Dans les pas de Trisha Brown

Dans les pas de Trisha Brown, Marie-Hélène Rebois, France, 2016, 79’

On June 21, 1979, choreographer Trisha Brown premiered her work, Glacial Decoy, in New York. 18 minutes of silent movements with set and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg which, once again in the career of this pioneer artist, redefined the concepts and limits of contemporary dance and postmodernism.  Almost forty years later, the Paris Opera Ballet Company decided to revive the work, under the direction of Lisa Kraus and Carolyn Lucas. In this way, through the documentary proposal by Marie-Hélène Rebois, we are privileged witnesses to rehearsals, warm-ups, tests, repetitions, movements and attempts to rewrite/activate a work that is now mythical in the world of dance. And now, the questions that really interest us with regard to this cycle of artist portraits: How to convey movement?  How to write and read movement? Does the repetition and observation of Trisha’s movements bring back to us the image - the portrait - of Trisha? Can the re-interpretation of these dance notions be understood as a way of invocation? In the film, we see the choreographers recalling their experience with Trisha and trying to convey those feelings to the dancers. In the film we see footage of Trisha herself performing the work; we also see her company in the 1980s involved in different works and exploring the limits of movement, of gravity, of space and chaos. Artist portrait therefore, yes. An artist taking other bodies, another city, another stage and generating a new image, a new experience, a new self-portrait.