Douglas Dunn and Trisha Brown essays

Douglas Dunn and Trisha Brown essays 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 uses ordinary movements in extraordinary circumstances. She works in structured improvisation and describes her choreographic approach as similar to that of a brick-layer with a sense of humor. One of Trisha Browns 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 Browns 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 Browns 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 audiences perception as well. From 1968-1972, Brown experimented with equipment pieces. These enabled her to exploit neglected performance spaces, ...