Trisha Brown’s Choreographic Legacy Ripples On

Sanjoy Roy

While some artists anticipate their demise and others pass away suddenly, the death of a choreographer always raises the same set of questions: what is to be done with their memory, their archives, this piece of dance history? Though American choreographer Trisha Brown left us in 2017, her work continues to flood onto stages worldwide. Under the aegis of dancer Carolyn Lucas, the Trisha Brown Dance Company continues to bring her legacy to life.

“I think it’s not too much to say that Trisha’s work has had a huge impact on many people,” says Carolyn Lucas, associate artistic director of Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC). She is being much too modest. Brown (1936–2017) was a prime mover of what we now recognise as a certain epoch in dance history, when a movement – later dubbed “postmodern dance” – arose, mostly in 1960s New York, and made waves around the world of dance, art and performance.

What ripples on, after Brown’s death? That is a prime question for Lucas, who approaches Brown’s legacy as not only a project of remembrance and preservation, but also of animation, activation and re-embodiment. In dance, the most time-honoured way to keep connected with past works has been through the lived experience of performers, who hold that history within their bodies. In that respect, Lucas (alongside several other company members) is very well placed: she danced with Brown for ten years, was choreographic assistant for a further nine, and has occupied her current post since 2013. TBDC recently revived Brown 1985 piece Working Title (1985), created just as Lucas joined them as a dancer. “I learned most of the phrase material,” she remembers, “and over the following years I also learned parts of Trisha’s and other people’s roles.”

She has, then, experienced the work from the inside. That is vital, because the “material” of the work is far more than phrases and spacings and visual appearance. “The amazing thing with Trisha’s work,” continues Lucas, “is that it somehow stays in your nervous system, in your muscles. It’s different from more codified techniques, because you’re remembering so many deep aspects of the material: the momentum, the rebounds inside the body, the pathways between your body and other bodies and the space.” She smiles broadly, and adds: “It’s also so much fun.”

Anyone who has seen Brown’s work will instinctively recognise what Lucas is saying here: that behind the physical material there are eddying undercurrents of energy, patterns that form and fracture like waves, varying degrees of compositional freedom and formality, fluid ways of thinking and feeling and being. Such qualities, more intangible than any appearance or execution, are what make the work feel alert and alive. In short, reanimating her work is not just a question of what to perform, but of why and how.

Accuracy, authenticity and information are nevertheless a crucial foundation, for which classic archival material – audiovisual and textual records, notes and commentaries, costumes and sets – remains vital. Fortunately, Brown was an early adopter of using video in creation and rehearsal. “That wasn’t initiated for archival purposes,” says Lucas, “but has become really valuable for it.” The TBDC archive was officially initiated in 2009, its stated mission to go beyond documentation and preservation and become “a living organism to be used to better understand her work in particular, and dance in general”.

Lucas, a self-confessed “archive nerd” who happily spends hours burrowing into the rabbit-hole of records and documents, is very conscious that above ground she needs to “keep nurturing the living”. She gives an example: “We’re now working with dancers who have never worked with Trisha. She always used to set up tasks and situations for the dancers, so we had our creative input, and it’s important for dancers today to continue to have that outlet.”

Recently, TBDC has commissioned new work from other choreographers. Former company dancer Judith Sánchez Ruíz created Let’s Talk About Bleeding in 2023, French choreographer Noé Soulier (the first from outside the company) made In the Fall in 2024, and Australian Lee Serle, a former TBDC mentee, will premiere a new piece in 2025. “It’s not a totally new idea,” says Lucas. “Trisha spoke about the potential of opening the company to other dance artists who were… ‘bright-minded’ was the word she used. The idea was never formalised then, but today I think it can be very generative for a bright-minded person who has been impacted by Trisha to come into dialogue with her work. I don’t mean that just in terms of movement or style: there are many different layers in Trisha’s work to connect with. It’s a dialogue that illuminates both Trisha’s spirit and the new choreographer’s. When you see a revival and a new work on the same programme it can resonate very powerfully with audiences.”

Alongside revivals, new commissions, and the growing archive, TBDC also licenses works to other professional companies, runs workshops and educational programmes, and offers the In Plain Site project, a highly adaptable selection of Brown’s work that presenters can bring to non-theatre spaces. This web of activities forms the “living organism” of Brown’s legacy; indeed, it strikes me that while our conversation rests upon Brown’s death, its sights are set on life. That seems right: in the dance field, Brown made waves when she was alive, but each life must itself finally break – and when it does, its water ripples outwards, and returns that life to the world.

Based in London, Sanjoy Roy has been writing on dance for The Guardian since 2002. He is a mentor at Springback Academy, a dance writing project by Aerowaves Europe, and the founder editor of Springback Magazine. He was formerly an editor and book designer for Dance Books Ltd, after studying contemporary dance at Trinity Laban. He is author of Work/World (2022), a collection of freeform essays on the work of Ann Van den Broek. He keeps an online archive at sanjoyroy.net.

Working Title & In the Fall
Choreography: Trisha Brown Dance Company & Noé Soulier
March 12 & 13 at Sadler’s Wells Theater, London
as part as Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Opal Loop & Son of Gone Fishin’
Choreography: Trisha Brown Dance Company
From April 29 To May 4 at The Joyce Theater, New York

Trisha Brown Dance Company
Learn more