Dance Techniques 2010

276 Historical Context
‘Trisha Brown Workshops’, which were a mixture of
Trisha Brown repertory, his own dance material, and
the technical information that he was exploring. Staying
true to her priorities as a maker of dance material, Trisha
Brown herself never taught the developing Release and
Alignment Oriented Technique, nor did she have a desire
to form a technique that bore her name. As her name was
well known in France, it was used when ensemble members
like Gries taught technique classes, and thus the myth
of a Trisha Brown Technique came into being.
Gries taught Release and Alignment starting in the
1990s at educational institutions around Europe, most
notably at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, founded by Anne Teresa
De Keersmaeker. In contrast to other release teachers like
Mary Fulkerson, who cultivated a calm and introspective
mode of research, he structured a teaching course using
similar techniques that engaged a broad range of physicality,
allowing students to develop a technical base from
internal sensation and building it into high energy technical
dancing. He developed courses in which the group
collectively familiarized themselves with Alexander Technique
(as reworked by June Ekman through hands–on 10
partner work), through their own explorations based on
improvisational structures to be used alone, with partners,
and in the group. The goals at the time were functional
joint work, comparative anatomy, and training perception
within large movement sequences that used the space
expansively.
Relation to Other Art Forms
Grand narratives were passé in American art by 1945 at
the latest. Now the material itself was being explored. In
painting, Abstract Impressionism emerged as the successor
to European Dada and Surrealism. Jackson Pollock
created energetic ‘action paintings’ with color that went
well beyond any figurativeness or representation. Society’s
reality and reproducibility became a topic and material for
art: Andy Warhol duplicated prints of Campbell soup cans
and media spectacles of tragedies like car crashes. In music,
John Cage abandoned melodies and chords and, like
the Italian Futurists before him, explored the phenomenon
of the experience of sound itself; noises edged into the music
and the arrangements became scores, i.e., directions
about how they were to be played were graphically similar
to arrangements, and progression was often composed, or
not composed, with the assistance of the Chinese I Ching.
Interpreters became more important, could make decisions
for themselves, and follow their own tempo. Listening,
thus the very process of sensing, became central. The
practice of meditation also made its way into the musical
experience: inviting and permitting silence as well as everyday
noise, and accepting it non-judgmentally. Improvisation—alone
and in a group—became a building block of
twentieth century classical music.
Dance also turned its back on the grand psychological
narratives of modern dance, like those of Martha Graham.
Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, and in the next
generation, from 1960 onward, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha
Brown, and Steve Paxton, explored the body’s autonomy
and its potential for movement. At this time, the issue was
non-decorative movement that did not refer to anything;
instead, movement was organized on a purely functional
basis. Pop Art led the way: ‘The Real’ was a topic. For
Release—oriented Techniques today, Lance Gries says, “I
am inhabiting my arm. I can lift my arm. And to be clear:
not my arm, but my arm.” So this is no longer about the
dancing ‘self’ that inhabits the body and senses, but about
the physical reality of movement.
At this time the ‘real’ meant not just the body’s physique,
an object, or an action, but also those of everyday
life. Art and life permeated one another. While Anna
Halprin and dancers from the Judson Dance Theater like
Trisha Brown brought everyday movements into dance—
such as walking, standing, stacking bottles, frying pancakes,
lying down, and sweeping the floor—visual artists
brought Happenings to everyday locations like riversides
or intersections. With the beginning of the Fluxus movement,
intercommunication thrived between the American
East and West Coasts, putting the focus on ‘direct action’
performances that took place in real life in reaction to societal
and political events. The arts informed each other
reciprocally; visual artists, theater people, dancer–choreographers,
and music composers worked together on
projects. Merce Cunningham and John Cage are a prominent
example.
The everyday entered into all fields of art and life: in
literature, Allen Ginsberg berated his country in the long
prose poem Howl, using supermarket metaphors. In On
the Road, Jack Kerouac recounted the collective vagabond
life without a period or comma, one that Bob Dylan also
celebrated in song. In dance, Yvonne Rainer gave away
her Trio A to a variety of trained (and untrained) bodies,
who then proceeded to pass it along. In Satisfyin’ Lover,
Steve Paxton had a group of laypeople execute pedestrian
movement, like walking, before he increasingly focused on
communicative encounters with physical parameters, like
the actual weight of the body.
10 Hands–on is widely used in American
English to describe both physical touch as
well as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in
various body–work techniques.
11 Lance Gries in conversation with Gabriele
Wittmann, Frankfurt, 14 October 2009.