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Foreword As part of the Museo Tamayo’s ongoing commitment to showcasing three-dimensional works in its “sculpture court”, we have initiated a program devoted to exhibiting spatialized sculptural practices that have emerged since the 1960s focusing on the expanded fields of traditional mediums that go beyond sculpture and into the domains of performance and dance. Moreover, this focus extends to works that engage the spectator’s participation. 3

This program will take place twice a year, and the staging of Trisha Brown’s 1970 choreographic and sculptural piece Floor of the Forest initiates this series, which will be followed in August by the presentation of some of the works produced by members of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel between 1960 and 1968 accompanied by a small documentary exhibition on the aforementioned artist group, organized by Andrea Torreblanca. The dancers participating at the Museo Tamayo are from the S Centro de Producción de Danza Contemporánea (CEPRODAC) of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Director: Raúl Parrao. The dancers were trained by choreographer Tony Orrico.

Synopsis Floor of the Forest (1970) is a dance/ CEPRODAC dancers: Stéphanie Janaina and Sheila Rojas; performance art piece staged for the first Irasema Sánchez and Edith Pérez; Juan Madero and Jorge time by Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat in 1970. The piece Ronzón; Gersaín Piñón and Yonatan Espinosa; Ricardo consists of a steel structure holding up a grid made of rope Rodríguez, asistente de dirección. and clothes. Two dancers move through the grid, dressing and undressing their way through the structure. At certain moments they pause and let gravity pull their bodies down towards the 4 ground. The public moves around the structure. Outside of 5 scheduled performance times, the piece functions as a sculpture. Schedule Premiere: May 8, 19:30 Performances: May 12 - July 21, 2013 This piece has been shown in various contexts—in theater Tuesdays and Thursdays: 13:00 and dance festivals as well as in performance art and contemporary Sundays: 12:00, 13:30, 15:00, 16:30 dance programs—at museums such as the Henry Art Gallery, The Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Barbican, and dOCUMENTA 12.

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Some brief notes on the work of Trisha Brown and Floor of the Forest Trisha Brown is one of the most original and innovative figures of contemporary dance, whose groundbreaking work redefined choreographic practice in the 1960s and 1970s in close relation to the artistic avant-gardes of the period. Born in 1936, Brown graduated from 7 Mills College in 1958, she trained, during summer workshops, with Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, Louis Horst and José Limón. In 1961 she moved to New York, where she contributed to the establishment of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962. Along with her peers and frequent collaborators Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton, she is considered one of the foremost representatives of post-modern dance.

Though we can identify the influence of early modernist choreographers such as Oskar Schlemmer and particularly Rudolf von Laban’s method of choreographic notation, the Kinetography Laban, on Trisha Brown’s conceptual approachto dance, her work can best be understood in the context of the New York avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s and the Bay Area counterculture of the same Trisha Brown © 1990 Lois Greenfield period. This was a time marked by departures from the constraints of medium specificity, the dissolution of boundaries between Once in New York and working with the other members of the genres, the dematerialization of the art object, and interdisciplinary Judson Dance Theater, including Robert Dunn, who had studied explorations that equally operated on choreographic and dance with John Cage, Brown began experimenting with duration, practices, which, in many respects, paralleled Minimalism’s chance, language, objects, and everyday movements. The spatialized approach and phenomenological concerns. As fellow collaborative environment of New York’s Soho neighborhood at that choreographer and dancer Simone Forti recently stated in an time was a hotbed for artistic experimentation and Trisha Brown interview “we were artists working with the medium of movement.”1 not only worked together with her fellow dancers at the nearby Judson Dance Theater but also collaborated with artists such A formative chapter in Brown’s early trajectory was the as George Maciunas, whose building at 80 Wooster Street served as summer workshop she took in 1960 with Anna Halprin in the Trisha Brown’s living quarters but was also the place from where she choreographer’s open-air dance deck designed by her husband, staged pieces such as Man Walking Down the Side of a Building architect Lawrence Halprin, and where Brown met Simone Forti, (1970), Roof Piece (1971), and Floor of the Forest (1970); Robert Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris, who would become frequent Rauschenberg, who designed the set and costumes for Glacial 8 collaborators and interlocutors. There, secluded among the Decoy (1979); Walter de Maria, who created a dance/vision for 9 trees and natural beauty of Marin County, the young artists learnt her in 1965; and Juan Downey for whom she performed Energy improvisation, task-based movements, and kinesthetic awareness Fields at 112 Greene Street in 1972 with Carol Goodden, Carmen from Anna Halprin; lessons that were to mark their individual Beuchat, Suzanne Harris and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others. practices and approaches to the interrelations between the body and space. Influenced by John Cage’s explorations of every day sounds3, Brown similarly experimented with everyday and basic movements One of the task-based exercises assigned to Brown during the of the body–standing, sitting, and lying down—which make up workshop was to sweep the deck with a broom; she concentrated the core of her first choreography,Trillium (1962) performed on the movement intensely until she propelled herself up in the air at the Maidman Playhouse in New York by Simone Forti, who also using the broom. In Brown’s words “I swept the floor for hours wrote the sound score. For Brown it was important to “break those and I went totally out of my mind. I was obsessively involved actions down to their basic mechanical structure, finding places with my job. I never really swept the floor, I took it as a dance of rest and power, momentum, and peculiarity (…) eventually structure, and action structure, and I held it.”2 This episode, accelerating and mixing up to a degree that lying down was done witnessed and described by Yvonne Rainer in several accounts, in the air.”4 is considered a pivotal one in Brown’s practice as it marked her future experimentation with gravity and the idea of bodies in flight. Homemade © 1989 Vincent Pereira Roof Piece © 1973 Babette Mangolte

In the mid-sixties Brown began integrating language but also objects, landmark gravity-defying pieces, Man Walking Down the Side harnesses, and pulleys to her choreographies. Homemade (1966), of a Building. Supported by a system of pulleys and ropes held performed at the Judson Memorial Church, was a collaboration with from the rooftop, dancer Joseph Schlichter walked down the side Robert Whitman in which Brown performed with a film projector of a seven-story building in Soho, his body parallel to the ground attached to her back. More importantly however was the series at a ninety degree angle from the wall.7 The 1971 and 1974 “off- of movements that she performed for this piece, “a succession of the-wall” pieces Walking on the Wall and Spiral similarly featured pedestrian behaviors of personal significance that she instructed dancers walking horizontally down a vertical surface, and, in the herself to perform “live”–not imitative “physical feats”—but as case of the latter, in a spiral motion down columns (originally at 383 representations of thought, demonstrating the mind’s connection West Broadway’s loft space where the piece was first performed), to the body.”5 their bodies parallel to the ground, making evident the tension between gravitational pull and the ropes holding them in place but Brown continued to push the limits of dance and choreography, also the strength of the dancer’s cores which enabled them to walk as well as to integrate other media such as film in her work, gracefully and seemingly effortlessly down the vertical plane. 12 notably in Planes (1968) in which dancers dressed in black and 13 white jumpsuits slowly moved across the surface of a wall, aided by a series of masked orifices which enabled them to climb and support themselves, onto which a film by Jud Yalkut was projected containing aerial footage of different locations including New York. The city itself would also prove to be another stage for Brown in her later Roof Piece (1971)6 performed on the roofs of several Soho buildings, an experiment in choreography as a site-specific and sculptural endeavor, but also as an act of communication; the dancers, dressed in red, would relay movements to one another from the rooftops of the buildings.

Ever since Brown took to the air propelled by a broom in Anna Halprin’s dance deck, defying gravity became a central concern in her work, either through simple bodily movements or aided by harnesses and rope-and-pulley systems which were never concealed from the audience. In 1970 Brown staged one of her Planes 3 © 2009 Julieta Cervantes Floor of the Forest © 2010 John Mallison

Floor of the Forest (1970) brings together many of Trisha Brown’s of the possibilities offered by the thinking body: “Do my movement fundamental concerns: task-based movements based on the and my thinking have an intimate connection? First of all I don’t everyday, such as dressing and undressing, performed with think my body doesn’t think.”10 the body in a horizontal position modulated by the force of gravity, also evidencing Brown´s interest in “shifting perspective 1 Andrew Boynton, No Mistakes: Simone Forti, The New Yorker online blog, http:// and the frame of the stage space.”8 Aside from addressing the www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/11/no-mistakes-simone-forti.html aforementioned imperatives, the work functions at the boundaries 2 Trisha Brown en Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance of dance, performance, and sculpture. (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 148. 3 “When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. (...) First performed in 1970 by Brown and Carmen Beuchat at 80 Wooster But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I Street, the work consists of a metal frame strung with ropes forming don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. a grid threaded with pieces of discarded clothing the garments. And I love the activity of sound (…) I don’t need sound to talk to me.” John Cage The dancers dress and undress their way across the structure, in transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film Écoute (Listen) by Miroslav 16 moving along the horizontal grid, giving new meaning to this Sebestik, 1991. http://hearingvoices.com/news/2009/09/cage-silence/ 17 commonplace and everyday activity. Structure and improvisation 4 “Trisha Brown: An Interview” in Contemporary Dance, edited by Ann Livet (New are negotiated here as in many of Brown’s choreographies: “there York: Abbeville Press, 1978), 46. is a performance quality that appears in improvisation that did 5 Susan Rosenberg, “Choreography as Visual Art”, October 140 (Spring, 2012): 27. not in memorized dance as it was known up to that date. If you 6 First performed in 1971 with twelve dance students and in 1973 by Carmen are improvising within a structure your senses are heightened; Beuchat, Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Nancy you are using your wits, thinking, everything is working at once Green, Suzanne Harris, Elsi Miranda, Emmett Murray, Sylvia Palacios, Eve Poling, to find the best solution to a given problem under pressure of a Sarah Rudner, Nanette Seivert, and Valda Setterfield. viewing audience.”9 7 The experience was repeated at the Whitney Museum in 2010 in the context the exhibition Off the Wall: Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown. Like most of Brown’s pieces, Floor of the Forest raises an 8 From conversation with Dorothée Alemany of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. awareness of the body, in relation to space, to other bodies and 9 “Trisha Brown: An Interview” in Contemporary Dance, edited by Ann Livet (New to itself, akin to the phenomenological concerns that guided the York: Abbeville Press, 1978), 48. expanded fields of many artistic practices in the 1960s, it also 10 Trisha Brown in Joyce Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary shows us how her practice is driven by a constant exploration Choreographers on Their Craft (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 64.

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY Orrico is a visual artist, choreographer and performer. His Penwald Drawings have been presented and exhibited internationally, attracting Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer attention from prominent collectors and institutions. He presented a solo Trisha Brown exhibition, CARBON in April 2012 at Polyforum Siqueiros in Mexico City. Associate Artistic Directors Carolyn Lucas Diane Madden Trisha Brown Company, Inc. Project Director www.trishabrowncompany.org Tony Orrico Executive Director Trisha Brown. Floor of the Forest Barbara Dufty May 8 - July 21, 2013 Curator: Julieta González EQUIPMENT PIECE Assistant curator: Ximena Amescua Floor of the Forest (1970) Editorial coordinator: Arely Ramírez Moyao Visual Presentation: Trisha Brown Design: Lídice Jiménez Uribe 18 First performed by: Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat 19 in and around 80 Wooster Street, NYC April 18, 1970 Consult events at: Performers: Cast Centro de Producción de Danza Contemporánea www.museotamayo.org (CEPRODAC): Stéphanie Janaina and Sheila Rojas; Irasema Sánchez Facebook: museotamayo and Edith Pérez; Juan Madero and Jorge Ronzón; Gersaín Piñón and Twitter: @museotamayo Yonatan Espinosa. Instagram: eneltamayo Assistant director: Ricardo Rodríguez. Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Understudy: Pol Hurtado, Ulises González, Kenya Murillo. Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec, México, D.F. 11580

Tony Orrico (Project Director) Tony Orrico was a member of Trisha Brown Opening Times Dance Company from 2006-2009 during which he was an original cast Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm member in I love my robots. He also performed in Foray Forêt, PRESENT TENSE, how long does the subject linger on the volume…, Set and Reset, Admission Fee $19.00 / General Public Groove and Countermove, Geometry of Quiet and the Early Works. Free admission for students, teachers, and senior citizens with valid ID. He has directed the restaging of Floor of the Forest and Drift, setting Sunday: Free admission Ms. Brown’s work at South Bank Centre, United Kingdom; Tate Modern, United Kingdom; ICA, United States; Hasselt’s Triennial for Contemporary Art, Belgium; flux/S, Netherlands; and Kunstsammlung, Germany. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Rafael Tovar y de Teresa Presidente

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes María Cristina García Cepeda Directora general

Xavier Guzmán Urbiola Subdirector general de Patrimonio Artístico Inmueble

Mónica López Velarde Coordinadora Nacional de Artes Plásticas

Carmen Cuenca Carrara Directora del Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo

Plácido Pérez Cué Director de Difusión y Relaciones Públicas