Trisha Brown: Free Measures: Drawings

Trisha Brown: Free Measures: Drawings presented an exhibition of drawings by choreographer Trisha Brown. The exhibition was organized by art historian and independent curator Hendel Teicher and was based on a larger exhibition which Teicher curated, Trisha Brown, Danse, Précis de Liberté, which was presented at the Centre de la Vieille Charité, Musées de Marseille. This exhibition marked the first time that Trisha Brown's drawings had been presented by an American museum.

Trisha Brown began to draw in the early 1970s, as a way to record and notate her choreography. These early works were created in notebooks and functioned as private records of her choreographic process. Brown remarked in an interview with Hendel Teicher, "I loved making the movement phrases and sitting down on the floor with my notebook and trying to write it out. I used words to describe dancing if it was a quicker representation of the movement… I supposed in all of that I began to see things on the page that intrigued me." In an early drawing series from 1973, Brown created pictorial alphabets that existed as possible keys for movement. Each invented "letter" was based on repeated combinations of a square, an "X," and a circle, with all shapes representing an abstracted sense of the body. Each of the resulting forms was intended to suggest a specific gesture or movement. On occasion, drawing also served as a pedagogical tool for describing a particular choreographic concept to her dancers.

Between 1976 and 1980, Brown began using text as an additional method for generating movement. One such text from 1976 begins, "Pure movement is a movement that has no other connotations. It is not functional or pantomimic." On top of these writings Brown drew multiple irradiating lines, both linking and obscuring her words. Unlike Brown's earlier drawings, these works did not function as notations for movement, but rather existed as text which mediated between dancing and drawing. In the early to mid-1990s, Brown returned to creating drawings which could be seen as dance patterns on paper. In style and format these works were linked to the visual alphabet Brown created in the 1970s, but the use of line was more fluid, linked, and overlapping.

Brown's interest in movement, text, and the body was a constant theme throughout her graphic works. Working with tremendous freedom, Brown constructed boundaries or rules for her image making. Some of her drawings were composed while her eyes were closed; others were drawn with her feet. In certain works she limited herself by time and/or space. The entirety of Brown's practice could be described as a remarkable and unique syntax that existed in interplay between dance, drawing, and writing. Through the creation of a set of rules or syntax came extraordinary fluidity. As Brown remarked, "It seems whatever flows into my mind about dancing flows into my mind about drawing."

Trisha Brown: Free Measures: Drawings was installed at The Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street, and ran concurrently with Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing, which was held at The Drawing Center, at 35 Wooster Street.