As the title of her new monograph implies, Susan Rosenberg's Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art explores the creative development of one of the twentieth century's most renowned choreographers through the valence of her relationships with visual artists and their work. Rosenberg focuses on the first twenty-five years of Brown's choreographic career to underscore the “artistic principles established during her [Brown's] formative years in relation to the first body of choreographies that she created for the proscenium stage” (1). Throughout, Rosenberg emphasizes Brown's interest in troubling the disciplinary boundaries between dance and visual art by establishing a “means by which to construct, differentiate, and visualize choreography’s specific artistic constituents” (2, original emphasis). In the epilogue, Rosenberg stresses her mission to understand Brown's work at the crossroads of visual art and dance; she displaces Brown's place in “dance tradition through a simplistic linear narrative” by emphasizing her “work's ancestry as tethered to composer John Cage's thought and methods” (314). This book does not repeat the history with which most dance scholars are familiar. Rosenberg glosses over Anna Halprin and Judson Church, focusing instead on Brown's interdisciplinary collaborations with composers and visual artists that structured her unique orientation to a broader artistic field. Rosenberg is the resident scholar of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and her writing displays her deep knowledge of Brown's vast archives as well as a prolonged devotion to Brown's dances. In addition to the numerous documents and drawings that Rosenberg presents to explicate Brown's artistic motives and intentions, Rosenberg draws on her own memory as witness to multiple iterations of the choreography she describes. Her interpretations of the choreography's productions and reproductions infuse Brown's historic work (created between the years 1962 and 1987) with a fresh breath of interdisciplinary perspective and contemporary relevance.

It would be remiss not to comment upon the fact that the book was published only shortly before Trisha Brown's death in March of 2017. Rosenberg's writing seems to anticipate this eventuality (indeed, her consideration of the timing of the publication may have been influenced by Brown's declining health) through the implicit relevance of the theoretical frames through which she considers Brown's choreography. In tandem with her examination of Brown's interest in visual art, Rosenberg considers Brown's work with regard to dance's paradoxical relationship to fleeting evanescence and structural durability. These theoretical preoccupations are substantiated by Rosenberg's attention to Brown's “meditations on questions of choreography's memory and the body as archive” as well as by the book's thematic concern with Brown's entry into “museums’ and the art world's institutional/archival memory” (316). Rosenberg's writing therefore interrogates multiple points of coherence and difference between dance and visual art's archival methodologies. Although the author's close attention to the creation and perpetuation of Brown's material archive may be largely attributed to her disciplinary inclination as an art historian, this persistent theme of her book also raises questions about the life of the choreography in the afterlife of the choreographer.

Rosenberg's thematic focus on the durability of Brown's dances also offers a significant contribution to the field of dance studies’ persistent challenge to the popular categorization of dance as an ephemeral artistic medium. However, Rosenberg also reminds us that this line of questioning is not beholden to academics, but has been consistently—even primarily—investigated by dance artists. In her fifth chapter on Locus (1975), for example, Rosenberg asserts that Brown's enduring drawings and scores for the dance resist “current dance theorists’ focus on dance's literal, inevitable death and the unalterable inherent vices of immateriality and disappearance as intrinsic to choreography” (182). Rosenberg's disavowal of dance as ontologically interwoven with disappearance reverberates with Marcia Siegel's infamous claim (published only three years before Locus’s premiere) that dance “exists at a perpetual vanishing point” (Siegel Reference Siegel1972, 1). But throughout Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, Rosenberg shows us that Brown's concern with dance's temporal complexity precedes Siegel's assertion and is manifest in many of the dances that span the breadth of Brown's career. Rosenberg presents detailed historical work that clarifies Brown's prolonged engagement with the question of dance's temporality alongside and even preceding Siegel's assertion. However, a critical dance theorist might consider her description of the field's “current” focus on dance's inevitable death as dismissive of decades of dance and performance scholarship that has also evolved to challenge the presumptive relationship between dance and disappearance.

Rosenberg initiates her consideration of the temporal dualities of the dance medium in the introduction's descriptions of Trillium (1962)—the piece that marked Brown's debut as a choreographer—and refines the theoretical implications of this dance throughout the first two chapters. Created while Brown was still a student at Mills College and in the aftermath her first experiences in Anna Halprin's workshops, Trillium expresses Brown's ambivalence about improvisatory structures. Rosenberg claims that the dance's reference to the wild trillium flower and its central theme of memento mori both suggest and contest the “notion that choreographic art might be a vain pursuit, given dance's fragility and ephemerality”; by highlighting “memory, loss, and mourning, Brown contrasts the fleeting, evanescent, nature of improvisation with choreography's structural fixity and durability” (30). Rosenberg further complicates her argument that Trillium responds to the essentialization of choreography as ephemeral by contrasting this early work with Homemade (1966) in the second chapter. Brown performed Homemade with a film projector screening a 16-mm film by Robert Whitman of Brown executing the same dance with the same projector strapped to her back. In addition to coordinating the relationship between dance and film to move beyond medium-specific thinking, in Homemade Brown also “produces a new understanding of the role of memory in choreography” and “exposes implications of the originality and historical specificity of any individual choreography/performance” (40–41). In contrast to the assumption that improvisation eludes while archives endure, Rosenberg argues, Homemade “demonstrates that any choreographic idea is only and always reproduced” and “contests the notion that performance happens only in the moment” (44, original emphasis).

Rosenberg's descriptions of Brown's museum pieces from the 1970s present a rich archive of notes, drawings, and performance documentation that support her continued exploration of dance's contentious relationship to time and indicate the future directions of Brown's career in affiliation with visual art. Rosenberg positions Locus as a significant turning point in Brown's creative evolution. In the making of this dance, she writes, “discrepancies between the graphic and the kinesthetic opened a productive gap”; the transitions that filled this gap between mediums, bodies, and phrases revealed the opportunity to “integrate the structured and the improvised” within a singular moment of possibility (163). Brown's distinct integration of structure and improvisation compels Rosenberg's entry into Brown's development of a movement vocabulary and style that resisted codification, as exemplified by Water Motor (1978), and provides Rosenberg with theoretical continuity bridging Brown's transition from studio to proscenium stage. There, Brown's recurrent collaborations with artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Judd continued to push her to challenge disciplinary boundaries. In her analysis of Glacial Decoy (1979), Rosenberg connects Brown's critical investigations of the proscenium to the durable iterations of her earliest work. “Harkening back to her transplantation of Trillium from one context to another,” Rosenberg explains, “Brown brought experience of the white cube's structure to her visual perspective on the properties and effects of the black box” (241). There, her “unconventional use of the stage involved the illusion that she was ignoring its boundaries” (241).

Throughout the latter half of Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, Rosenberg documents and beautifully describes the creative challenges and resulting innovations of Brown's work within the stage setting involving a larger company (including male dancers), culminating with her final chapter on Newark (Niweweorce) (1987). Rosenberg's continued attention to Brown's interest in improvisation and structure surfaces here in a potent anecdote concerning Brown's discovery of the dance's movement vocabulary in a “different mental and kinesthetic state” precipitated by moving furniture around the studio (295). This designed intervention between what had become her natural way of moving and the sharp geometries and material weight of her furniture once again confronts the relationship between what always changes (the body and its movement) and what endures (the structural elements of the dance and its architecture). Although Rosenberg's descriptions of Newark arrive at the summation of the artistic inquiries that spurred Brown's early work, her analysis concludes with a provocation for further critical investigations of the second half of Brown's career in the dance's wake. Perhaps, given the urgent attention to Brown's work in the wake of her passing, Rosenberg's invitation will be accepted.