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

Art in America, May, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell

A collaboration with the Japanese sculptor Fujiko Nakaya for Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (1980), with costumes by Judith Shea and lighting by Emmons, was represented by an installation involving Nakaya's signature fog equipment and a projected video of the work in performance. The billowing fog echoed the effect depicted in the dance document. (3) With Brown's opal ring as inspiration, Shea chose body-responsive fabrics with various reflective qualities and colors, and draped and cut them to different shapes to exaggerate the dancers' movements. In 1981, Brown presented Son of Gone Fishin', her first collaboration with Donald Judd; again, costumes were designed by Shea and lighting by Emmons, with a score by American experimental music pioneer, composer Robert Ashley, that allowed the performers to select at random which music would be played with each performance on the road. Judd's sets consisted of green and blue upstage drops that moved through a number of positions but did not further encroach on the open space of the stage. Shea's simple, loose-fitting costumes followed Judd's palette. Brown remarks that the work's structure related to the concentric rings of a tree trunk. She considers this the most complex of her works. (4)

Sets and costumes for Lateral Pass (1985) were created by Nancy Graves. The work reiterated Brown's interest in opposing gravity, for in the performance a dancer was suspended by a harness above the heads of the company to the music of Brown collaborator Peter Zummo. Among related materials representing the collaboration were a bronze sculpture with a polychrome patina not more than 19 inches on a side, and a bronze with polychrome patina and baked enamel, roughly 13 inches high by 26 by 13, presented as maquettes. Consistent with Graves's work at the time, they incorporate brightly hued, curved passages embellished with painted-bronze ornaments, suggesting the movement of the dancer. There were several poster designs in pastel and oil stick, a series of set designs in gouache on paper, and a notebook including swatches and drawings for costumes. As first presented at the Walker, cloud-shaped set elements descended from the flies into the midst of the choreography and became distinct, interactive parts of the dance.

Early in 1987, when the Graves sets failed to arrive for a performance in Naples, Rauschenberg stepped in and within two days replaced her costumes with distressed black unitards and scarves and created a new set out of found objects. One scavenged combination of assembled objects featured metal venetian blinds, and another assembly included a metal industrial sink and a plastic hose. Both were lowered in the manner of Graves's set pieces from the theater's flies. Once they had fulfilled their function as ad hoc set, Rauschenberg considered them sculptures and titled them Blind Rosso Porpora Glut (Neapolitan) and Mobile Cluster Glut, respectively.

In 1987, Brown again collaborated with Donald Judd, this time in the creation of Newark (Niweweorce), which debuted in Paris and then was seen in New York at City Center. Judd designed sets that closely correspond to the radically simple drops of Son of Gone Fishin' but employ the entire stage, moving forward and backward, up and down, in sheets of what seemed in performance to be pure, radiant light. Brown recites the five light-saturated, monochromatic, proscenium-sized drops like a mantra: "Cadmium light red" burnt sienna, cadmium yellow, deep blue, and cadmium red." (5) Judd chose gray unitards for the company, and offered a sound concept, which was developed by Zummo, with lighting by Ken Tabachnick.