Trisha Brown (1936-2017)

Major partners of the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary

Major partners of
the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary

A suivre:

Abbé Perrin (Director of...

Directors, ballet masters, stage directors, choreographers, architects... Octave discovers the personalities that have marked the history of the Opera which continues to attract the great names of music and dance.

Trisha Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington State. She studied classical dance and then trained in various modern techniques at Mills College, and in California, before turning towards improvisation. In 1960, she moved to New York where she studied under Merce Cunningham and attended the composition workshops of the musician and teacher Robert Ellis Dunn. Whilst there, she would meet the young artists who would soon shake the foundations of American modern dance to create post-modern dance. In 1962, they and Brown would became founding members of the Judson Church Dance Theatre, an avant-garde minimalist movement that brought together painters, musicians and choreographers. Trisha Brown presented her research in unusual and original sites, such as her “antigravitational dances” which explored the walls of New York’s skyscrapers. In 1970, she created her own company and opened up new territories, envisaging her work in cycles, each one pioneering a new interpretation of movement. In the 1990s, after long favouring silence to highlight the innate musicality of a dancing body, Trisha Brown initiated a series of new cycles focused on the relationship between music and dance. In 2003, with some hundred choreographic works to her credit, she was invited by the Paris Opera for a four-season cycle featuring the entry of Glacial Decoy into the repertoire, the world premiere of O zlozony / O composite (2004), a visit by the Trisha Brown Dance Company (2006) and the staging of Salvatore Sciarrino’s opera, Da gelo a gelo (2007).