From the post-modern dance of the 1960s, founded on a rethinking of movement art that questioned the very concept of technique, to the creation of works for groups in the 1980s informed by a rigorous mathematical method of composition, and onward to the reflections of the 1990s dedicated to exploring dance in relation to exemplary works of Western musical tradition, Trisha Brown infused her work with the ongoing evolution of research, articulated in substantial cycles of experimentation. It is worthwhile to trace its lines.
The origins of American post-modern dance, dating back to the early 1960s, were rooted in composition classes held at Merce Cunningham's New York studio by Robert Dunn. There, the groundwork was laid for the development of a generation of artists led by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, Deborah Hay, and David Gordon. In contrast to the sign-based virtuosity and movement codes of both modern dance (such as the Graham technique) and classical-academic ballet, Brown and her contemporaries tackled the challenge of redefining the dance medium. They broke with the past to reconsider, under new premises, the relationship between body, space, time, performance venue, audience, and performance quality.
Many dancers who attended Dunn's composition classes, influenced by John Cage's research, initiated their collective experiments at New York's Judson Church. This space was frequented not only by young choreographers but also by avant-garde painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers (including names like Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris), which contributed to the analysis of dance in relation to other arts. Ordinary actions such as running and walking became materials in the dance vocabulary, and everyday objects entered into compositions. Costumes, lights, and scenery were chosen not for their spectacle but for their functionality in relation to changing performance venues: no longer just traditional theaters, but also churches, squares, streets, and art galleries.
In 1970, the improvisation collective The Grand Union was formed, where alongside Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Nancy Green, and David Gordon, Trisha Brown also worked. In Grand Union pieces, the dance medium was redefined in light of the body movements explored by individual collective artists (think of the couple and group movement studies of contact improvisation developed in those years by Steve Paxton), as well as in relation to the potential psychological and social aspects of gesture. This paved the way for the recovery of a narrative aspect of performance, distinct from the so-called analytical phase of early post-modernism.
After the break with modern dance, classical ballet, and experimentation outside traditional presentation circuits, artists like Lucinda Childs (linked to the early Judson Dance Theatre) and Trisha Brown, armed with research on movement principles and body regions, mended the initial rupture with the past. They reclaimed codes, techniques, theatrical means, and the relationship between music and movement. Among the works scheduled in Rovereto, exemplifying the various research phases undertaken by Brown, "Accumulation plus Talking with Watermotor," danced by the author herself, revisits the style of her famous accumulations from the 1970s. These pieces were built from a simple body movement, with subsequent additions resulting in a complete sequence that starts anew each time.
Between the late 1970s and the end of the following decade, Brown collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg on masterpieces like "Glacial Decoy" (1979), "Set and Reset" (1983), and "Astral Convertible" (1989). In the latter, she explored the idea of perspective by creating a horizontal dance on the floor for an audience viewing from above, and a vertical dance for the audience in the auditorium. She also delved into the boundary between meaningful and meaningless movement. In "Set and Reset," another piece by Brown featured in the Festival, she celebrates the poetics of continuous momentum bordering on stability's limit—a foundational principle of fluid yet structured choreography. This piece is enriched by the "Visual Presentation" signed by Rauschenberg, where key elements include diaphanous projections appearing above the dancers.
In "If you couldn't see me" (1994), Brown returned to choreographing for herself after fifteen years, creating a piece about eight minutes long, danced—following Robert Rauschenberg's suggestion—backwards from start to finish. For this work, she focused on two key concepts: the objectification of the body ("staging the body as if it were an object") and narcissism. This theme, addressed by Brown since the post-modern era when it was considered politically incorrect to exhibit narcissistic talent, led to simplifying dance movements to everyday pedestrian actions. Here, she seeks to communicate with the audience through a back-facing dance that lacks frontal interaction.
Brown's "M.O." and "Twelve Ton Rose" are the first two stages of a trilogy from the 1990s dedicated to engaging with Western musical tradition. This trilogy concluded in 1998 with Claudio Monteverdi's "Orfeo." For "M.O.," inspired by Bach's "Musical Offering," Brown spent a year studying Baroque polyphony and Bachian literature. She taught her company to read the score and understand its rules and forms. She then compared her personal choreographic polyphony, a "form within the form," which neither merely illustrated the thirteen sections of Bach's music (including two fugues, ten canons, and a trio sonata in four movements) nor remained independent from it. The result was a dance that colored its final moments with a curious emotional ambiguity, sparked by a change in the gaze of the principal dancer—no longer projecting through space but rather "looking" at space. This difference invites a fresh perspective on the dual choreographic and musical polyphony.
