Trisha Brown’s It’s a Draw (2003): Work at the Crossroads of Dance and Visual Art

In 2002, on commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, artist/choreographer Trisha Brown embarked on a new approach to drawing. Her project’s title “It’s a Draw” deliberately suggests the indivisibility of dancing and drawing in Brown’s creative process—and in this new series of works in particular. Following a brief survey of transformations in Brown’s use of drawing after the 1970s (when the medium primarily served her as a vehicle for scoring or notating her dances), this paper focuses on her late-career devotion to drawing as an autonomous art form realized through the body, which culminated in presentations of It’s a Draw at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum; at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; at London’s White Cube Gallery; and in the artist’s ongoing studio practice from 2003 to 2012, when she retired from choreographing. Brown’s exquisitely trained physical instrument; her experience as a master improviser; and her unique drawing techniques, (which engage her entire body), made for an unparalleled integration of dance and drawing in which the artistic intentions and aesthetic results differ from those manifested in the work of visual artists, (despite recognizable, yet superficial visual and conceptual affinities between Brown’s work and theirs.). The paper concludes by discussing how Brown’s late drawings were repurposed as sets for the final operas that she choreographed, L’Amour au theatre (2009) and Pygmalion (2010), productions that bring full circle—as well as showcase—her career-long investigation of gestures’ bodily signs, as manifested both in dance on the stage and on drawing’s pages.