Geneva, Handfall: Drawings
- Geneva, Handfall:Drawings
Click for larger view
View full resolution
A drawing by Trisha Brown from Geneva, Handfall. Pen on paper, 11. x 14. Photo: Courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company and Toki no Wasuremono.
[End Page 51]
Click for larger view
View full resolution
All images courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Gallery Toki no Wasuremono.
[End Page 52]
These were the first drawings I made following an accident that broke my wrist the year before. The Company and I were in Geneva. I was in my dressing room directly underneath the stage while a performance of Twelve Ton Rose was in progress overhead. I could hear the dancers' feet fall and joined them singing along with Webern's music, profoundly engaged.
The system was to take my contorted hand, palm-rotating, fingers splayed, with space like a grotto beneath. I drew as fast as I could go because the hand was falling onto its side, or turning with the thumb as an axis—a probing pen chasing the hand into and out of a stream of awkward positions. Again and again these strange creatures collapsed their way across the page from splat to splat. [End Page 53]
Click for larger view
View full resolution
All images courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Gallery Toki no Wasuremono.
[End Page 54]
Click for larger view
View full resolution
All images courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Gallery Toki no Wasuremono.
[End Page 55]
Click for larger view
View full resolution
All images courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Gallery Toki no Wasuremono.
[End Page 56]
Click for larger view
View full resolution
All images courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Gallery Toki no Wasuremono.
[End Page 57]
Trisha Brown is one of the most innovative choreographers in contemporary dance, beginning with her early days as a founder of the Judson Dance Theater and continuing on with her twentieth-first century experiments using robots on stage (I love my robots). She founded her own company in 1970, creating since then numerous pieces of great range and complexity, exemplified by those that defied gravity (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building), collaborations with artists Robert Rauschenberg (Set/Reset) and Terry Winters (El Trilogy), works in opera (Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Salvatore Sciarrino's Luci Mie Traditrici), and musical settings (Franz Schubert's Winterreise). In addition to her pure dance pieces, such as the recent Foray Forèt, Brown also created O zlolony O composite, based on the poetry of Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, with the collaboration of visual artist Vija Celmins and composer Laurie Anderson. Another of her newer dances, how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . incorporates new digital technologies with the assistance of The OpenEnded Group. Brown has exhibited her work as a visual artist in galleries, museums, and at Documenta, and she continues her frequent collaborations with contemporary painters and sculptors in works staged in major opera houses and theatres on several continents. Among her many awards of distinction are the National Medal of Arts, MacArthur Fellowship, Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Benois de la Danse Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
Endnotes
Other PAJ features in the ongoing series "Performance Drawings"—
1. "The Threepenny Opera," by Robert Wilson, PAJ 88 (January 2008). [End Page 58]
