Choreographer Elizabeth Streb gave the following tribute to Trisha Brown, the 2011 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize Recipient, at an award ceremony in New York on November 2, 2011.
Thumbnail photo: Trisha Brown and Elizabeth Streb in “For Elizabeth,” Danspace Project Gala 2009 by Jennifer & Vincent Keane/Lucence Photographic
After being in a room at all with Trisha Brown, one’s consciousness can never snap back to ordinary. Her Brilliance is embedded in her relentless insistence that everything that came before is open to question to re-examination. Trisha invented a new way to move on earth with the cliché-ridden human body.
Rightside up, upside down, sideways, the swirl, the fall, the flight.
The holding-moment, the stay—The Forces traversing the organs of the Body like a gentle electric shock.
The do-not-move-moment.
The “disappearing moment”—
Normal has been left for lost
And The way the World—sees, just about everything…feels wrong again.
How do I Accurately quantify the spirit, the soul, The Work of Trisha Brown?
One who looks out at the world, who notices what it is that are the essential ingredients of what makes us human? Who sees what others don’t, what others can’t… then represents it/shows it, somehow…
Trisha is an elevational Movement Inventor. Whose journey, into the mist of invisibility, the terrain of choreography, is in reality, our society’s insignia for bravery and courage. She exists as a constant and eternal reminder of all the moves yet left to do.
Trisha made a duet for the two of us, I had asked her to, as a favor:
TWO YEARS AGO I danced with Trisha in Machines made of Paper…
This is My un-erasable experience:
…to round a corner and meet her gaze flamboyant in its craven occupation of space, so complete it was, leaving no prisoners behind as her body slashed across and thru the stage we were on-with a speed I could not fathom, I turned, she was gone, I turned, she was not there….
—even the wake of her passage suggests rabid flight, even the ground would heave and gasp, seeking refuge from… her trajectory…
Watching, feeling the reverse arch of her mere foot, with the capacity of the razor—sharp and perfect—exactly carved, manifesting a harmonic ring as its 100 mph+ rapidity misses my face’s edge by a sliver of space, the only speck she left ungrazed… the only chance for survival in her midst, is to just keep dancing. My part was clear, get out of her way, the “truth” in movement terms hasn’t been clearly declared, yet, what could be signified by: i.e.: “meaning every move you make?”
The answer is “Trisha.”
—Trisha has been physically, where no one has ever been, keeping secret “new spots in space”
…you can tell by her transformational, delineations, her cryptic distinctions
Please help us notice the fingers, the tibia, the femur, the radius, the ulna, the foot, find for us, as she has, their depth, their meaning—their content, oh yes, the forearm, oh yes, the forehead, oh yes, that man is bigger than that one, oh yes, a unison, but not, 2 animals run, with slightly different gates, of course they do, Trisha Brown knows, his Achilles is slightly more stretched, his hip flexion creates a longer stride, of course!
There is no pretending in the movement world of Trisha, “Redefined”, UNISON is “not quite.” Itself anymore.
She travels with these movement inventions to all new galaxies, creating surface, rhythms, shapes, pathways—in skies that don’t behave like ours.
Her imagination leaps, like a pathfinder she sniffed the wind
And flew.
She’s the cartographer of Dance
The map-maker, Our leader, Trisha Brown.
Thank you Trisha for every single move you made and even more for all the ones yet left.
IN YOUR WORK IS THE BEDROCK THAT DANCE AND MOVEMENT OF THE 21ST AND 22ND CENTURIES WILL REST.
