2016 Theses Bachelor's

Dancing and Drawing in Trisha Brown’s Work: A Conversation Between Choreography and Visual Art

Dai, Lu Shirley

This Art History and Dance combined, interdisciplinary thesis explores the connections between choreographic approaches and creative processes in dance and visual art. It develops from a postmodern, historical foundation and looks at choreographer Trisha Brown’s drawing and dancing in 1970s, a crucial period when Brown constantly investigated fundamental questions about choreography. It was through her drawing and choreography that Brown was able to examine structure from both choreographic and visual perspectives. Chapter Two uses Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of line to analyze Brown’s 1973 linear drawings as well as her notion of the body-making line in space. Chapter Three compares Brown’s Locus (1975) to conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s sculpture Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). Both Brown and LeWitt emphasized the conceptual idea behind a work of art, and both adopted the cubic form as a visual strategy to actualize their conceptual ideas.