Like Sculptures Constantly in Flux
Published: May 3, 2010
"To watch Trisha Brown’s best dances, particularly the early ones, is to be aware of how little a choreographer has to do to hold the stage: a single idea, developed with rigor and presented with clarity, is often all it takes.
This same principle is thrown into relief when you walk through the marvelously alive rooms of Dia:Beacon, gazing at works by masters of the essential like Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin and Donald Judd. So it is especially satisfying to see the Trisha Brown Dance Company perform in these rooms, surrounded by Ms. Brown’s peers: several of the artists represented at Dia, including Judd, number among her visual art collaborators.
...
Flux and solidity vie in "Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503" (1980), in which four performers slip and tangle through the shimmering, decentralized space created by Fujiko Nakaya’s “cloud sculpture,” a roiling bank of machine-generated fog backlighted by Beverly Emmons’s warm lighting design.
Seen in Dia:Beacon's cavernous basement, the work’s spooky, otherworldly qualities came to the fore. Ms. Brown is adept at subverting traditional notions of how choreography develops; much like the misty cloud, the dancers momentarily cohered into larger, shared themes, only to melt away along individual trajectories"
"With 1978's
Accumulation with Talking plus Water Motor, a complex solo combining elements of three other pieces, she demonstrated a mental and physical virtuosity seldom seen in the dance world, then or now. Brown's rigorous structures, combined with pedestrian or simple movement styles and tongue-in-cheek humor brought an intellectual sensibility that challenged the mainstream "modern dance" mindset of this period."
Wikipedia
Trisha Brown
ARTseenSOHO: Free Measures: drawings
"Trisha Brown has played a vital role in contemporary American choreography for over thirty-five years. Begun as private notations, many of her drawings contribute to her choreographic process. As she puts it, drawing "sits in the air between me and my dancers..." In turn, she has come to see choreography as a kind of drawing. "Whether they are in air or on paper, it's a whole other vista of possibility, another way of thinking about the body moving in space that frees me up to do things I would never think of doing in dance." - paraphrased from an essay by Hendel Teicher, who organized the exhibition.
Karin Davie with Joan Waltemath
by Joan Waltemath
"On the occasion of her traveling mini-survey featuring 41 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which began last month on February 23rd at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo,
Rail contributing editor Joan Waltemath visited Karin Davie’s Lower East Side studio to discuss her life and work.
Rail: When I first saw your paintings I understood that you were painting stripes as a genre though you had made a great deal of references to Trisha Brown. Could you elaborate more on that?
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Karin Davie, “Between My Eye and Heart No. 18”
84" by 108", oil/canvas, 2005.
Courtesy: Mary Boones Gallery, New York. |
Davie: Well, I‘ve always been interested in her work because of the way she dealt with the mechanics of the body, the edges and where they lie, the sense of natural gravity that she uses and defies at the same time, and how she was able to extend all of that beyond the boundary of the stage, out of the concert hall into other alternative spaces like rooftops and walls as well as gallery spaces."
