Unidentified Rehearsals

This project begins with Trisha Brown (1936-2017), a groundbreaking choreographer, often seen as dance’s equivalent of better-known (male) contemporaries in other media — John Cage’s experimentalism, Sol Lewitt‘s minimalism, or the chaotic collages of Robert Rauschenberg, with whom she often collaborated. After years of institutional processing, her archives — notebooks, videos, drawings — are becoming available to researchers. But the fact that we have access doesn’t mean we know how to look at them. The aim of "Unidentified Rehearsals", a phrase taken from a label on one of her early rehearsal videos, is twofold: to learn how to work with her archives, and to teach how those lessons can inform artistic research more broadly.

Today we take a woman choreographer in her studio working with video for granted, but when Trisha began doing this every aspect of it was radical. Dancers might be women but (with few exceptions) choreographers were men; lofts were rough alternatives not lifestyle choices; and video was a cheap, reusable tool dismissed by cinema, museums, and academics. So it comes as no surprise that her videos blur the boundaries around artmaking: a dog walks by, someone pops in for a hug, the camera moves out of focus, then reframes to show dance through a new window. This kind of material is typically ignored as incidental; on the contrary, I will show how it was central to how she developed her work on every level, from fine-grained vocabulary to stage composition to, ultimately, the poetics of her bodies — as collages of limbs, as site-specific experiments, as polyrhythmic beings.

These observations are specific to Trisha’s work, but the lessons are broadly relevant. In speculative contexts — artistic and scientific — it’s far from clear what a “document” actually documents. With this project, I invite others to consider examples or parallels in their own domains and research — and why it’s essential to the questions posed by artistic research