by Julie Bloom

Few artists have the audacity to change the entire way we see the most elemental aspects of existence, but for 40 years, Trisha Brown has done just that, redrawing the body in quantum space and beyond.

In “How long does the subject linger on the edge of volume…” a dance choreographed by Trisha Brown, performers in wine colored body-hugging costumes move along imaginary coordinates on the stage, travelling purposefully as if they were points on an imaginary mathematician’s protractor. Projected over them, a spectrum of red, blue, and purple light reacts in time to their movements across the stage—a conversation between light, bodies, and space. It’s a perfect representation of the type of daring, innovative thinking from an artist who has been on the cutting edge of dance—really, of movement and the rediscovery of the body in space—ever since she began her career more than 40 years ago.

Trisha Brown first came to the public’s attention in the 1960s as part of a new wave of post-modern dance in America that was founded in a small church in lower Manhattan. What became known as the Judson Dance Theater, named after the Church it was born in, represented a new way of thinking about movement that went against the dance establishment and placed a premium on risk-taking, challenging the status-quo of ballet and modern dance. Brown and her peers created dances that pushed the boundaries of choreography, changing the course of dance forever. Instead of dances restricted to set positions, technical showmanship, and the accepted view of the body onstage, these choreographers focused on everyday movement: walking, sitting, falling down, buying milk, eating a banana, making love… Instead of the drama of contrived historical stories and seasonal variations (falling leaves, days at the beach), they brought the drama of everyday life. Brown became one of the leaders of this group of innovators, creating choreography that seems as fluid and organic to the way the body moves as breathing itself.

She is the first to say that she was born with an obsession for innovating. “I have a fountain for a head and I can’t stop,” she says on a sweltering summer afternoon at her company’s headquarters on the far western edge of Manhattan. “It’s very entertaining and it always was from the time I was a child. Things just collage themselves in front of me. My big game is to make structures. Before I start on a piece, two things are operating: freedom on the one hand, and ideas to flow and organizational process on the other.”