the cycle called Back to Zero and for a for a she played with a commotion on the edge of the stage where she would whenever someone was trying to exit or when someone was trying to enter there would be a little sort of interference or play with that from a dancer offstage or whatever so there was she was really bringing your attention to to that edge offstage and then a dance following that for M.G. the movie she went in the exact opposite direction and tried to direct the audience's eye which she was extremely aware of how to do that to that side of the stage so she could sneak someone in over here and it was the dance was constantly basically sneaking people on and offstage so she just was like okay that now let me play with this so how did how did the rehearsal process look like for a piece of what period of time where did you rehearse and where would it open and what were how did a New York choreographer in their time work what were the conditions I was just trying to remember this that and I think that it changed over time of course I think that most of the rehearsal day the day would always start with the creation of new work like 10 o'clock in the morning basically 12 to 6 right now we're 11 to 5 that's changed shifted forward but basically a 6 hour day 5 days a week and we break it down usually into 3 chunks of time 3 sessions when she was choreographing the first 2 sections were devoted to the creation of new work and then the end of the day would be devoted to repertory and either reviving something or just keeping all of the repertory going and in terms of you know she would come in either come in with raised material made on her own that happened more in the earlier years and teach that to the company or starting in 1984 really was when she first sat and directed to generate phrase material on her dancers I just thought there's still not a company class is there or maybe variations because I just thought it would be worth saying a large portion if not the whole existence of the company there's no company class before rehearsal where I don't know if I can name any huge companies so that's just worth noting the dancers prepare on their own knowing what they're getting into it's notable and in more recent years I think especially as you know Tricia's moved on and you know the dancers currently in the company none of them have had direct contact with Tricia so we feel Carolyn Lucas who's my colleague feel the importance of trying to maintain this approach to movement that is very specific and apply to a great deal of freedom so there has been more and more of an effort at the beginning of the rehearsal day to have there be running of shared phrase material we have gone through periods of time where we have alumni come in and teach a class but it's not, as Gwen said it's not something that we have on a regular basis because there is not a codified technique and phrase means kind of a set of movements like in a language that's a phrase which you can up with and you like a DNA sequence which you keep repeating so let's say for reset which is such a highly complex at least from the outside piece which looks improvised but is choreographed to the very last little movement how long did it take to produce and maybe talk about the original rehearsal times you had a loft and then it opened and bam how did it work? I think that Son of Gonfission premiered in 81 and I always looked to Susan when I say a year and and set in reset was 83 so that was a two year span of time but two years you worked on one piece well we also did a lot of touring and there was a little bit of time off in there just a little but yeah that's the other thing that was just made working with Trisha such a pleasures that she really insisted on having the time that was required to be able to explore and saying no to what was happening and say no to keep looking and not take sort of the easy way and because I was telling these guys there would be so many times where I in a building rehearsal where I would see dancers do something and I would just be like oh that's so beautiful and then Trisha would keep going and leave it to the wayside and I'd just be like but it's so beautiful but then always when it did land where it landed I was like oh yeah that's exactly what needed to happen so that takes time you have to be able to edit I think we mentioned it early on the day from the end of her school she did her master class at her university till her performance in Rome was 10 years of work and research went into that work so could one say is there a is there a philosophy of Trisha Brown's teaching or as a teacher she also wasn't educator or in her choreography is there something one could detect I've written about her as a choreographer whose work investigates the very questions and constituents of choreography as an art form so like when Diane was talking about the importance of delivery systems on the stage that's actually where she began with creating the delivery system was this famous work called Man Walking Down the Side of the Building and the building gave her the system and the structure and the duration and the act itself and so where most choreographers would begin inventing movement you can see Trisha's inventing movement and improvisation but however exciting those performance opportunities were for her they were a dead end at the time until she started to ask what is choreography and choreography initially was just a simple thing as a walk down the side of the building and all of the different things that that involved which include physical memory because you have to remember all movements that the body makes to pantomime a walk it involves gravity and working against gravity and from that she discovered gravity is a choreographic principle that she could carry forward with her and so she talks about the systematic exploration of choreography then gesture, then movement and then dancing and when she gets to dancing in 1978 she's ready to go to the stage and so that's my my ABC's of Trisha Brown's which were similar to the concerns of artists of her generation who were questioning what are the constituents of art and do they have to be visual and do they have to take place in a frame or do they have to be a commodity that Trisha was similarly asking these questions but in a very systematic and as I said evolutionary fashion but I also think that the other principle that makes her work so stunning and different and that I failed to mention earlier is that watching Trisha perform and watching her dance perform the principle that I'm not just making beautiful movements and shapes with my body but you can actually see my mind thinking and my body thinking while I dance she managed to infuse her work with whether it was by doing extraordinary acts of coordination by talking while performing by talking while performing two dances simultaneously and alternating between two stories simultaneously she continually showed you that dances and entertainment dance involves the mind and the body has a mind of its own I took a composition class in 1991 from Trisha the company was in residence at Skidmore college and I was a young dancer and I don't think she gave many composition classes I went back as I was preparing to be here I went back to see if I could find any notes in the workshop and I found some scribbles and there were two things that I had jotted down and one was Trisha said that isn't it funny that people think they can make a dance based on a musical score and then the other one was she had given us an exercise in mind notes I called it wall as score I think I later realized that she was referring to the 1966 inside dance where she read the visual information on the wall in order to translate that into movement but what an incredible composition exercise but under next I put wall as score and then she said the simple thing don't worry that it has to look like a dance just be true to what you see and so there you go and I just feel like those two statements really explain a lot of how she worked interesting that you know the question about a philosophy I don't know like what we're talking about is so much a philosophy but I just finished I just wrapped up a project working at Sarah Lawrence and with material from both set and reset and lineup and when we got into performing what was made I feel like a lot of this whole philosophy almost or approach it becomes really all of a sudden that it's like okay this becomes really important in terms of how do I show this how do we share this and I think that what you're saying is it is this authenticity that was such a such a given in how she would engage you in the choreographic process or how she would ask you to perform or how she herself would perform I mean spending the afternoon with these videos and seeing those wonderful close-ups of performers faces and Trisha's face as a performer and the that there's no there's no hiding there's nothing obscuring the intelligence of and the focus of in the difficulty actually of what what she's trying to do I think one of her trademark if I understood why is also observing everyday movement and somehow incorporating them I think also at the Whitney as in her son talk and they would walk down the street everything would be in a way a game or they would reproduce a movement say saw and often one had the feeling that contradicting forces were moving her like even in that what he would say the phrases you know they were the body finishing thinking thoughts as a body but often the movements feel like forces are pulling her from different sides but she was still in control of it but they are of everyday movement so would you would dancers bring movements would she observe them or would she even mention that or I think all of the above yeah she worked as we could see in the video she worked with Rauschenberg, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley in a way continuing a tradition that what Diago left it with the Balerous you know they had the Picasso's and Matisse's working was a very new invention from him at the time nobody had ever done that and I think most probably also at that downturn was probably also not yet a practice was that who was interested was it Rauschenberg who came to her she knew how they knew each other through a gallery or how what was the story of that close-knit collaboration they had well the funny story that Trisha told about meeting Rauschenberg was that she had a work study position answering the telephone at the Merce Cunningham studio when she first moved to New York and a funny man named Robert Rauschenberg would call up and they would have these hilarious conversations and she finally asked who he was and went up in 1963 he had his famous Jewish Museum retrospective exhibition she realized he was like a major artist Rauschenberg participated in Judson and actually he started he made some dances with members of Judson very close to Steve Paxton for a period they lived together and so Trisha was part of that he went on took part of the Judson group on a tour and then of course he had been Merce Cunningham's artistic director until 1964 from 58 to 64 I believe the dates are and until they had a break and Trisha always answered when she was asked she said I was invited to be at the stage and everyone asked what are you doing for costumes what are you doing for lighting and she said so I just called Bob because he was the man he'd worked for Merce but obviously they had a great rapport that had developed over all those years and she would describe I've heard her describe their communication as almost telepathic that they would and I think it had to do with and this is where I would say yes it's in the tradition of Diagolo and Cunningham and Cage but Trisha really directed her collaborators she gave them the seeds of her choreographic ideas she oriented them to the idea that she was working within the proscenium context and that was an actual non illusionistic place for her and she would meet with them and there would be an exchange back and forth and as soon as anyone got on the stage everything was very carefully orchestrated and by Trisha even so we do know it but to really be reminded that influences were contemporary visual artists it was not ballet it was not a traditional theater or Broadway dances but it was a proximity to galleries and to visual artists installation art performances that in New York performance scenes so unique and now legendary in a way but she she should be lost her this year and how does the company cope with it is it teachable what she did what are the plans what are you going to do well we just had an incredibly successful season at the Joyce you got to see it we're looking good right so it was a great surprise frankly I was afraid but I loved it the audience I was there Friday night the audience I think it was an unequivocal success and I'm glad you saw it and I can understand if you care about the work that you would be concerned to and I'm glad that you saw that that we're doing well so yes there's still interest in the work and the interest also coming from young extremely talented dancers who continue to find the work very relevant and enriching and that I think is a big vote of confidence to carry on and I feel strongly that the work needs to find more of an educational home that the I think that the dance world has been really very influenced in a positive way by Trisha's work you know that the dance world really recognizes that and I think until we can reach more people with more clarity about really what Trisha's contribution is and has been to dance I'm concerned that that we can't build on that that dance can't progress as strongly as it could so I'm not sure exactly what that means honestly what shape is that going to take I don't know but it's clear that people are interested in the work artists are using it and not just dance artists not just choreographers but artists in other medium and and I just would love to continue to figure out how to make her ideas as accessible as possible and as clear as possible we have an extraordinary archive that hopefully would be part of that and you know are in the process of figuring out where that will go and how it can be best used but it's an incredible resource and documentation of all of her work I know that for the Graham company or Cunningham or Pina Bausch they all had kind of directives you said she did director collaborators very or you said that earlier very strongly did she give you indications of her ideas or visions of did she ever yes I mean they were not very detailed but clear she wanted the work to be performed as long as there was interest she wanted the archive to be placed in a way that where it would be used and accessible and she did want her work placed in an education context in the US in the way that it's firmly established in different European settings that had yet to be found and I'm very committed to realizing that maybe after my question talking too much and so it's not directly and also at the Segal we don't perhaps do a good enough job to include dense events but not so many but we felt very strongly to react and invite you even so it was a bit late in the December and this semester is over so again thank you for coming and it's such a big honor of you having here just thinking that you prepared for it and I think it all through is really a great compliment but let's open up the room maybe we have some light also for the audience and some comments or question or so we're going to give you a microphone but we also are recording it this follows up on what you were just saying about the company going forth earlier this fall there was an extraordinary full day at St. Mark's church which Irene was very much involved in I found at the most moving thing that I have seen since the election of Donald Trump the most promising I mean the most promising thing that I had seen and one of the things that was so beautiful is that generation after generation after generation of dancer came back and obviously put they had to put so much time and care into recreating all this extraordinary work so that's the prelude to the is there no way to build on that you have all those extraordinary dancers and particularly strong women dancers and it was so the two lineups where you had all 14 women and for those of us who followed the company's work for many years it was not just moving but extraordinary that they would all come back and basically we loved the woman and we're very very much wanted to see the work go on so is there no way to you almost have this battalion of people to help you and we do take advantage of that or I don't know if there's a more positive way of saying that I mean we're very aware of the wealth of really talented mature artists that have worked with the company back since the beginning and we have stayed connected as you saw and it's a beautiful thing and I think that says everything about who Trisha was as a person and what she created, what she generated the way that she invited people into the process so you felt so personally invested in it and those connections don't dissolve they're always there so there we're definitely tapping into all of those alumni who are out around the world and continually finding ways through either education licensing projects performance projects within the company there's so much information there so much energy so we're definitely trying to keep it all active and take it use it comment or a question or remark you said two things you said choreographic it's a word I'm very interested in I haven't heard it describe a pan theater who's a Roy Hart follower uses that term to describe his work and I'm a devotee of his work so I haven't heard it so if you can unpack that a little bit and I was also very interested when you just said your presence and you said whether it was failure or success I had a sense that you were feeling a bit of that maybe even in quotes like gossip because I'm interested in that historically if those two things mean anything I'm not sure what the choreographic thing is but I'll start with the other one first and I do feel like something that comes up comparing Trish and Rauschenberg let's say like we got a glimpse of them today in the video one of the things that was so beautiful about Rauschenberg is that he had absolutely zero editing capability it was very frightening and exciting and exhilarating to be around him for that reason and Trisha was not like that Trisha was and maybe it's it was a gendered thing maybe she couldn't afford to be like that as a woman in her time but she was much more I think is free and expressive as she was and as joyful as she was and as powerful as she was she was very careful about how she presented herself and really smart about it and really strategic about it and was able to fulfill some of the things that were really important to her which was to be really an active advocate for women in the arts and so what am I talking about Trisha walking into the studio bringing in so that maybe and you can talk about that a little bit too because that's something I think one of the first things I think about her is that she's extremely emotional but I think many people looking at her work they see it as quite abstract work but I always felt like I knew exactly where she was emotionally when she walked into the studio and whether she dropped it or not it didn't matter and she would drop it in some ways but I think it showed up physically in the material that she would be producing the material that she was producing so I think that was part of our discussion and then stepping back a little bit more in restaging works with with younger dancers who maybe don't know Trisha or weren't born at the time that a particular work was made I always looked at her dancing before then going into what really needed to be looked at but because her she was just present with all of that stuff like joy, awe, anger, rigor you know those are the main ones that always come up for me and it was present in the doing of the work we saw it in her face today on stage and it often in the solo that we all watch tonight that presence would sometimes determine the duration of a movement like that big plie that she did where it looked like she was kind of crying and then she came up out of it and then it was done but something about that has always been curious I've been really curious about it we see it in the solo tonight so I'm trying to remember your question but that's part of the answer do it and get off it so I think that that applied to both just her not just her physical presence but also her emotional, psychological like be present but then move on you know do it and get off it is a term that is used often to this day in the rehearsal process teaching dancers how to fully inhabit a moment of movement and then move on not embellish it you know exaggerate it but what's the choreographic question just the term I think what it means in your universe you said choreographic I didn't know if that's a specific language that she would use I just don't hear that a lot I don't know if I've heard it it's very prominent in an artist that I know so I was just curious she's a choreographer I don't know it's pretty common like a choreographic choice or what are some common ways that that's used but it is choreographic composition I think what's notable is to realize that you're talking about a different discipline and it shows up in a very specific way but I think it's fairly common for us without a lot of yeah I'm just gonna add to your comments about the pieces because I think every piece is made with a certain context and feeling and emotion in mind like geo very different in how it was done after 9-11 set and reset very up you have new work which has an expanded feel so like as a dancer you pick up like a lateral pass you use a lot of adjectives like it was steel edge so you know in what we are you're actually creating so it's really a dialogue between your cognitive self and your mind your conceptual self you can only do it if you are in the moment otherwise it becomes false and it falls it's like a stupid word to use it doesn't become beneficial put it that way it doesn't put you forward and in terms of choreographic I think like the whole how she constructs my experience again like we all have a different experience in this but it's like how she actually we call it building you build something and you build something from what was to what comes so everything has a linearity in it and then sometimes she cut I wouldn't call it I remember the word destroy I would call it disrupt like the certain reason she comes in is because she loved disruption you have a common thought or a linear thought and then she loved to tweak it to get to another thing as you said so and that choreographic comes from I don't know if you come from theater which is different right but it's sort of yeah it's a whole I felt that Tricia was more of a composer or a painter like she lay a different structure to build it and she's much more complex than we can ever talk about here you know like she has so many levels and and the thing that you reacted to I think about the success of failure I do think because of the when you talk about the choreographic if you take Paul Taylor who has trios, duos, quartets and you can actually look upon it as a musical structure in some way and I feel like Tricia is symphonic in her way and she has a macro structure and she has a micro it's like micro because I within the body and that micro structure relates to the outer structure so it's a very very layer sometimes very early I felt that she was kind of like an you know like this Indian architecture that has a very simple form and then within it is like all these things happening within and that's when I started the company that happened a lot the body gets awakened so thank you maybe as a finishing question to all three of you what are you up to in your project relating to Tricia Brown maybe we'll see you as are you going to write a new book or is there something coming up in terms of well in some long term way my book covers the first 25 years of Tricia's career so in some way looking to find digital platforms for publishing that would allow me to use moving images because you can't talk about a 40 minute choreography on the page the same way you can I've had a limited experience talking over movement and it's just the best way to write about movement is to have it running while you're talking and in the more immediate I'm working on a project about the ground union which was an improvisational group of choreographers in which Tricia Brown participated from 1971 1976 so I'm going to be getting very involved in her parallel what she called her parallel life in the amorphous world of improvisation I've been particularly inspired by Tricia working from drawing to movement and movement to drawing and other places in between and I also work with those two forms and so right now I'm really very much trying to stay connected to her and her work as I develop my own material purely just kind of maybe from that sense when you were saying that a lot of dancers came back for the event really just like what was the support that she gave me intellectually or simply the inspiration to study about line and to use it at that energy really to make my own current work I have some nice big juicy teaching projects on the horizon I'll be in Brussels at parts for five weeks teaching Tricia's work and then I go to Hong Kong for nine weeks doing a set and reset reset which is our education version of Tricia's original choreography and then I go to Dusseldorf and work with the ballet on the heim there and reconstruct Tricia's locus trio so all really really great projects yeah those are all great and then sort of like the above below and in between all of that is what I talked about earlier is continuing to research and look for an educational home, Tricia's work wonderful so thank you for coming and I hope it was a little step in that long journey to find a home have a home or get back home and thank you all for coming on a cold day night in New York and in the middle of the shopping season Christmas season and we couldn't really compete with the Joyce but I think it was still a very significant and important evening and also honoring really one of the great artists, American artists female artists but also as a choreographer on her own she made an enormous contribution we all know how hard it is to be an artist and make a contribution but doing it on the scale she did was extraordinary and I think we all got a little glimpse of it so thank you for coming we're going to stay here a little bit and then go over to the archive bar we have two books left two or three and again they're just 20 dollars that are 40 and so thank you for coming and I hope to see you for one programs that might pick you up for the next season thank you and have a good new year