From the post-modern dance of the 60s, founded on a rethinking of the art of movement whose assumptions called into question the very concept of technique, to the creation in the 80s of group works nourished by a rigorous mathematical method of composition, up to the reflection of the 90s dedicated to the comparison of dance with exemplary works of the Western musical tradition, Trisha Brown has given her work the breath of a research in constant development, articulated in substantial cycles of experimentation. It is worth retracing its lines. The origins of American post-modern dance, dating back to the early 60s, can be traced back to the composition classes held in the New York studio of Merce Cunningham by Robert Dunn. There, the foundations were laid for the development of the generation of artists led by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, Deborah Hay, David Gordon. In opposition to the virtuosity of signs and the movement codes of both modern dance (think of the Graham technique) and classical-academic ballet, Brown and his companions faced the problem of redefining the medium of dance, breaking with the past to consider the relationship between body, space, time, place of representation, audience and quality of performance according to new assumptions. Many of the dancers who attended Dunn's composition classes, influenced by John Cage's research, began their collective experiments at the Judson Church in New York, a space frequented not only by young people interested in choreography, but also by painters, sculptors, musicians and avant-garde writers (the names of Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris are enough), and which contributed to dance being analyzed in relation to the other arts. With respect to movement, ordinary actions such as running and walking became material of the dance vocabulary just as objects taken from everyday life became part of the compositions. Costumes, lights and sets were chosen not on the basis of their spectacularity, but on their functionality in relation to the changing places of performance, no longer traditional theatres, but churches, squares, streets, art galleries. In 1970 the improvisation collective The Grand Union was born, in which alongside Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Nancy Green, David Gordon, Trisha Brown also worked. In the pieces of the Grand Union the medium of dance was redefined in light of the experiments on the body carried out by the individual artists of the collective (think of the studies on the movement of couples and groups of contact-improvisation developed in those years by Steve Paxton), but also in relation to the possible psychological and social implications of the gesture. This opened the way to the recovery of that narrative aspect of performance that was foreign to the so-called analytical phase of the first post-modern. After the break with modern dance, classical ballet and the moment of experimentation outside the traditional circuits of representation, artists such as Lucinda Childs (linked to the beginning of her career at the Judson Dance Theatre) and Trisha Brown, strong in their research conducted on the principles of movement and the regions of the body, mended the initial rift with the past, reappropriating the codes and techniques, the theatrical means, the relationship between music and movement. Of the works scheduled in Rovereto – exemplifying the various phases of research undertaken by Brown – Accumulation plus Talking with Watermotor, danced by the author herself, proposes the style of the famous accumulations of the 1970s, pieces constructed starting from a simple movement of the body, to which others were gradually added until a complete sequence was constructed, repeated each time from the beginning. Between the end of the 1970s and the end of the following decade, Brown signed masterpieces in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg such as Glacial Decoy (’79), Set and Reset (’83), Astral Convertible (’89): in the latter the artist worked on the idea of perspective, creating a horizontal dance, on the floor, for the audience who saw the show from above, and a vertical dance for the spectators in the stalls, also interested in the border between movement with meaning and movement without meaning. In Set and Reset, Brown’s second title on the Festival programme, the artist celebrates the poetics of uninterrupted momentum at the limit of stability, the basic principle of a fluid yet structured choreography, enriched by the comparison with the “Visual presentation” signed by Rauschenberg, of which the key element is only the diaphanous and transparent projections that appear above the dancers. With If You Couldn’t See Me, in 1994, Brown returned to choreograph, fifteen years after her last solo, a creation for herself.
It is a piece of about eight minutes, danced, at the suggestion of Robert Rauschenberg, author of music and costume, backwards from start to finish. For this piece the artist worked on two key concepts: the reification of the body (“putting the body on stage as if it were an object”) and narcissism. This latter theme has been addressed by Brown since the post-modern era when it was considered “politically incorrect” to make a narcissistic display of one’s talent. There the solution was to bring dance back to the simplicity of pedestrian movement, here it is to seek communication with the audience through a back dance deprived of the frontal relationship with others. If you couldn’t see me develops from a circular energy, set in motion by impulses, leaps, oscillations. A leg stretched outwards in a soft sequence gives an impulse to the body which in turn moves like a wave in the direction indicated by the peripheral movement of the lower limb. The hip slides on an imaginary horizontal plane, giving an input to the arms that rise parallel upwards in a rotary motion that heralds other excursions in space. Until the movement returns to stillness with a square gesture, in balance with the vertical axis of the body. M.O. and Twelve Ton Rose finally constitute the first two stages of the trilogy dedicated in the 90s to the comparison with the Western musical tradition that will end in 1998 with Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo. For M.O. inspired by Bach's Musical Offering, Brown studied baroque polyphony and Bach's literature for a year, teaching her Company to read the score and understand its rules and forms. To then compare it with her personal choreographic polyphony, a sort of "form within a form" that does not illustrate in a didactic way the thirteen sections of Bach's music (two fugues, ten canons and a trio sonata in four movements), but is not independent of it either. The result is a dance that is colored in the finale by a curious emotional ambiguity given by the change in the gaze of the main dancer, a gaze that suddenly stops projecting itself through space to "look" at space: a difference that invites us to read the double choreographic and musical polyphony from a new perspective.
