THE RELATION BETWEEN DANCE AND ARCHITECTURE. Talking about Trisha Brown and Sasha Waltz Research by Alessia Fortuna for the 37th World Dance Research Congress Introduction In the dance the body occupies and at the same time creates the space, as well as the performative activity gives meaning and dynamic place in which it is placed. The movement is penetrated by the space and it is conditional on the physical, perceptual and emotional. The same environment in which we live becomes, in fact, our way of being in the world and participates in the construction of individual subjectivity, which is reflected again in the way of creative and performing the dance. With this brief research, I wanted to emphasize that two choreographer who used theater buildings not born then as containers for other (museums, factories ...), to investigate how these spaces are adapted to the performance and the latter as a once they have adapted to these places. The two artists are: Trisha Brown and Sasha Waltz, the first since the sixties began his choreographic practice even outside the theater walls, and then bring them inside of theater to try in recent years new spaces, such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The second one since her early years as a choreographer began experimenting with alternative architectural spaces such as the Jewish Museum, the Schaubühne, the Neueus Museum in Berlin and the MAXXI in Rome, and even today her choreographic practice while returning to the stage of a real theater, reports the lived experiences made within these alternative spaces.
TRISHA BROWN NO SPACES BETWEEN ORTHODOX AND THEATRE The motion of movement of Trisha Brown have changed with the passage of time. Her career as a composer during the Sixties and Seventies has allowed us to lay the foundations for the construction of a style of movement, already started from Körperkultur in the early decades of the century in Germany. The breakthrough technology of the Sixties and the emergence of certain modes of dance such as Contact Improvisation also have allowed Brown to develop a type of personal movement, without encoding it in a real language. The key word of his work is change, expressed surprise at the urgent desire of new discoveries. The visual identity of Brown, to be traced in the process of invention and reinvention. It is placed in front of each new stimulus by herself increasingly focusing "on the present moment of creation, allowing the chaos and the unexpected to sneak in a rigorous planning ..."1. Fundamental in his work is improvisation that allows you to give life to new structures and movement process different types of creations. This research is developed from improvisation freedom of movement starting with the completion of tasks, these are the so-called task dances, dances that reflect the desire to 1
R. Mazzaglia, Danza e spazio. Le metamorfosi dell'esperienza artistica contemporanea, Mucchi Editore, Modena, 2012, p.169.
know the functioning of the body and the physical processes put in place outside of a specific style of movement, or even in daily tasks rather.
The space in the performance of Trisha Brown To better understand the work of Brown, it is useful to retrace his artistic maturity, stressing the importance of the place for his works. In fact the place is not seen simply as a stage, or place in which it occurs artistic representation, but has a true symbiotic relationship with it, as it influences the movement and part of it. It was during the seventies that Trisha Brown, is dedicated to creating performance in urban places and unusual for the dance. Of this experiment are part of the Early Works, which include: •
La Chanteuse (1963)
•
Falling Duet (I) (1968)
•
Planes (1968)
•
Skymap (1969)
•
The Stream (1970)
•
Floor of the Forest (1970)
•
Leaning Duets (1970)
•
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)
•
Accumulation (1971)
•
Walking on the Wall (1971)
•
Roof Piece (1971)
•
Group Primary Accumulation (1973)
•
Spanish Dance (1973)
•
Scallops (1973)
•
Raft Piece (1973)
•
Sticks (1973)
•
Figure 8 (1974)
•
Drift (1974)
•
Spiral (1974)
•
Locus (1975)
I decided to take a look at some of the trials of the Early Works, also placing them in the spaces Trisha Brown has recently used to reproduce his work. Among his works are emblematic involving innovative use of space, we can remember and retrace Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Man walking Down the Side of a Building, 80 Wooster Street, New York, NY, April 18, 1970
This performance is the first in a long series of experiments in which the dance comes from conventional places to move in different areas of the city roofs, lofts, galleries. In these early works, the American choreographer chooses not to use dramaturgical ideas for his creations, preferring to focus attention on the performance of simple tasks, such as, in this case, the mechanics of the act of walking. The dance is the dancer's descent down a eight-storey building at number 80 Wooster Street in Manhattan, New York, equipped with mountaineering equipment. The descent is walking perpendicular to the building, with arms withheld at the sides of the body, in a natural way (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Tate Modern The description that Brown offers the whole process is the following: "The natural activities under the stress of an unnatural environment. Gravity denied. A large scale. Clear order. Parties to the top, walk straight down, you stay on the ground.2 " This experiment is only the beginning of a journey that will continue to evolve in the Early Works, in fact the idea of "walk on walls" will be resubmitted by the choreographer in an enclosed space inside the Whitney Museum of American Art, to Walking on the Wall, where the Brown and other performers, supported by slings hanging from the ceiling, walked around on the walls (Figure 3), sometimes "jumping with a jump parallel to the floor.3"
Figure 3. Walking on the Wall
2 3
http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_06/sep06/gw_rev_trisha_brown_0506.htm Ibidem.
On this occasion, the dancers were suspended with ropes around the columns of the walls of the museum. Trisha Brown plays with perspective, in fact, "For a moment it seems that you are the one suspended in space, not the dancers.4" The thought that accompanies these works, starting with Man Walking Down the Side of a Building is "the identification and deconstruction of dance as a spatial experience. Trisha Brown is looking at her public performance in a different way, by turning metaphysical truths, literally, on their head.5 " The audience could see only ever a part of the performance: this partial view was easily dictated by the constraints of the architectural point of view or by natural obstacles with respect to the vision of trees, buildings and structures. Because of this split perspective, no one can see the whole performance (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Tamara Riewe in Spiral
The Early Works at MAXXI After twenty years of experimentation in churches, streets, museums, parks and other spaces nonOrthodox, in 1979 created the first choreography for the stage Glacial Decoy and within a few years come to the realization of his masterpiece Set and reset 1983, indicating that the adjustment to a more traditional context did not involve himself in an erosion of the creative research. In October of 2011, with the RomaEuropa Festival, the Trisha Brown Dance returns in non-theatrical spaces, with the inauguration of the MAXXI Museum in Rome. 4 5
G. Kourlas, A Twist on Getting Dressed: Try Doing It While Dangling in “The New York Times”, 14 febbraio, 2010. Ibidem.
The MAXXI, arises from the competition organized by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture and carried out by the DARC (Directorate General for Architecture and Contemporary Art) and won by the architect Zaha Hadid's winning proposal, submitted in 1998. It provides a great cultural center with a museum inside for the arts of the twentieth century, a museum of architecture, space for experimental activities, library, auditorium, reception, bar and restaurant, shops, offices, service areas and public spaces to open. The program that Trisha Brown has presented at MAXXI is a selection of some of the most significant works of the first period, created when Trisha Brown founded his company. The Early Works presented back to the years 1970 - 1974 and are composed of seemingly simple movements that combine to become complex choreography. In the program are flanked by some as the first Italian Scallops or Leaning Leaning Duets and Duets II, where the relationship between balance and imbalance is disassembled and reassembled, to work more known as Spanish Dance, which uses as a soundtrack song Early Morning Rain interpretation Bob Dylan, and Accumulation of Grateful Dead music. Sticks and Figure 8 instead are designed as true architecture marked by the bodies of the dancers. The space of the MAXXI has not been exploited in its entirety, in fact, the performance took place between the ground floor (floor 0) and the first floor (1). The performance begins with Sticks II and Group Primary Accumulation, floor 0 of the Museum (Figure 5), in 1 gallery.
Figure 5. Gallery 1 floor 0 Sticks II is one of the many types of experiments that Brown creates relying on an object, a long rod, to seek balance (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Sticks II Group Primary Accumulation (Figure 7) is derived from the movement of material Primary Accumulation of 1972, in which a supine figure overlaps systematically moved in eighteen thirty minutes through the rotation at forty-five degrees, each of the last two steps until you have completed the ride to 360 degrees. Primary Group Primary Accumulation becomes Accumulation May 16, 1973 when it is executed in the courtyard of the McGraw Hill Building, Spring Dance Festival in New York.
Figure 7. Group primary Accumulation During the presentation at the Walker Art Center on November 9, 1974, adds another level to the movement: the dance is performed on a raft floating in the lagoon of Loring Park in the Rain (Figure 8). This setting introduces another dimension to the choreography: the relationship of the dancers to each other and their orientation in space was determined by the water current, which in turn dictated by the wind.
Figure 8. Group Primary Accomulation in Loring Park The performance then continue on the ground floor of the MAXXI, the gallery 4 with Leaning Duets II, Accumulation, Leaning Duets I, Scallops Re-worked and Figure 8. In Leaning Duets II, couples are facing each other, the big toes are touching, and the dancers become unbalanced back, holding a maximum of ropes that are attached to the wooden board placed behind their hips. Maintaining the posture and going one another in various directions through voice commands moving in space (Figure 9).
Figure 9. Leaning Duets II
The solo Accumulation, humorous and legendary is based on a simple expedient of adding a gesture to another, one at a time, repeating the sequence, which grows from time to time, with each new movement. "Although it is not the intention of the dancer, the dance is nevertheless full of personal emotions of the dancer that responds to the physical action of the movement and to the public6" (Figure 10).
6
Programm MAXXI, Early Works, 18-19-22 Ottobre 2011.
Figure 10. Accumulation In Leaning Duets I, the dancers walk in pairs, holding the arms, giving themselves to each other verbal instructions (Figure 11). While their bodies tend towards the outside, the edges of their feet instead meet in the middle.
Figure 11. Leaning Duets I
A test of balance and confidence witty, Leaning Duets I represents the choreographer Brown experiments with the capture, on the loss and regaining of gravity.7 " With eyes closed and lined up one behind the other, is the arrangement in space taking the dancers in Figure 8. "A row as when the flight attendants demonstrate the safety measures on a plane. 8" The right arm is arched laterally and upward over his head, and back then in the opposite direction, the left arm is raised sideways and arched over his head (Figure 13). The dancers perform in unison movements. 7 8
G. Kourlas, Dance and Art Play Off Each Other in “New York Times”, 15 Novembre, 2009. Ibidem.
Figure 13. Figure 8 The Early Works retained their charge and visionary return to the public after many years, the climate, the hopes and energies of a group of artists from New York has dramatically changed the dance, his relationship with the visual arts, the use of space and the relationship with the audience. These experiments, with their light weight (because they last for a few minutes) are an opportunity to measure the relevance of the proposals, in a time when artistic creation, in addition to more structured forms, seems to rediscover the need for a more intimate search even outside of the theater spaces canons.
SASHA WALTZ TESTING ALTERNATIVE SPACES The contemporary art world seems to have, in recent years, more and more interest in the practice choreography, to the point of including it in the programming of its exhibition spaces and museums, classifying it as a "performance." Insert the dance in museums and galleries, however, involves the redefinition of some parameters such as space, time, the interaction with the artworks and with the viewer. The space of the museum is structurally different from the space of the theater, there is a stage and there is not necessarily a united front to the public. In the space of the museum there is no general time frame theatrical canon composed of a beginning and an end, but you can think of fragmentation or repetition. Moreover, we should not only taking into account the museum as a container but also the relationship that develops between the dance and the contents of the museum. Finally, the public, are buying multiple roles: it can be a simple user, or it can interact and even decide from which perspective also watch the performance. Marten Spangberg, performance artist who lives and works in Stockholm, has written two handbooks that seem to want to build the foundation of the manifesto of the dance in museums. The central assumption is that the museum Spangberg, defined as "a place full of inanimate objects, is out today." Now more and more people want actions, not objects, and in this dance can come in handy to animate the exhibition spaces. As well as Trisha Brown with his Early works led the dance in a museum space, another choreographer Sasha Waltz, the last two decades has experienced alternative spaces.
In this chapter I have examined the trials of this choreographer Dialogue, called "Architektin unter der Coreographen" offers four different areas: the Jewish Museum, the Schaubühne, the Neues Museum in Berlin and the MAXXI in Rome.
The Dialogue '99 within the Jewish Museum in Berlin "Architecture is a language" this is the concept that nourishes the architecture of Daniel Libeskind and is materialized through one of his most important works: the Jüdisches, opened in 2001. Originally, the project was designed to expand the existing historic building of the Berlin Museum (Figure 14), entering the Baroque district, southern Friedrichstadt, destroyed during the war.
Figure 14. The Jüdisches The idea of extension and integration of existing Museum is disrupted by a project that summarizes the history of the Jews in Germany. The architect has called his project "between the lines" because it is right in between a series of intersecting lines that gives life to an old building with a facade very broken, which incorporates the geometric shape of a lightning bolt (Figure 15) , hence the nickname blitz, which in German means precisely lightning.
Figure 15. View from above
The Holocaust room is one of the places where Sasha Waltz in 1999 during the opening of the Jewish Museum in Liebeskind made her performance. The place is quiet, so much so that to make the background music are the movements of the dancer, his breaths and the impact of his body on the floor. Recreate the condition of the deported Jews who did not know of where they were and could not have news. The dancer is almost naked, wearing only a white underwear, his movements are jerky and heavy, they tend to gravitate to the dancer down (Figure 16).
Figure 16. Dancer in the Holocaust room Symbolic becomes a metal ladder about two feet from the floor, a means of salvation and hope that nourished the minds of the Jews, here is unattainable, as well as the salvation of many of them. The second performance that shows in this environment is a choreographer of the group. Two small groups of women only, half-naked, with a flesh-colored pant and a circle on the head from which descend on the breast almost to the ground two long fabric-like scarves. Knees are protected by the knee black. Their bodies seem to move as if they were automatons, with outstretched arms, they collide with the wall of the tower, bouncing back and forth (Figure 17). Each time you touch the wall they fall to the ground a white powder, as if they wanted to find a way out digging.
Figure 17. Dancer in the Holocaust room
During the course of a sudden the matter "dematerialize" the full is emptied to lead the visitor to ponder. The emptiness, the dominant theme of the museum is of great significance: the impossibility of bridging centuries of suffering and pain. Only sometimes the silence is broken by the sound of the cold metal; visitors who are venturing into the great void tread a dense and stunning expanse of small faces of iron barred from the mouth in a scream (Figure 18).
Figure 18. Dancer in the Holocaust room Then we reach the second axis that leads to the Garden of Exile; through a glass door enters in apparent contact with the outside. A high concrete wall surrounds the square area of the garden so that from the outside you can’t see anything. The stairs are exploited by Sasha Waltz to walk the dancers, in line side by side, wearing only the underwear again. Their steps have a unequal rhythm, their face has a blank expression and walking following the sides of the walls adjacent to the stairs (Figure 19).
Figure 19. Dancer on the stairs
The linearity of this walk symbolizes the continuity of history and awareness of the fact that life goes on, that there is a hope of salvation. As a reminder of the unpredictability of the story, however, there are plots of structural beams inclined, as shrapnel, penetrate the walls walking parallel to the scale (Figure 20).
Figure 20. Museum structure The only larger spaces, which testify to the "vacuum" are used by Sasha Waltz for a group performance. The dancers initially crouching along a wall, slowly approach each other, becoming a set of naked bodies, piled between them (Figure 21), which recall precisely the image of the bodies of Jews lifeless in the concentration camps.
Figure 21. Accumulation of bodies The oblique lines of the building Liebeskind are "structurally and emotionally also the choreography by Sasha Waltz, marked by diagonal lines and broken inside the individual gestures in the overall composition9", in fact the choreographer also used the space of the museum, creating lightning performance passing from one space to another, as when the dancers, dressed in black chase or run away in search of shelter within the walls and columns of the museum (Figure 22).
9
C. GRAZIOLI, Architetture
Figure 22. Simultaneous performance
The Neues Berlin The Neues (Figure 23) is in the heart of the Museums Insel (Museum Island), the northern part of the Spree in central Berlin. Currently belonging to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulterbesitz (Prussian Cultural Foundation). It was built between 1841 and 1859 to accommodate the Egyptian collection: the architect Friedrich August Stüler, gave the building a strong classical appearance.
Figure 23. Neues Museum
Dance and architecture, both arts ensemble and commissioning relationship in space, made their debut together in the environments of the Neues Museum on the day of the opening. The daughter of an architect, Sasha Waltz adheres without hesitation to the context within which inserts its creation and defines the event a "temporary exhibition" and a "Vernissage". In this Dialogue is the focus for the whole, the individual choreographies are no longer, as in the '99 Dialogue to the Jewish Museum, independent or flash situations, but they conform to each other, with the orchestration, and with the architecture.
"The individual performance established between them, with the music and with the architecture, created in 1859 by Friedrich August Stüler and re-released in the history of the restoration of David Chipperfield, a large breath.10" Each dance has a different character but all participate in creating the unit. Seventy artists: dancers from Sasha Waltz & Guests, others who have worked in the past, singers and musicians from Vocalconsort Kaleidoskop. Interaction is not random, just think that Kaleidoskop is a group of musicians (14 strings) committed to re-read and re-contextualize the works of various periods investigating the relationships with other artistic fields. In their manifesto you can read "The final caleidoscopizzazione of the world, where old and new act in the struggle and dialogue. The music meets architecture, dance, drama, literature, and the light "Even the voices of the Vocalconsort through early music and baroque to contemporary music coming. From here you can see that Sasha Waltz as the architect Chipperfield has given importance to the union of old and new, creating a sense of continuity and amalgamating all the arts. Ten Performances begin in the basement and the ground floor of the Neues unison (Figure 24).
Figure 24. Performance together Subsequently, an interlude makes the spectators gather in the same place: the great staircase, where all the dancers perform the choreography together, using the entire space (Figure 25).
Figure 25. Using the entire space During the execution of the pieces danced, which are proposed in different environments, it may happen that a dance move from one room to another, but also that a group of dancers beginning of a change in silence respecting exactly the rhythm or melody of the musicians involved in another room, and that only at
10
G. Grazioli, Architetture: Sasha Waltz “dialoga” con gli spazi del Neues Museum, in “Drammaturgia.it”, 6 aprile 2009.
a later time, over and abandoned the previous situation, they move and fit in the visual score with their voices. Sounds so, that permeate through the spaces and, calibrated in such a way that it can be exploited in more salt and simultaneously so as not to invade areas of silence. The dancers take advantage of the space in every direction, including vertical for example walking on the walls. Outdoor environments are also involved in the performance so that the dancers perform on the cornice of the building (Figure 26).
Figure 26. Outdoors The Dialogue of Sasha Waltz in the Neues Museum in Berlin, have been turned into a video performance that you can see and re-see online at sashawaltz.neuesmuseum.com (Figure 27).
Figure 27. Digital performance The choreographer explains in an interview that "In the Neues Museum every detail, every column, every arc has been continually questioned. In this way they were born incredibly individual spaces. 11" The experiences of the Neues Museum in Berlin, as well as those of the Maxxi in Rome (2009), also return to its recent creation Continuum, which Sasha Waltz has presented November 2 at the Auditorium of the Conciliation of Rome.
11
G. Grazioli, Architetture: Sasha Waltz..., op.cit.
To jump to the eye, the cone famous "walking on the wall" and the circular joints in the running, the more suggestions, the ideas of movement and the figures taken from the site-specific situations (Figure 28)
Figure 28. Continuum As the same choreographer says in the interview made during the evening: "In both works the appearance of the dialogue is very present. The works are interconnected: there are traces of the works conceived for museums in this latest creation Continuum. 12"
Conclusion This trend which is here today, as an extension of the Sixties, to make urban performance, rather than in art galleries or groups who usually have a different social function, as well as enjoyment, confirms the existence of several places where the dance fits and performs.
12
Metamondi 2013, Interview to Sasha Waltz. http://www.bufu.org/video/metamondi-2013-intervista-sasha-waltz/
