Man walking down the side of a building

The reprise at Fondation Cartier of Man walking down the side of a building, a 1970 Trisha Brown’s work, has underlined her relevance in the conceptual artistic discourse beyond the specificity of dance.

Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016
Invited to Paris for the first time in 1973 for the Festival d’Automne, the Trisha Brown Dance Company was summoned back in September 2016 by four Parisian cultural institutions for the restaging of a few of Ms. Brown’s early dance compositions. The performances have been a welcome opportunity to rediscover the wealth of this American artist’s oeuvre. Her unique touch connects the practice of choreography with highly topical ideas in a myriad of figures that go beyond the specificity of dance.
Her critical use of performance art has not only made her an icon of American dance, but has also rooted the practice in an intersection between very different disciplines, from the visual arts to architecture. Almost all of her concepts have become fundamental cornerstones in rethinking the relation of the body to the space. Particularly the restaging of the demanding piece from 1970, Man walking down the side of a building, now proposed as the centrepiece of her career, has freshly underlined the relevant elements of this relation in conceptual artistic practice.
All of Trisha Brown’s pieces are essential to delineate a correct history of contemporary choreography. Although postmodern dance cites her continuously and incorporates entire phases and passages of her repertory, it often forgets to cite the founding episodes of it. Fortunately nowadays, the Trisha Brown Dance Company returns to different places and other spaces that are not theatrical. Precisely in these venues it is possible to measure her fundamental contribution and pivotal ideas, such as the very special way she conducts the exit from the dimension of the stage. Ms. Brown’s approach has not only probed the structure of minimal ideas, but she has used them with an attentive and relaxed mind, working on the construction of a different awareness of the body. It is not a laborious search for technique and its transmission problems, but rather a propulsion to the maximum limits of the idea of non-dance, where absolute rigour is anchored in the proxemics of daily gestures. The movement in space tenaciously interrogates contemporaneity.
Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016
Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016

The programme in Paris, created under the artistic direction of Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden, is a retrospective rereading of the priceless sobriety of gestures and spaces. It immerses Ms. Brown’s work in the highly original soundscape of The Great Animal Orchestra, a sound-and-vision exhibition on at the Fondation Cartier until 8 January 2017. This is an acoustic landscape by the American musician and bioacoustician Bernie Krause, and the dance programme follows an indoor and outdoor walking route within the concreteness of its sound surroundings. The dance’s proximity to the context, interspersed with soundscapes from endangered natural habitats, ultimately shines a different light on the “very brief” descent from the glass-and-steel building designed by Jean Nouvel.

The distance from the same “walk” in black and white on the brick facade of a building in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood is measured in decades and filming techniques, but it remains an event. It is a radical idea that unleashes a sea of thoughts on the laws of gravity, statics and equilibrium. It underlines Trisha Brown’s ability to generate micro-revolutions by using simple devices. It is the directing and disrupting of the spectator’s attention toward unusual spaces that other artists had not yet dealt with. She has often shown this regaining of centrality for spaces that lived in the indifference of the eye. In each of her performances, she travelled and made us travel in unexplored perspectives that could offer her dances ceilings, walls, corners, roofs and connecting spaces.

Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016
Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016

From the choreographical complexity of a warehouse in Newark to the variable roof structures of downtown New York, her repertory can now cite all these “outings” – from the more urban to those in nature. We are looking at an endless canvas for improvisations, a central concept in the work of Anna Halprin, of whom Ms. Brown was a pupil, and in the work of Simone Forti, with whom she shared a contemporaneous debut. Her studies were nourished by and survived the shock of the first happenings, and Robert Whitman’s theatre works. She incorporated such events consistently. Her mission was to demystify the idea of the spectacle that narrates and describes a world made up of danceable places. This included the hypothesis of being read in physical terms, in terms of assembly. No sophistication exists in these extremely evocative studies that reduce the distance between dancers and the public, and that invite us to multiply our points of view. Such concepts were explored by many artists including Robert Rauschenberg, with whom Trisha Brown embarked upon memorable collaborations.

Even in the most elementary pieces of work presented in this cycle – specifically very short numbers such as Sticks IV, II (1973) and Leaning Duets (1970), which lasts three minutes – it is easy to see her interest for the instability of situations.

Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016
Bandaloop Company, Man walking down the side of a building, Fondation Cartier 2016
More than once, Trisha Brown has alluded to the idea of being observed in her operations as in a microscopic vision. In the exceptional unfolding of this exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, where the dance of marine microorganisms in a wonderful installation about plankton shows unprecedented elegance, the quality of her dance comes across as amplified in abstract rigour, and it has found an unusual consonance. In the randomness of the decor for the sound installations, the contrast to the Merce Cunningham–John Cage duo becomes legible, where a more potent visibility was in vogue at the beginning of Brown’s career as a choreographer. Her Dance Company continues to define hierarchy. The two sessions in Cartier’s Parisian space were full of unforgettable resonance. They were a temporary dislocation between architecture, body, place and movement.
If the method to make energy flow through dance has followed all the most unusual directions, it is because it never gave into the limits of physical constrictions, and has entered a conceptual dimension. Trisha Brown’s work dangerously approaches the gestures of architecture, of which it measures the content of challenge and makes accessible portions of space, presenting them to the public as innovative surfaces.
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