تريشا براون
트리샤 브라운
トリシャブラウン
Триши Браун

Walking on the Wall

source: trishabrowncompanyorg

After graduating from Mills College in Oakland, California, studying with Anna Halprin and teaching at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Trisha Brown moved to New York City in 1961. Instantly immersed in what was to become the post-modern phenomena of Judson Dance Theater, her movement investigations found the extraordinary in the everyday and challenged existing perceptions of what constitutes performance. In this “hot-bed of dance revolution”, Brown, along with like-minded artists, pushed the limits of choreography thereby changing modern dance forever.

Trisha Brown in Set and Reset, 1996
Photo by Chris Callis
In 1970, Brown formed her company and explored the terrain of her adoptive SoHo, creating her early dances for alternative spaces including rooftops and walls, and flirting with gravity alternately using it and defying it. In this time, Brown made the groundbreaking work, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), and Roof Piece (1971) among many others. Glacial Decoy (1979) was her first of many collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (1980) with fog designer Fujiko Nakaya was followed by Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981) with sets by Donald Judd. Set and Reset (1983) premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music with original music by Laurie Anderson and visual design by Robert Rauschenberg. The now iconic Set and Reset completed Brown’s first fully developed cycle of work, Unstable Molecular Structures, establishing the fluid yet unpredictably geometric style that remains a hallmark of her work. Her relentlessly athletic Valiant Series followed, epitomized by the powerful Newark (1987) and Astral Convertible (1989) in which she pushed her dancers to their physical limits and began exploring gender-specific movement. Next came the elegant and mysterious Back to Zero Cycle, which includes another Rauschenberg collaboration, Foray Forêt (1990), and For M.G.: The Movie (1991) with music by Alvin Curran, in which Brown pulled back from external virtuosity to investigate unconscious movement.

Brown collaborated for the final time with Rauschenberg to create If you couldn’t see me (1994), danced entirely with her back to the audience. One year later, this piece was transformed into a duet performed by Brown and Bill T. Jones and later Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Inspired by her experience working in opera when Lina Wertmüller invited her to choreograph Carmen (1986), Brown turned her attention to classical music and opera production known as her Music Cycle. M.O. (1995), choreographed to J.S. Bach’s monumental Musical Offering, was hailed as a “masterpiece” by Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times, who stated that Brown’s piece made “a great deal of other choreography to Bach’s music look like child’s play.”

Brown joined with new collaborators, visual artist Terry Winters and composer Dave Douglas to create El Trilogy (2000), an evening length choreography danced to the sounds and structures of today’s new jazz music full of sensuousness and marked by an unmistakable modernity. She then worked with long-time friend and artist, Elizabeth Murray to create PRESENT TENSE (2003), set to music by John Cage.

Brown again collaborated with Laurie Anderson and Jennifer Tipton to create O zlozony/O composite (2004) for three étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet, and added Japanese artist, Kenjiro Okazaki to create the witty and sophisticated I love my robots (2007). Brown’s last work, I’m going to toss my arms- if you catch them they’re yours (2011), with collaborators Burt Barr and Alvin Curran, premiered at Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris.

Trisha Brown has created over 100 dance works since 1961, and was the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award.” She has been awarded many other honors including five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Medal in Dance, and she has been named a Veuve Cliquot Grand Dame. In 1988, Brown was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the government of France. In January 2000, she was promoted to Officier and in 2004, she was again elevated, this time to the level of Commandeur. She was a 1994 recipient of the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award and, at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, served on the National Council on the Arts from 1994 to 1997. In 1999, Brown received the New York State Governor’s Arts Award and, in 2003, was honored with the National Medal of Arts. She recently had the prestigious honor to serve as a Rolex Arts Initiative Mentor for 2010-11 as well as receiving the S.L.A.M. Action Maverick Award presented by Elizabeth Streb, and the Capezio Ballet Makers Dance Foundation Award in 2010. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was awarded the 2011 New York Dance and Performance ‘Bessie’ Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011, Brown was honored with the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for making an “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”
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source: trishabrowncompanyorg

As well as being a prolific choreographer, Brown is an accomplished visual artist, as experienced in It’s a Draw (2002). Her drawings have been seen in exhibitions, galleries, and museums throughout the world.

Previous exhibitions of Brown’s work include: the Venice Biennale (Italy); The Drawing Center (Philadelphia, PA); Musée de Marseille (France); Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH); Addison Museum (Andover, MA); Contemporary Art Museum (Houston, TX); New Museum (NYC); Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA); White Cube (England); University of South Florida (Tampa, FL); Documenta 12 (Germany); as part of the Year of Trisha – a celebration of her entire body of work at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); Le Centre Georges Pomipidou (France); Mills College (Oakland, CA); Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon (France); and Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) in 2011. Brown’s visual art is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York City.
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source: guardiancouk

In the 1970s, Adrian Searle used to stroll through downtown New York carrying money for muggers, on his way to meet a man who painted with a meat cleaver. What does he make of a new show about the era’s art scene?

Rope trick … Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall, re-created at the Barbican. Watching Walking on the Wall, a 1971 work by US choreo-grapher Trisha Brown, is an extraordinary experience. The dancers, held parallel to the floor by unobtrusive harnesses that slide on tracks, almost glide. Spurning gravity, they never look down as they put one foot in front of another, step around corners, meet and part. Seen from the balcony of the Barbican, it’s like watching life on the street: people strolling alone and in pairs, holding hands. Then you notice the other spectators in the well of the space below, looking up. But which way is up? You feel like a character in an MC Escher drawing, caught up in an optical game with impossible architecture.

Three Brown works from the 1970s are performed every hour, throughout the day, in Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, a look at art and life in New York’s SoHo during the 1970s. Back in the day, Brown had dancers performing on the flat roofs, fire-escape ladders and water towers of Manhattan. In one mesmerising photograph, your eye discovers figure after figure performing across the skyline. Brown also had roped-up dancers walking down the sides of buildings, and, in Floor of the Forest, cradled in mid-air in a nest of old clothes and rope. They rummage amid the jumble and hang upside-down, limbs poking out everywhere.

It was a time when art was moving off the plinth, and dance was stepping away from the proscenium stage: the two joined forces and invaded the galleries, museums and lofts of New York. Brown, turning walls into sidewalks, made a stage of the city itself.

New York in the 1970s was broke, busted and frequently dangerous. Even at the end of the decade, I was advised to carry mugging money, to walk under the streetlights, and never to stroll through Central Park at night. It would have been safer to walk on the walls. Forget Paris. New York, especially SoHo, was where aspiring British artists yearned to be. Britain’s own DIY artistic culture in London’s East End paralleled New York’s, but with less elan and almost no audience.

At the end of the 1960s, SoHo was a district of abandoned workshops, moribund sweatshops and acres of empty floorspace. It began to be populated by artists who had little money, few prospects, and lived and worked there illegally, at first. Loft-style living is now an estate-agent cliche, but in 1970s SoHo it was the real deal. Today, the area is just chi-chi. The artists moved in, then the galleries, then the money. Pioneering artists are now moving to Detroit, the rust-belt city whose stunning, ruined architecture can be had for a song. They’re building communities there, starting again. Who knows where this might lead?

Pioneers of the Downtown Scene focuses on the social world, the experiments and the art of Brown, Laurie Anderson and Gordon Matta-Clark, son of Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta. Phillip Glass was there, Steve Reich, Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer and legions more. They fixed plumbing and built walls; they botched electrics, made do and got by. Artists got into dance; dancers and musicians got into their art. They were each other’s influence and audience, a clique not yet riven by commerce and fame.

Feminism, protests against the Vietnam war, a social conscience and communal spirit were more than a backdrop. Anderson started out drawing political cartoons and being an “art reporter”. She also photographed strangers who had assaulted her with sexual remarks in the street. She recorded the dreams she had after falling asleep in incongruous public places, and played a violin weirdly adapted with shoddy electronics from Canal Street markets. She told laconic stories as unhinged as the times. Her later success as a multimedia artist was formed in these works in downtown New York. It’s fascinating and a little ramshackle, and all the better for that.

Matta-Clark opened a restaurant in SoHo called Food, to feed the burgeoning artistic population. He also covered himself in shaving foam while roped to a huge clockface high above the Manhattan street, behaving more like silent movie prankster Harold Lloyd than an artist. He devised dances in trees, imagined floating islands in the Hudson, and started slicing up buildings, excavating floors and hacking through walls in the Bronx. Like Brown, Matta-Clark defied both gravity and architecture, and probably sense, too. He died of cancer in 1978, aged 35.

The art, music, dance and theatre that came out of the downtown scene was born of contingency. This show effects a well-tuned balance between art and archival material, photographs, drawings, performance and grainy old film and video. There are bits of Matta-Clark’s dissected buildings and a big waste container fitted out with internal walls and reclaimed doors – turning it into a house with many rooms, prefiguring the installations Mike Nelson makes today. The exhibition charts a social as much as an artistic moment, with its friendships and love affairs, ideals and arguments. There was little distinction between work and play. It was a prolonged, vital moment, and the work still resonates. This exhibition is worth the trip for Trisha Brown alone.

Every time I went to New York from the end of the 1970s till her death in 2009, I would try to visit the artist Nancy Spero. She lived with her partner, the painter Leon Golub, in a big loft with a dividing wall between their studios, on the border of SoHo. “You’re a marked man in this town,” Golub once said, threateningly, when I began writing criticism. Golub affected to be a Chicago bruiser, and painted with a meat cleaver. Spero seemed a gentler soul, till you saw the rage in her art. Every time I met them, I felt chastened by a somehow old-fashioned yet relevant bohemian morality and ethical certainty. Spero was already a legend, a key figure in the feminist movement, an outspoken critic of injustice.

A small, measured retrospective of Spero’s work is currently at the Serpentine in London, and a new book by Christopher Lyon documents her entire career. The Serpentine is a good venue for her art, with its disconcerting mix of intimacy, anger and celebration.

Snarling from the maypole

For many years, Spero suffered from arthritis: hand-painting gave way to stencilling and home-made printing. She developed a cast of characters and motifs that populated frieze-like drawings, or were hung – gurning and snarling – from a maypole, which now fills the Serpentine’s south gallery. You need to approach her art with care. Suddenly, you’re jolted by newspaper clippings of horrors perpetrated in El Salvador and the Philippines; then goddesses, phallic women and neolithic fertility gods dance and sing and bare their vaginas at us.

The verbal assaults of French poet, theatre director and madman Antonin Artaud rage across her drawings. Her work erupts, joyously and horrifically, as it erupted year after year in Manhattan, impervious to fashion, unfazed by the growing and sometimes overnight successes of neighbours and colleagues, the calumnies of US politics, domestic and abroad. She watched like an eagle. In her art, there are moments of sexual frenzy and abandon; then the helicopters come, shitting death. SoHo may be over, but idealism isn’t.
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source: ffw

No contexto da falência industrial, desemprego e violência urbana de Nova York da década de 1970, um grupo de artistas se destacou ao utilizar a cidade como inspiração, cenário e objeto de estudo. Misturando artes visuais e performances, esse movimento ajudaria a moldar o lado artístico da cidade — hoje espalhado pelo descolado bairro do SoHo – além de influenciar toda uma geração de artistas (que da mesma forma, transfomaram o Brooklyn).

Agora, três expoentes desse cenário criativo ganham uma exposição retrospectiva na galeria Barbican, em Londres: a performer e musicista Laurie Anderson, a coreógrafa Trisha Brown e o artista Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 – 1978).

A mostra “Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s” reúne esculturas, fotografias e instalações interativas que, literalmente, conversam com o público; como o “Talking Pillow” de Laurie Anderson, travesseiro que “conta” sonhos para as pessoas que descansam a cabeça sobre ele. Um dos destaques da retrospectiva é a apresentação de hora em hora de trechos da coreografia “Walking on the Wall”, de Trisha Brown, em que bailarinos fazem o ordinário – andar em linha reta – de modo extraordinário: presos por cabos em perfeita linha perpendicular ao solo.
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source: tahrirnews

فازت الباليرينا الأمريكية تريشا براون، المولودة عام 1936، بالجائزة الأولى لمؤسسة الفن المعاصر التى أسسها الفنان الألمانى الراحل روبير روشنبرج1925-2008 وتكرم كل ما هو جديد ومبتكر فى مجال الفن بجميع صورة والجائزة الفنية قيمتها 25 ألف دولار وتمنح سنويا من قبل مؤسس روشنبرج وتعد الباليرينا هي الأولى التى تحصل على هذه الجائزة.
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source: daverkr

< 트리샤 브라운 무용단 >

무용 예술에서 포스트모더니즘(postmodernism)은 과연 무엇인가? 1960년대 미국 현대무용에 포스트모던이라는 새로운 역사를 연결 시켜낸 포스트모던 무용 안무가 트리샤 브라운의 트리샤 브라운 무용단(Trisha Brown Dance Company)의 첫 내한 공연이 지난 10월 13일과 14일 이틀동안 리틀엔젤스 예술회관에서 있었다(평자는 14일 공연을 보았다).

1960년대의 미국 뉴욕의 가난한 무용 안무가들은 공연장을 빌릴 경제적 여유가 없어서, 무료로 사용할 수 있는 워싱턴 스퀘어 부근의 교회, 잣슨 처치(Judson Church)의 지하실로 모여 든다. 이들은 그들 이전의 이사도라 던컨, 마사 그래함, 머스 커닝햄 등이 이어 오던 미국 현대무용의 과다한 표현, 서사적인 안무 구조, 정형화 된 동작 등에 반기를 든다.

이본 레이너, 루신다 차일드, 스티브 팍스톤, 트리샤 브라운 등등 실험 정신에 충만했던 포스트모던 무용 안무가들은 기존의 현대무용 움직임을 과대 포장된 백화점 진열대에 나열되는 움직임이나 이미지로 보고, 무용에서의 수많은 실험을 시도한다. 걷는 동작, 뛰는 동작, 음식을 먹는 움직임 등도 무용 어휘에 사용해 보고, 무용 공연에서의 과다한 표현을 줄이기 위해 극도의 미니멀리즘적인 움직임만 사용하기도 했다.

특히 이번에 방한한 트리샤 브라운 같은 경우는 수백 미터 씩 떨어져 있는 건물 옥상에 무용수들을 올라가게 하여 장쾌한 무용 공연 안무를 하기도 했다. 또한 그녀들 그룹은 현대무용에서 왜 분장(make-up)을 하는가 하면서, 무용 공연의 승부는 과다한 의상이나 얼굴 화장에서 가려져야 할 것이 아니고, 무용수 움직임이나 창의적 안무로 승부 해야 된다고 했다.

따라서 그녀는, ” 이제 우리 무용수들도 무대 위에서 예쁘게 보이려고 노력만 하고 있어서는 안 된다. 땀을 뻘뻘 흘리면서 거친 호흡 소리를 그대로 보여주는 살아서 움직이는 생동감 넘치는 춤을 자신 있게 보여야만 한다”고 했다.

공연이 시작되기 전 객석에 앉은 평자는, 과연 이런 실험을 주도해 왔던 트리샤 브라운이 지금은 어떤 작업을 할까? 그리고 계속해서 실험적이면서 미니멀리즘적인 움직임을 즉흥적으로 보여주고만 떠나지 않을까? 등등의 생각에 잠겨 있어야 했다.

막이 오르고 9명의 무용수들이 무대 좌측에 들어서는데 벌써 경이로운 느낌이 들고 있던 < Canto Pianto >는 장중한 음향 속에서 싱그러운 충만함이 가득한 움직임을 만들고 있었다. 대칭과 비대칭을 자연스럽게 이루는 이미지가 기품 있게 만들어지고 있다.

9명의 무용수들이 라인을 이루며 움직이기도 하는데, 느리지만 미묘한 느낌을 만들어 객석을 압도하고 있다. 각을 지어 움직이다가 제자리에 조각처럼 정지하는데도 느낌은 섬뜩할 정도로 생생하다. 흑백 영상 같은 짙은 톤의 이미지가 무대 전체에 입체적으로 그려져 나가던 이 작품은 무용 예술 표현의 극치를 보여주고 있었다.

무대 후방에 동화 같은 추상화가 걸려 있던 < Present Tense >는 잔잔한 느낌의 움직임을 조용히 만들어 나가고 있었다. 붉은 의상의 두 여인이 빠른 템포의 음에 맞추어서 동화 같이 대칭 되는 움직임을 조용히 만든다. 4명의 무용수가 합세하여 좌측 벽 쪽에 붙어서 마치 큰 건축물을 짓는 듯한 입체적인 변형을 만들고 있다.

다시 오른쪽 공간으로 가서 세련된 이미지를 만든 다음, 두 여인이 누워서 다리를 들고 있다. 다른 여자 한 명이 순간적이지만 누운 두 여인의 발바닥을 딛고 지나가는 에크로베틱한 움직임(이들은 필요할 때면 세계 최고의 무용 기량을 보여준다)을 만들기도 하던 이 작품도 경이적인 안무 창의력을 보이고 있다.

연노랑, 연분홍, 연회색, 연초록(색상에 무딘 평자의 표현인데 사실은 트리샤 브라운이 사용한 색상은 말로 표현하기 힘들 정도로 경이로웠다) 등의 의상을 입은 무용수들이 나비처럼 움직이고 있던 < Groove and Countermove >는 현대무용의 ‘명품’이 되고 있었다.

지혜롭고 자연스러운 무용수들의 등 퇴장 속에서 인체 이미지의 경이로운 다양함을 강렬하게 실험해보고 있는 듯한 이 작품에서는 앞의 두 작품과는 또 완전히 다른 움직임과 영상을 창조해내고 있었다. 톤을 고상하게 죽인 컬러풀한 움직임들이 강인하면서도 부드럽게 이루어지던 이 작품은 무용이 ’21세기를’ 가장 잘 표현할 수 있는 예술이 될 것이라는 것을 확신 시켜주고 있었다.

공연이 시작된 후 5분이 채 지나지 않아서, 아 오늘 나는 무서운 공연을 체험하게 되겠다는 예감을 가지게 해준 이번 공연은 비록 포스트모던 무용이라는 명칭을 가진 현대무용이었지만, 평자가 본 어떤 클래식발레 대작 공연 못지 않은 감동을 주었다.

미니멀리즘적인 단순함 속에서도 숨막힐 듯한 환상적인 형식미를 내밀하게 탐미하고 있던 이번 공연은, 1960년대 최첨단 실험 안무가였던 트리샤 브라운의 무용 창작 작업이 지난 40 ~ 50년 동안 끊임없이 변화(주로 지성적, 이지적으로)해 왔음을 무대 위에서 확인시켜주고 있었다.

이는 현시대 모든 예술들의 추세와 같다. 즉, 1950 ~ 60년대의 현대 미술도 기존의 모든 것을 파괴 시켰지만, 1980년대 이후의 미술에서는 다시 ‘표현’이 살아나고 있다. 물론 이때의 ‘표현’은 1900년대 초반의 신파조적 표현이 아니다. 이지적 기품이 객관적으로 살아나는 투명한 표현이 된다(이는 무용사에서 1960년대 postmodern dance가 1980년대 이후 postmodernist dance로 변하는 과정과 마찬가지이다).

트리샤 브라운은 자신 스스로가 가장 과격한(?) 실험주의자였으면서도 그 과정을 겪으면서, 스스로 이 세상 누구보다도 정교하고 치밀하며 완벽한 창의적 안무가 되어 있었다(그런데 우리 나라에서는 아직도 50 ~ 60년 전 미국에서 있었던 ‘실험’을 한다면서, 윗통을 벗어 젖가슴을 덜렁거리면서 막춤을 추고 있다).

자신의 치열했던 실험정신과 철학이 완벽한 정격 예술로 승화되어 무대 위에서 기품 있는 표현으로 되살아나고 있던 이번 공연을 보고 트리샤 브라운은 작품을 만들 때마다 완전히 새로운 것을 시도하는(이날 3개의 작품도 완전히 다른 형태의 작품이었다) 말 그대로의 무용 포스트모더니즘의 선구자였다.
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source: maestro-newsru

Выдающаяся американская танцовщица и хореограф Триша Браун (Trisha Brown) как-то сказала в своем интервью прессе: «Cекрет успеха моих постановок очень прост – я люблю все мои работы». Все ее творчество подтверждает этот тезис. Премьера нового танцевального шоу театра Триши Браун была показано на фестивале в Токио, затем театр танца планирует продолжить гастроли по Японии и другим странам Юго-Восточной Азии.
Японский критик The Guardian Мина Окумура, сделала отличную рецензию на новую танцевальную постановку театра Триши Браун. Балерина со стажем Мина Окумура назвала новую танцевальную постановку выдающимся образцом постмодернизма, контактной импровизацией в танце и одной из самых удачных танцевальных постановок в стиле современного балета.
Сейчас творчеству балетного театра «Компания Триши Браун» более подходит музыка современных композиторов, таких как итальянец Сальваторе Шаррино (Salvatore Sciarrino).
Критики считают хореографию Триши Браун воплощением остроумия, таинственности, красоты, великолепия и изящности в технике танца. В новом танцевальном шоу воплощены экстраординарные идеи. Дуэты и сольные партии танцоров отличаются сложность и высокой техничностью движений, которая так понравилась японским зрителям.
Чтобы воспринимать такую авангардную хореографию нужно работать над своей концентрацией и восприятием современного искусства. Стойкость, изящество и новаторская хореография, таковы основные постулаты нового танцевального шоу театра Триши Браун!