Abstract
When I enter the apartment on the first floor in Berlin Schöneberg, where the Musée de la danse is announced to take place, Rabih Mroué welcomes me and the others visitors. At the very first room, I encounter a workshop situation in which Shelley Senter, former dancer with Trisha Brown (one of the icons of postmodern dance) tries to teach some phrases of Primary Group Accumulation, a piece from 1973, to Claire Bishop, art historian and critic of relational and participatory aesthetics. Both are lying on the floor, and we are joining them. Primary Group Accumulation was the third piece set by the mathematical structure of accumulation, following the principle of a children’s game: A, AB, ABC, ABCD—repeating and adding one new element of movement after each repetition. Four dancers performed rotations and bending of the joints in unison; the easier and more everyday it looks, the harder it is to execute the movement in exact unison, with the right timing. The piece precisely negotiates the tension between the relatively simple structure, the non-virtuosic movement, and its interpretation—between “geometric order and corporal imprecision.”
Highlights
When I enter the apartment on the first floor in Berlin Schöneberg, where the Musée de la danse is announced to take place, Rabih Mroué welcomes me and the others visitors
One of the former dancers mentioned that the performers seemed to become objects while performing,[2] and several critics at that time and later certified the minimalist character of Brown’s choreographies.[3]
The Accumulation Pieces were not so much inspired by minimal art as critics suggest, but more by Brown’s interest in minimal deviation; in the very singular interpretation of each dancer and the slight differences that occurred in the process of interpretation
Summary
Entrance – repeating, learning, memorizing, synchronizing: looking at the body and being watched. Retracing dance is about relearning a choreography of given steps and movements, or reinterpreting older scores, but demands actualizing them, in order to refer to a specific contemporaneity and to transfer the conditions of artistic practice to this framework It seems reflective of the need to provide dance as an ephemeral art form with a sort of archival heritage, and to trace back the most recent history as long as the witnesses are still alive, but collecting its traces means moving beyond the already existing archival formats of notational devices of dance history and researching the intrinsic relation of reconstruction and reproduction. Their uses of scoring practices, inspired by John Cage and Anna and Lawrence Halprin,[8] fundamentally changed the binary relationship between choreography and dance, turning it into a more reciprocal one
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