Trisha Brown began studying dance when she was thirteen—“ballet, tap, acrobatics and modern jazz, as it was interpreted by my dance teacher in Aberdeen, Washington.” She also was involved in another physical discipline. “My older brother was an athlete and he was training me to be an Olympic star when I was ten or eleven. I played basketball, football, did tackling, and ran out for passes all the time I was growing up. He trained me in pole vaulting and running. He tapped my physicality when I was very young and pushed me a lot.”

She attended Mills College in California where she majored in dance and studied traditional modern dance techniques. “At that time the mode of teaching choreography was to use the Louis Horst forms of theme and development. I never understood it. I always had difficulty because I hadn't developed my own source of movement, so the restrictions of the choreographic forms just got in my way.”