The American postmodernist who danced to silence and choreographed in car parks passes at 80.

Trisha Brown, one of the most respected of the ‘postmodern’ generation of American choreographers, has died after a long battle with vascular dementia according to Barbara Dufty, Executive Director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Brown, latterly a close collaborator with the composer Laurie Anderson and artist Robert Rauschenberg, was best known at first for creating unusual dance works in unconventional spaces – in carparks, even dancing along walls – and more controversially for preferring silence to music.

^{Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall}

Patricia Ann Brown was born on November 25, 1936 in Aberdeen in Washington State, the natural landscapes of which she cited as an early inspiration. Learning her post-college craft at the annual American Dance Festival summer schools from 1958, she moved to New York in 1961 where she was one of the founders of the radical Judson Dance Theater. Taking her cue from work done in the previous generation by the likes of Martha Graham, her dance had a stripped back, utilitarian, even functional quality, enlivened by a keen sense of humour....