This performance on the façade of Tate Modern re-stages a groundbreaking dance piece made by the American choreographer Trisha Brown in 1970. In April of that year, Brown strapped a male dancer into a mountaineering harness and sent him walking down the façade of a seven storey building at 80 Wooster Street in Manhattan, New York.

Brown, one of the most widely acclaimed choreographers to emerge from the Postmodern era, first came to public notice when she began showing her work with the Judson Dance Theater in New York in the 1960s. Along with like-minded artists including Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, she radically pushed the limits of what could be considered appropriate movement for contemporary dance. In common, these choreographers were interested in stripping dance of its illusionistic ‘magic’ and narrative to foreground the real weight and presence of the body and, in parallel with Minimalist artists’ use of industrial materials and simple shapes, they concentrated on treating simple tasks as the basis for movement, using ordinary objects as props.

In Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Brown was interested in creating 'a situation and an activity with a beginning, middle, and end,' thereby 'reducing the plethora of options available to artists at that time.' In the same period, she made a number of other site-specific works in the city including Roof Piece (1973) in which a number of dancers were positioned across the roof tops of the New York skyline, and Woman Walking Down a Ladder (also 1973) in which a female dancer walks down the ladder from one of city’s famous water towers.

www.trishabrowncompany.org

Part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend - Minimalist Monday

See Collection Display: Idea and Object

  Music & Performance