I asked the audience to yell “yellowbelly,” which means “coward” in Aberdeen, Washington; performed the piece twice. The first time they were very sweet about it so I stopped and I asked them to yell in a nasty way and they did. They started jeering and yelling. I was improvising and absolutely frozen and I have not any idea what I did, although I had a few amorphous possibilities prepared. When I stopped, they really jeered at me, so I started up again and finally we both stopped. It was terrifying because it was confronting the performer’s fear that you will get up before an audience and forget what you are doing. The point was to set up precisely that situation and it certainly tested both me and the audience. - Trisha Brown, Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001, Teicher, Hendel