Drawn to dance: since the 1960s, dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown has repeatedly called upon artists to create sets and costumes for her performances

In the company of a group of young dance students, choreographer Trisha Brown recently strolled through "Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001," a traveling exhibition devoted to her work, in its incarnation at Manhattan's New Museum. Perpetually in motion, she paused briefly at a group of untitled pencil drawings from 1973 that resemble contiguous semaphore signals in unbroken lines, part letter, part glyph. Hand outstretched, she followed the signs from one line to the next and said these were attempts to represent dance movement in a two-dimensional language of signs. Then she laughed and said the experiment had led her nowhere, and she had gone on to address the representation of movement in other ways. In a related group of drawings completed two years after that, she proposed a three-dimensional box that expresses the reach of the body in motion at 26 points, corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, concluding in a final, central point, the 27th. Brown briefly performed the drawing, extending her arms and legs to the imagined terminal points, swooping and dipping within the volume, rising, folding, finally indicating a return to the center.

Brown began to make drawings early in her career, and she continues to do so today. In this exhibition are depictions of her feet drawn with her feet, and of her hands, one drawn by the other. Brown performs the works of the ongoing numbered series "It's a Draw" (begun 2002) with charcoal held between her toes, dancing expressive lines in arabesques that glide across the paper; the results recall the quality of line in the late paintings of Willem de Kooning. At the New Museum, two 8-by-10-foot charcoal drawings from the series were replaced by those Brown made in the gallery itself. In keeping with her investigations into the relationship between viewer and performer, the audience sat elsewhere in the museum and observed the private process of her mark-making by means of video relay. In such ways, Brown continues to find new approaches to the multidimensional world that is dance.

Having studied with Robert Dunn in the 1960s, in an influential class sponsored by Merce Cunningham, Brown tapped into a wellspring of ideas generated by artists working in the time-and idea-based art scene. At the Judson Dance Theater, she participated in a community of dancers and choreographers, among them Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti and Lucinda Childs, and artists such as Carolee Schneemann. She worked in a variety of expressive mediums and took part in the Happenings of Robert Whitman. With the generous inclusion of major set pieces and ephemera, this exhibition communicates a sense of Brown's works as originally performed--by means of vintage photographs, video monitors, earphones, suspended screens, texts and costumed mannequins. A display of photographic documents by Peter Moore and Babette Mangolte interprets many performances, recalling the crucial role they, as well as Barbara Moore and others, have played in the understanding of the dance of that period.

For the self-referential Homemade (1965), Brown, dancing solo, strapped a working film projector to her back to display on the surrounding walls a single-reel black-and-white film made by Whitman showing her in performance. The film captured Brown in a series of everyday gestures she then performed in real time, in tandem with the projection. (1) For this exhibition, the projector was attached to a simply costumed mesh mannequin and cast Whitman's three minutes of footage on a nearby wall.

The set for Floor of the Forest (1970) extended across the center of the gallery, a horizontal grid of ropes interwoven with colorful clothing suspended at eye level within a 24-by 16-foot frame of metal pipe. When the piece was originally presented, two performers dressed in shorts and tank tops made their way across the grid, like children hanging from a jungle gym, donning and removing individual elements of clothing in an essentially horizontal activity that opposed the pull of gravity. Brown's "Equipment Pieces" were further represented by photographs and videos. Two radical works involved mountain-climbing harnesses and rope, as performers acted out the titles of Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) and Walking on the Wall (1971). (2)

This exhibition gave particular emphasis to Brown's collaborations with artists working in a variety of disciplines to realize the design and fabrication of her sets, costumes, lighting and sound. Multifarious objects and images represented her collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Fujiko Nakaya, Donald Judd and Terry Winters.

Rauschenberg provided sets and costumes for Brown's Glacial Decoy (1979), with lighting by Beverly Emmons and Rauschenberg, which debuted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The ephemeral set consisted of large projections selected from hundreds of black-and-white slides taken specifically for the collaboration. Each image was projected sequentially from left to right, at brief intervals, on an expansive projection surface at the rear of the performance space--12 by 26 feet as installed at the New Museum. The images included signs, a motorcycle wheel, a hedged garden, a stork, windmills, a spray of yucca flowers, bicycle handlebars, cows, oilcans, rearview mirrors, a chair. On opposing walls, a series of etchings and lithographs Rauschenberg produced at ULAE the same year demonstrated his preoccupation with the encyclopedic images gathered for this project. Images derived from another collaboration, Set and Reset (1983), which included music by Laurie Anderson and lighting by Emmons, appeared in Rauschenberg's collages on fabric-laminated paper. A transparent, vertically pleated, A-shaped costume from Glacial Decoy was shown on a mannequin, while nearby, Rauschenberg's sheer, silkscreened costumes for Set and Reset continued the theme of translucency.