Trisha Brown Dance Company

28 - 31 October 2009


The RED (Reggio Emilia Danza) Festival, part of the new Aperto Festival, which takes place next autumn in Reggio Emilia, presents the Early Works by Trisha Brown, one of the most prominent figures of contemporary dance.

The creativity of Trisha Brown has always gone hand in hand with experimentation and the avant-garde and, ever since her early days, with creating “alternative spaces” for the stage; in the Sixties and Seventies she was famous for her settings in car parks, streets, on building façades, Soho rooftops and in galleries.

Through collaboration with the Collezione Maramotti and the support of Max Mara, RED, in unison with the Trisha Brown Company, has chosen the Collezione building, once the headquarters of Max Mara’s firm, for the staging of Early Works on 28, 29 and 31 October 2009. The Collezione Maramotti, dedicated since its foundation to the exploration of new forms of expression, will also be hosting the choreographer in a public meeting on Monday 19 October 2009.
The six dances to be performed at the Collezione Maramotti, stripped down and essential in character and lasting between two and 15 minutes, were created by Brown between 1970 and 1973. Brown belongs to the “liberators of dance” group, and with her anti-narrative, anti-spectacular work she has broken traditional codes of representation and created a new choreographic language.

Already performed at prestigious international venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Early Works were created for performance by a variable number of dancers, from two to nine, in a complex, abstract dance, at times accompanied by music (Bob Dylan in Spanish Dance) and at times silent. The dance mingles, interacts and interrelates with the visual language of the paintings, sculptures and structures present at the venue which represent some of the foremost artistic tendencies that have emerged in Italy and the rest of the world since the end of the Second World War.
This coming together of languages with shared experimental roots gives visitors and audience the opportunity to rediscover a place of art and recollection and to enrich themselves with new inspiration.

Art historian Susan Rosenberg writes: “Celebrated by critics as the apogee of minimalism in dance, Brown's 1970s works, featured on the Reggio Emilia program, conceptualize choreography as a structure visible to the mind and eye. To see the "score" of Brown's work is to see an abstract architecture in which ephemeral movement unfolds according to systematic procedures. The container of individual movement, structure enables the viewer to perceive each physical gesture as original at the instance of its execution and in relation to the body of an individual dancer performing in three-dimensional space. Choreography and movement are visible, unique and object-like.”

The Trisha Brown Dance Company will also be performing at the Teatro Valli on 30 and 31 October in a programme featuring two Italian premières (L'Amour au théâtre, her latest creation and You Can See Us) in addition to her masterpiece Set and Reset.

Press-clipping selection


L. Cherubini, Trisha Brown. Dance Revolution, in "Flash Art", n. 279, Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010

L. Vergine, Le chimere dei corpi, in "Alias", 28 Nov. 2009

M. Guatterini, Trisha danza "minimal", in "Il Sole 24 Ore", 8 Nov. 2009

M. G. Minetti, Trisha Brown. "Fin da piccola volevo volare" in "La Stampa", 27 Oct. 2009

A. Lombardi, Trisha Brown. Dalla vita quotidiana a Bach. Ballando ballando, in "Il Venerdì di Repubblica", n. 1125, 9 Oct. 2009

C. Campanini, Trisha Brown. Astrazioni in volo, in "Arte", n. 434, Oct. 2009

S. D. Agostini, Gli Early Works di Trisha Brown alla Collezione Maramotti, in "Arte e Critica", n. 60, Sep./Nov. 2009