ABSTRACT
This essay considers the impact of choreographer Trisha Brown’s work on performative dimensions of Diller + Scofidio’s architecture, exploring the shared investment in multi disciplinarity that has been a key impetus for both Brown’s dances and Diller + Scofidio’s artistic and architectural projects. Correlations between Trisha Brown’s and Diller + Scofidio’s concerns with urban, spatial interventions; their common interest in choreographing the body’s and eyes’ relationship to architecture; and their mutual explorations of the body’s mediation by technology are part of another shared project – that of using dance and architecture to problematize and concentrate attention on visual perception. Examining this affiliation reveals that Trisha Brown’s ephemeral acts of choreography have endured through transfer to one of the most concrete, lasting art forms: in the architecture of one of today’s most vibrant, maverick design firms. Among the projects that will be discussed is the 2011 re-siting of Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece (1971/1973) on New York’s Highline (designed by Diller + Scofidio). While other scholars have claimed that this performance altered and diminished Brown’s original choreographic concept, this paper argues for the project’s announcement of a new dialogic relationship between Brown’s work and Diller + Scofidio’s theatricalization of 21st century urban space – in an extension of one of Brown’s key artistic principles: her work’s re-invigoration and re-authentication through its presentation in new contexts at different historical moments. Likewise, this text compares Brown’s 1980 collaboration with artist Fujiko Nakaya on Opal Loop to Diller Renfro + Scofidio’s work with Nakaya on their famous Blur building pavilion (2002) – another instance of transfer between artistic media – this time from dance and its atmospheric visual surround in a SoHo loft, to the creation of an architectural event sited on, and deriving its ephemeral cloud formation, from a lake in Switzerland, where the audience (not dancers) were performers. Ultimately this text argues for the ongoing contemporaneity of Brown’s artistic production as manifested in its concepts’ permanent residence within the experimental installations and built projects of Diller + Scofido, all completed two to three decades after Trisha Brown’s initial ground-breaking artistic research and multi-disciplinary choreographic experiments.
