The Original – ‘Again’ Historical and Contemporary Strategies for Writing and Re/Constructing Dance

Writing and dance have been positioned by scholars in a contraposed play throughout the chronological period from the Renaissance to today: dancing begins when writing stops. Scholars have accused dance of ephemerality and have attempted to salvage it through notation. In postmodern and contemporary dance, some choreographers challenge traditional assumptions about the primacy and stability of text and documentation. They ‘write’ with dance in both conceptual and alphabetic ways, some exploring the dimension of race. This study tests theories by Mark Franko and André Lepecki through analysis of dance reenactment strategies and interventions by choreographers Trisha Brown and Christopher-Rasheem McMillan.

Coming Together by Moving Apart: Contemporary Dance Scores and Communities During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper discusses Roof/Roof Piece, an adaptation of Trisha Brown's Roof Piece by Trisha Brown Dance Company and perch a dance made by Amy Voris and adapted by Voris and Katye Coe for Coe to perform in her home and online. Both these adaptations began during the Covid-19 pandemic, in contexts when the artists could not meet in person. I consider the role that the scores played in facilitating these shared practices, asking how they allowed for the development and continuation of bonds between members of dance communities during this period.

« Pourquoi ne pourrait-on pas danser la peinture ? »

This article, born of a reflection initiated at the research seminar conducted by Patrice Pavis, questions the forms of multidisciplinary plays. How can dancing seize painting and enrich the picture with currents meanings? Dancers, like Joseph Nadj or Trisha Brown, used to draw during the show. Sometimes, choreographer draw their inspiration from a canvas of the past that echoes the present. This is the case of Gaëlle Bourges whose play we are going to discuss here: Conjurer la peur, which evokes a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

Trisha Brown: Between Abstraction and Representation (1966–1998)

Choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017) is renowned as one of the most influential abstract artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Emerging from Judson Dance Theater and the 1960s avant-garde, Brown invented what she termed her ‘pure movement’ abstract vocabulary in the 1970s, rejecting narrative, psychology and character as bases for dance-making. Yet Brown’s notion of abstraction, when examined across the long arc of her fifty-year career, is more complicated and elastic than previously known. This essay addresses selected choreographies dating from her first decade as a choreographer, the 1960s, to the production of her first opera L’Orfeo (1998), underscoring how memories, images, language and stories fueled a previously unexamined dynamic relationship between abstraction and representation that profoundly influenced her choreography’s development.

Choreographic Transmission in an Expanded Field: Reflections on “Ten Artists Respond to Trisha Brown’s Locus”

The Locus project commissioned 10 Bay Area artists from multiple disciplines to learn Trisha Brown’s Locus and respond by creating their own pieces. It was the first time that the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) had allowed one of Brown’s dances to be transmitted beyond the company for the explicit purpose of inspiring new works.

A Criação entre Dança e Instalação

Este artigo busca entender as similitudes, intelectuais e práticas ao mesmo tempo, entre o conceito de instalação, muitas vezes atribuído às artes visuais, e o de movimento dançado, muitas vezes considerado como efémero e transitório. Com a ajuda desta comparação, uma definição inovadora de criação artística poderia emergir. À primeira vista, nada associa o procedimento da criação coreográfica ao ato poiético de instalação artística. E, portanto, a linha se torna porosa em certas obras exemplares concebidas por Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Christian Rizzo, Boris Charmatz e Mette Ingvartsen. Isto poderia se explicar pela influência da prática dos happenings (Allan Kaprow) sobre arte contemporânea, onde a criação torna-se processo, work in progress, evento. Seguindo essa associação entre a instalação e a dança, é possível descobrir que o elemento do ar se apresenta como verdadeira matéria plástica, fonte de inspiração para os artistas e verdadeiro processo criativo.