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F Foreword
As part of the Museo Tamayo’s ongoing commitment to showcasing three-dimensional works in its “sculpture court”, we have initiated a program devoted to exhibiting spatialized sculptural practices that have emerged since the 1960s focusing on the expanded fields of traditional mediums that go beyond sculpture and into the domains of performance and dance. Moreover, this focus extends to works that engage the spectator’s participation. This program will take place twice a year, and the staging of Trisha Brown’s 1970 choreographic and sculptural piece Floor of the Forest initiates this series, which will be followed in August by the presentation of some of the works produced by members of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel between 1960 and 1968 accompanied by a small documentary exhibition on the aforementioned artist group, organized by Andrea Torreblanca.
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S Synopsis
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Floor of the Forest (1970) is a dance/ performance art piece staged for the first time by Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat in 1970. The piece consists of a steel structure holding up a grid made of rope and clothes. Two dancers move through the grid, dressing and undressing their way through the structure. At certain moments they pause and let gravity pull their bodies down towards the ground. The public moves around the structure. Outside of scheduled performance times, the piece functions as a sculpture. This piece has been shown in various contexts—in theater and dance festivals as well as in performance art and contemporary dance programs—at museums such as the Henry Art Gallery, The Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Barbican, and dOCUMENTA 12.
The dancers participating at the Museo Tamayo are from the Centro de Producción de Danza Contemporánea (CEPRODAC) of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Director: Raúl Parrao. The dancers were trained by choreographer Tony Orrico. CEPRODAC dancers: Stéphanie Janaina and Sheila Rojas; Irasema Sánchez and Edith Pérez; Juan Madero and Jorge Ronzón; Gersaín Piñón and Yonatan Espinosa; Ricardo Rodríguez, asistente de dirección.
Schedule
Premiere: May 8, 19:30 Performances: May 12 - July 21, 2013 Tuesdays and Thursdays: 13:00 Sundays: 12:00, 13:30, 15:00, 16:30
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Trisha Brown Š 1990 Lois Greenfield
S Some brief notes on the work of Trisha Brown and Floor of the Forest Trisha Brown is one of the most original
and innovative figures of contemporary dance, whose groundbreaking work redefined choreographic practice in the 1960s and 1970s in close relation to the artistic avant-gardes of the period. Born in 1936, Brown graduated from Mills College in 1958, she trained, during summer workshops, with Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, Louis Horst and José Limón. In 1961 she moved to New York, where she contributed to the establishment of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962. Along with her peers and frequent collaborators Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton, she is considered one of the foremost representatives of post-modern dance. Though we can identify the influence of early modernist choreographers such as Oskar Schlemmer and particularly Rudolf von Laban’s method of choreographic notation, the Kinetography Laban, on Trisha Brown’s conceptual approachto dance, her work can best be understood in the context of the New York avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s and the Bay Area counterculture of the same period. This was a time marked by departures from the constraints
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of medium specificity, the dissolution of boundaries between genres, the dematerialization of the art object, and interdisciplinary explorations that equally operated on choreographic and dance practices, which, in many respects, paralleled Minimalism’s spatialized approach and phenomenological concerns. As fellow choreographer and dancer Simone Forti recently stated in an interview “we were artists working with the medium of movement.”1
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A formative chapter in Brown’s early trajectory was the summer workshop she took in 1960 with Anna Halprin in the choreographer’s open-air dance deck designed by her husband, architect Lawrence Halprin, and where Brown met Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris, who would become frequent collaborators and interlocutors. There, secluded among the trees and natural beauty of Marin County, the young artists learnt improvisation, task-based movements, and kinesthetic awareness from Anna Halprin; lessons that were to mark their individual practices and approaches to the interrelations between the body and space. One of the task-based exercises assigned to Brown during the workshop was to sweep the deck with a broom; she concentrated on the movement intensely until she propelled herself up in the air using the broom. In Brown’s words “I swept the floor for hours and I went totally out of my mind. I was obsessively involved with my job. I never really swept the floor, I took it as a dance structure, and action structure, and I held it.” 2 This episode, witnessed and described by Yvonne Rainer in several accounts, is considered a pivotal one in Brown’s practice as it marked her future experimentation with gravity and the idea of bodies in flight.
Once in New York and working with the other members of the Judson Dance Theater, including Robert Dunn, who had studied with John Cage, Brown began experimenting with duration, chance, language, objects, and everyday movements. The collaborative environment of New York’s Soho neighborhood at that time was a hotbed for artistic experimentation and Trisha Brown not only worked together with her fellow dancers at the nearby Judson Dance Theater but also collaborated with artists such as George Maciunas, whose building at 80 Wooster Street served as Trisha Brown’s living quarters but was also the place from where she staged pieces such as Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), Roof Piece (1971), and Floor of the Forest (1970); Robert Rauschenberg, who designed the set and costumes for Glacial Decoy (1979); Walter de Maria, who created a dance/vision for her in 1965; and Juan Downey for whom she performed Energy Fields at 112 Greene Street in 1972 with Carol Goodden, Carmen Beuchat, Suzanne Harris and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others. Influenced by John Cage’s explorations of every day sounds 3, Brown similarly experimented with everyday and basic movements of the body –standing, sitting, and lying down--which make up the core of her first choreography, Trillium (1962) performed at the Maidman Playhouse in New York by Simone Forti, who also wrote the sound score. For Brown it was important to “break those actions down to their basic mechanical structure, finding places of rest and power, momentum, and peculiarity (…) eventually accelerating and mixing up to a degree that lying down was done in the air.”4
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Homemade Š 1989 Vincent Pereira
Roof Piece Š 1973 Babette Mangolte
In the mid-sixties Brown began integrating language but also objects, harnesses, and pulleys to her choreographies. Homemade (1966), performed at the Judson Memorial Church, was a collaboration with Robert Whitman in which Brown performed with a film projector attached to her back. More importantly however was the series of movements that she performed for this piece, “a succession of pedestrian behaviors of personal significance that she instructed herself to perform “live” –not imitative “physical feats”—but as representations of thought, demonstrating the mind’s connection to the body.”5
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Brown continued to push the limits of dance and choreography, as well as to integrate other media such as film in her work, notably in Planes (1968) in which dancers dressed in black and white jumpsuits slowly moved across the surface of a wall, aided by a series of masked orifices which enabled them to climb and support themselves, onto which a film by Jud Yalkut was projected containing aerial footage of different locations including New York. The city itself would also prove to be another stage for Brown in her later Roof Piece (1971)6 performed on the roofs of several Soho buildings, an experiment in choreography as a site-specific and sculptural endeavor, but also as an act of communication; the dancers, dressed in red, would relay movements to one another from the rooftops of the buildings. Ever since Brown took to the air propelled by a broom in Anna Halprin’s dance deck, defying gravity became a central concern in her work, either through simple bodily movements or aided by harnesses and rope-and-pulley systems which were never concealed from the audience. In 1970 Brown staged one of her
landmark gravity-defying pieces, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. Supported by a system of pulleys and ropes held from the rooftop, dancer Joseph Schlichter walked down the side of a seven-story building in Soho, his body parallel to the ground at a ninety degree angle from the wall.7 The 1971 and 1974 “offthe-wall” pieces Walking on the Wall and Spiral similarly featured dancers walking horizontally down a vertical surface, and, in the case of the latter, in a spiral motion down columns (originally at 383 West Broadway’s loft space where the piece was first performed), their bodies parallel to the ground, making evident the tension between gravitational pull and the ropes holding them in place but also the strength of the dancer’s cores which enabled them to walk gracefully and seemingly effortlessly down the vertical plane. 13
Planes 3 Š 2009 Julieta Cervantes
Floor of the Forest Š 2010 John Mallison
Floor of the Forest (1970) brings together many of Trisha Brown’s fundamental concerns: task-based movements based on the everyday, such as dressing and undressing, performed with the body in a horizontal position modulated by the force of gravity, also evidencing Brown´s interest in “shifting perspective and the frame of the stage space.”8 Aside from addressing the aforementioned imperatives, the work functions at the boundaries of dance, performance, and sculpture.
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First performed in 1970 by Brown and Carmen Beuchat at 80 Wooster Street, the work consists of a metal frame strung with ropes forming a grid threaded with pieces of discarded clothing of different bright colors, either through the legs or the sleeves of the garments. The dancers dress and undress their way across the structure, moving along the horizontal grid, giving new meaning to this commonplace and everyday activity. Structure and improvisation are negotiated here as in many of Brown’s choreographies: “there is a performance quality that appears in improvisation that did not in memorized dance as it was known up to that date. If you are improvising within a structure your senses are heightened; you are using your wits, thinking, everything is working at once to find the best solution to a given problem under pressure of a viewing audience.”9 Like most of Brown’s pieces, Floor of the Forest raises an awareness of the body, in relation to space, to other bodies and to itself, akin to the phenomenological concerns that guided the expanded fields of many artistic practices in the 1960s, it also shows us how her practice is driven by a constant exploration of the possibilities offered by the thinking body: “Do my movement
and my thinking have an intimate connection? First of all I don’t think my body doesn’t think.”10 Andrew Boynton, No Mistakes: Simone Forti, The New Yorker online blog, http:// www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/11/no-mistakes-simone-forti.html 2 Trisha Brown en Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley y Los Ángeles: University of California Press, 2009), 148. 3 “When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. (...) But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound (…) I don’t need sound to talk to me.” John Cage in transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film Ecoute (Listen) by Miroslav Sebestik, 1991. http://hearingvoices.com/news/2009/09/cage-silence/ 1
“Trisha Brown: An Interview” en Contemporary Dance, edited by Ann Livet (New York: Abbeville Press, 1978), 46. 5 Susan Rosenberg, “Choreography as Visual Art”, October 140 (Spring, 2012): 27. 6 First performed in 1971 with twelve dance students and in 1973 by Carmen Beuchat, Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Nancy Green, Suzanne Harris, Elsi Miranda, Emmett Murray, Sylvia Palacios, Eve Poling, Sarah Rudner, Nanette Seivert, and Valda Setterfield. 7 The experience was repeated at the Whitney Museum in 2010 in the context the exhibition Off the Wall: Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown. 8 From conversation with Dorothée Alemany of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. 9 “Trisha Brown: An Interview” in Contemporary Dance, edited by Ann Livet (New York: Abbeville Press, 1978), 48. 10 Trisha Brown in Joyce Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 64. 4
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TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer Trisha Brown Associate Artistic Directors Carolyn Lucas Diane Madden Project Director Tony Orrico Executive Director Barbara Dufty
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EQUIPMENT PIECE Floor of the Forest (1970) Visual Presentation: Trisha Brown First performed by: Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat in and around 80 Wooster Street, NYC April 18, 1970 Performers: Cast Centro de Producción de Danza Contemporánea (CEPRODAC): Stéphanie Janaina and Sheila Rojas; Irasema Sánchez and Edith Pérez; Juan Madero and Jorge Ronzón; Gersaín Piñón and Yonatan Espinosa. Assistant director: Ricardo Rodríguez. Understudy: Pol Hurtado, Ulises González, Kenya Murillo. Tony Orrico (Project Director) Tony Orrico was a member of Trisha Brown Dance Company from 2006-2009 during which he was an original cast member in I love my robots. He also performed in Foray Forêt, PRESENT TENSE, how long does the subject linger on the volume…, Set and Reset, Groove and Countermove, Geometry of Quiet and the Early Works. He has directed the restaging of Floor of the Forest and Drift, setting Ms. Brown’s work at South Bank Centre, United Kingdom; Tate Modern, United Kingdom; ICA, United States; Hasselt’s Triennial for Contemporary Art, Belgium; flux/S, Netherlands; and Kunstsammlung, Germany. Orrico
is a visual artist, choreographer and performer. His Penwald Drawings have been presented and exhibited internationally, attracting attention from prominent collectors and institutions. He presented a solo exhibition, CARBON in April 2012 at Polyforum Siqueiros in Mexico City. Trisha Brown Company, Inc. www.trishabrowncompany.org Trisha Brown. Floor of the Forest May 8 - July 21 2013 Curator: Julieta González Assistant curator: Ximena Amescua Editorial coordinator: Arely Ramírez Moyao Design: Lídice Jiménez Uribe Consult events at: www.museotamayo.org Facebook: museotamayo Twitter: @museotamayo Instagram: eneltamayo Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec, México, D.F. 11580 Opening Times Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm Admission Fee $19.00 / General Public Free admission for students, teachers, and senior citizens with valid ID. Sunday: Free admission
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Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Rafael Tovar y de Teresa Presidente
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes María Cristina García Cepeda Directora general
Xavier Guzmán Urbiola Subdirector general de Patrimonio Artístico Inmueble
Mónica López Velarde Coordinadora Nacional de Artes Plásticas
Carmen Cuenca Carrara Directora del Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Plácido Pérez Cué Director de Difusión y Relaciones Públicas