CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/22/2017

Trisha Brown, 1936 - 2017

We will miss Trisha Brown, fearless dancer, choreographer, artist and collaborator, who died March 18 in San Antonio. Pictured here with Robert Rauschenberg while working on the costumes for her 1983 dance, Set and Reset, Brown was integral to New York's avant-garde dance scene from the 1960s onward. A founding member of Judson Dance Theater, she made dances that "eliminated bravura, academic technique, acting and musicality — the hallmarks of modern dance as it had been developed by Martha Graham and others, not to mention ballet," in the words of Alastair Macaulay of The New York Times. Perhaps most notorious for her seminal 1970 dance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, in which a dancer in a harness did just that, she influenced more than five generations and collaborated with some of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century, including Yvonne Rainer, Donald Judd, Merce Cunningham and Laurie Anderson, to name just a few. Featured photograph is by Terry Van Brundt, from the stupendous catalog to MoMA's forthcoming Robert Rauschenberg retrospective. For more on Brown's visual artwork, see Walker Art Center's Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing.