In a dance studio at the University of South Florida, Stacy Matthew Spence looms like a willow tree over his students. The dancer leads eight undergrads — all women — in learning the choreography of Trisha Brown.
At this point, the women are slogging through the tough work of memorization. Sweat stains on their tank tops and T-shirts growing larger by the minute, they struggle to make their own limbs do what seems to come effortlessly to Spence's long, elegant ones. Much to his delight, the students rise to the challenge, absorbing complex series of gestures and, after several practice rounds, spitting them right back out.
"Sometimes I forget what I'm doing, but I'm still moving," admits Claudia Alvarado, a 21-year-old dance major, face flushed during a break. "It's kind of like a brain teaser."
What she's struggling to wrap her brain around, as much as the choreography, is the thrill of dancing in a piece by world-renowned choreographer Trisha Brown.
At USF, Brown has been named the College of Visual and Performing Arts' 2007 Distinguished Master Artist, a program designed to expose students to world-class artists. Not only is Brown the first choreographer to receive the honor — past recipients include jazz pianist Dick Hyman, choral director Dale Warland, Shakespearean actor Brian Bedford and jazz composer Chick Corea — she brings a background in other artistic disciplines as well.
For nearly 40 years, Brown has produced drawings in tandem with her work in dance, and since the late 1990s, has also made the innovative restaging of opera part of her domain. Throughout these projects, she has shared the bill with artists of equal stature in full-fledged collaborations that tested the boundaries of artistic disciplines and conventions of authorship.
Her residency comes at a time when USF, like countless intellectual communities worldwide, is struggling to harness the power of crossover creativity necessitated by technology. By its very nature as an educational institution with thriving visual and performing arts communities, the university proved uniquely suited to host a network of events with Brown as collaborator in residence.
Hot off the presses: A series of Brown etchings completed during a residency at Graphicstudio, the university's prestigious printmaking institution, and an exhibit of her drawings fills the school's Contemporary Art Museum (CAM). On Feb. 16, after a symposium and reception in her honor at the CAM, she'll introduce the students' dance program. And at the end of the month, the Trisha Brown Dance Company will perform on USF's Tampa campus and at the Mahaffey in St. Petersburg before embarking on a European tour.
The students are rehearsing Set and Reset, one of Brown's most celebrated works. For the 1983 piece, she collaborated with artists Robert Rauschenberg, who designed sets and costumes, and Laurie Anderson, who wrote an original score.
A staple among Brown's experiments at the intersection of dance, visual art, sound and multimedia, the piece has helped make her one of the most widely acclaimed choreographers of the postmodern era. She has made it a tradition, when traveling with her company for residencies, to extend that collaboration to local students and faculty in a restaging of the piece.
Luring Brown to the Bay area was a collaborative effort in itself, spearheaded by Margaret Miller. She is the director of both Graphicstudio and CAM under the umbrella title, USF Institute for Research in Art, a name that suggests a hoped-for synergy between the two institutions.
And collaboration is second nature for Trisha Brown. In the creative hothouse of New York's Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, she emerged from a group of choreographers — often collaborators — who challenged established modern dance conventions of movement and space. (For instance: 1970's Man Walking Down the Side of the Building, a truth-in-advertising description of one piece, where Brown outfitted a male dancer with a climbing harness and sent him down the face of a vertical edifice.)
As her work progressed into the 1970s and '80s, Brown also began to work with visual artists — including Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Nancy Graves, Terry Winters and Elizabeth Murray — and composers — Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Salvatore Sciarrino — to create sets, costumes and scores for her pieces. Last week, at age 70, she debuted a new work at Montclair State University called I Love My Robots, which pairs her with artist/architect Kenjiro Okazaki and again with Anderson, who composed an original score. Amid human dancers, Okazaki's robots careen on and off stage, controlled by computers.
Brown's innovative approach to movement has long been based on a kind of mathematics of gesture. Early in her career, it struck her that most of the body's parts, where joint meets joint, can only do three things: bend, straighten, and rotate. Many of her works are premised on the concept of reducing movement to such basic elements, then playing with the limits of recombination. In Locus (1975), points in an imaginary cube surrounding the body stand for letters in the alphabet. (By dancing, she spells out her biography: "Trisha Brown was born in Aberdeen, Wash., in 1936. She received her bachelor's degree in dance. …" and so on.) In Group Accumulation (1973), Brown and four other dancers lie in a row and repeat small gestures with their hands in alternating cycles akin to a fugue.
During the 1970s, Brown began creating drawings as a way to document her choreography before the advent of video, but they soon became objects of visual interest on their own.
The CAM exhibit features a selection of the drawings, previously exhibited as a group only in France. There are smaller, repetitive doodles and grids that express — in their own distinct visual language — the ideas behind pieces including Locus, or a 1999 project with Terry Winters. Large-scale works are performance pieces in themselves, as videos of Brown drawing demonstrate: She lies down on the paper and uses the weight of her body to move the charcoal around.
Instead of being a literal correspondence to her choreography, the drawings capture a way of thinking or frame of mind. To viewers, they pose a challenge of finding patterns and imagining relationships to her dance — a process facilitated by several videos in the exhibit of Brown's dance performances, including a montage of key moments in her career by video artist Burt Barr, who is Brown's husband. In one gallery, a long sequence of tracings of her hands, arms and shoulder that Brown drew while her company danced create a portrait of fluttering motion. (Because she no longer dances with the company, she sometimes draws behind the scenes during performances.)
For Brown, who has not only mastered multiple media but redefined them, Graphicstudio offered an opportunity to try something totally new: printmaking. With help from studio manager Tom Pruitt, she coated the sole of her foot with ink and danced on a copper plate to create etchings. The resulting 10 prints, included in the CAM exhibit, are minimalist portraits of feet in motion, tiny details of skin groves captured in the etching process. The images are speckled with ink that normally gets wiped away during the printing process, a mark of Brown's appreciation for chance and her fondness for bucking convention. In a cooperative gesture, the prints have been broken into three suites — one for Graphicstudio subscribers, another for the commercial market and a third to benefit the Trisha Brown Dance Company.
In addition to drawings, prints and videos related to her choreography, Brown's residency offers several opportunities to see live dance. On Feb. 28 and March 2, the Trisha Brown Dance Company visits the Bay area for two public performances — a rare occurrence outside of New York City and Europe — at USF's Tampa campus Theater 1 and St. Pete's Mahaffey Theater. The nine-dancer company will perform the original Set and Reset (which the USF students will perform as an adapted version called Set and Reset, Reset during their spring concert) as well as Geometry of Quiet (2002), a collaboration with composer Salvatore Sciarrino, and PRESENT TENSE (2003), with sets designed by painter Elizabeth Murray. The student recital will take place on Feb. 16-24, opening the same day as the CAM exhibit's reception and a symposium with Brown, USF assistant professor of dance Michael Foley and curator/art historian Susan Rosenberg.
The company began teaching the student Reset in the 1990s as a way to introduce the complex vocabulary of Brown's choreography to a new generation. For simplicity's sake, the adaptation typically retains the original Anderson score. A Trisha Brown Dance Company member— in this case, Spence, whose tenure lasted from 1997 to 2006 — adapts the choreography through improvisation with local students, and a student artist is selected to create new sets in the spirit of Brown's original collaboration with Rauschenberg. USF faculty members are instrumental throughout the process, building the new sets, designing the costumes and enabling the entire process.
Claudia Ryan, who graduated from USF's MFA program last year, will step into Rauschenberg's shoes as set designer. At 54, she's a generation older than the dancers she'll be designing for, and closer in age to Brown and Rauschenberg.
Ryan's style of drawing and painting may have something to do with her being chosen; her dense, multicolored abstractions are expressive odes to the physical process of mark-makingg, an interest that aligns her with Brown and recalls the work of Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly and Brice Marden.
In her downtown Tampa studio, Ryan closes her eyes and lets her hands intuitively pile up a maze of chalky scribbles; her medium of choice is pastels in a broad spectrum of colors. The chalks are handmade by artist Karl Kelly in an adjacent studio.
In the original version, Rauschenberg's photographs of industrial and everyday objects were projected onto three-dimensional scrims shaped like cubes and a pyramid. Ryan will most likely design a simple backdrop, though the decision is up to her.
"She gives us parameters to work in," Ryan says of Brown, "but she doesn't want to tell us what to do."
Ryan will take a cue from Brown's own drawing process and watch the student dancers to find inspiration from their movements. One motion in particular already caught her eye: As blood dripped from one of the dancer's taped toes during rehearsal, the gesture of wiping it off the floor looked like a natural extension of the choreography. Perhaps it will become a red scribble in one of her sets.
It's quite a coup for USF to have scored a Brown residency, an exhibit of her drawings at CAM, new prints at Graphicstudio, two performances by her dance company and the chance for students and faculty to collaborate with her. It wouldn't have been possible without all parties collaborating, says Institute for Research in Art director Miller. By pooling resources between departments and reaching out to the community, the university was able to offer the multifaceted Brown a whole package of engagement with her interests as an artist, Miller says.
Opera proved to be the only facet of Brown's work they couldn't accommodate, Miller says. Then she stops to reflect. "Although, Judy Lisi [president of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center] has been doing some of that … I guess if I had been even more ambitious, maybe I would try to pull [off] something like that," she muses.
If it all seems like an unusual project for the head of a print studio to put together, reconsider Graphicstudio's specialty. "Collaboration spoken here" could be the studio's motto. The facility does more than produce fine art prints — it creates an environment where artists, supported by a specially selected complement of Graphicstudio staff, can challenge themselves, sometimes by trying a traditional printmaking process they have never experienced before, other times by inventing a whole new process within sculpture, video, printmaking, or some combination thereof.
Diversity is conspicuous as Miller enumerates the projects that staff members are working on now: using a high-speed water jet to cut a doily-like pattern into metal plates; working with a Bible printing plant to edge the sides of an Ed Ruscha book in gold leaf, then stencil the edges with an optical illusion. Recent projects include casting a plastic flip-flop with an abstract cityscape impressed into its sole, or carving an ornate wooden cigar box (both done with Cuban artists Los Carpinteros).
And of course, within printmaking, Graphicstudio has no shortage of innovation credits under its belt: notably, director of research emeritus Deli Sacilatto's work reviving the process of photogravure and taking it to new heights with artists like Ruscha, Chuck Close and Vik Muniz.
When Graphicstudio invents a new technique with an artist, the studio and the artist share the copyright on the collaborative process. To use the process again, the artist needs the studio's participation or approval (though refusal is rare except in the case of a few proprietary techniques), while Graphicstudio, in turn, refrains from offering that particular technique to anyone else without the artist's OK. The studio's goal is to protect the process from other potential artistic or commercial users, though preventing others from coming up with their own way of doing the same thing is impossible, Miller admits.
eing part of a university campus, with access to a vast multidisciplinary bank of knowledge, facilitates diversity and innovation, Miller says. In 2002, when artist Keith Edmier wanted to cast lava for a sculptural project, Miller picked up the phone and called the geology department for advice. Recently, as she gave a cell biology professor a tour of the studio, Miller got some unexpected feedback:
"He said, 'Wait a minute, I've got equipment that could allow you to do this [project] completely three-dimensionally.'… so I told that to the artist, and he said, 'Wow, I love that idea.' So there's an example of how somebody in medicine came up with an addition to an idea that an artist was working on. Now, the artist is still going to sort it: yes, I want to do that; no, I don't want to do that. But the sense of possibility comes."
As it stands now, Graphicstudio farms out many of its more ambitious processes — cutting with a CNC router or the water jet — even when the technology exists on campus. To remedy that disconnect, in the hopes of benefiting all involved, Miller says she's in talks with faculty and administrators from disciplines in the social and natural sciences to pool their technological resources, skills and — hopefully — creativity in an "integrated spatial technologies lab." The lab could be used to produce three-dimensional architectural and biological models and, of course, sculptures.
The Institute recently received permission from the university to begin a $12.5 million capital campaign — to be matched by state funds — to construct a new building to house Graphicstudio (which currently rents space) and a permanent collection gallery for the CAM.
Later this year, Graphicstudio staffers will begin work on a project with artist James Turrell, best known for his nearly 30-year transformation of an inactive volcano in Arizona into a celestial observatory.
What would an artist obsessed with space and light want with a printmaking studio?
Maybe because when you're collaborating with Graphicstudio, the sky's the limit.
Mix it up: Spring arts
What to watch for
This article appears in Jan 31 – Feb 6, 2007.