UCLA

This thesis examines Homemade, the collaborative, multi-media project that dancer/choreographer Trisha Brown and experimental filmmaker Robert Whitman staged in 1966. Against current understandings of the work as primarily a choreographic intervention into the canon of postmodern dance, this thesis argues for the project’s reclassification as an instance of “cine-choreography,” a hybrid medium which transforms through the co-presentation of dance and film the respective “real” and representational effects of postmodern dance and “expanded cinema.” Drawing on Homemade’s crucial and generally ignored cinematic component, a 16mm color film directed and edited by Whitman that was projected “on screen” during Brown’s live dance, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of Homemade’s interdisciplinary status by considering the work’s conceptual proximity to Whitman’s expanded cinematic practice from the early 1960s, as well as the project’s relation to Brown and Whitman’s individual experiments with live and mediated modes of performance in the years just prior to their 1966 collaboration.