Pure movement is movement that has no other connotations. It is not functional or pantomimic. Mechanical body actions like bending straightening or rotating would qualify as pure movement providing the context was neutral. I use pure movements, a kind of breakdown of the body's capubilities. I also use quirky personal gestures, things that have specific meaning to me but probably appear abstract to others. I may perform an everyday gesture so that the audience does not know whether I have stopped dancing or not and, carrying that irony further, I seek to disrupt their expectations by setting up an action to travel left and then cut right at the last moment unless I imagine they have caught on to me, in which case I might stand still I make plays on movement, like rhyming or echoing an earlier gesture in another part of the body at a later time and perhaps out of kilter.
I turn phrases upside down, reverse them, or suggest an action and then not complete it, or else overstate it altogether I make radical changes in a mundane way. I use weight, balance, momentum, and physical actions like falling, pushing. etc. I say things to my company like, Toss your knees over there's, or Start the phrase and then on the second count start it again, or "Do it and get off it" I put all these movements together without transitions. I do not promote the next movement with a preceding transition and, therefore. I do not build up to something. If I do build up, I might end it with another build up. I often return to a neutral standing position between moves; it is for me a way of measuring where I have been and where I am going.
Trisha Brown, 'Locus' (1975), in Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001, ed. Hendel Teicher (Andover, Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art/Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002) n.p.