This is the first solo exhibition in South America dedicated to the choreographer, dancer, and pioneering artist Trisha Brown (Patricia Ann Brown, Aberdeen, Washington, United States, 1936 – San Antonio, Texas, United States, 2017), and includes works she produced between 1963 and 2005. The exhibition inaugurates the cycle Histories of Dance at the museum, bringing together a set of 156 works: photographs and films of choreographies by Brown and her company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company (formed in 1970), as well as drawings and scores/diagrams that represent her dances.
Since the 1960s, Brown radicalized this art form in different ways: through the emphasis on improvisation as a means of creation, the insertion of dance into daily life, and the incorporation of common everyday movements into her choreographies — hence the inspiration for the exhibition’s title, Choreographing Life. The Judson Dance Theater (1962– 1964), a collective that Brown joined in New York alongside artists like Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, performed unconventional performances that sought a break with the rigid and dogmatic traditions of classical and modern dance practices. As part of that generation, Brown took her work out of the sites where dance was usually performed (for example, the theater stage), creating pieces for urban spaces such as the roofs of building, parking lots, and parks.
This exhibition is divided into eight sections, based on their concepts and directions of the work, including: “Democratic Body,” “Against Gravity,” “Relaying Gestures,” “Accumulations,” “Moving Diagram,” “Contradictory Impulse,” “Dance Machines,” and “Drawing, Performing.” Trisha Brown: Choreographing Life aims to highlight the complex relationships between dance and its visual representations — in video, photography, drawing, and notation. The show also considers Brown’s engagement with combining dance and other areas of knowledge (mathematics, geography, architecture, and the strategies of conceptual art).
CURATED BY André Mesquita, Curator, MASP
