International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Volume 7 Issue 1 Pilgrim Bodies: An Anatomy of Christian Article 11 and Post-Christian Intentional Movement 2019 Walking on Walls: Shifting Perspectives in a Post-Modern World Philip Szporer Concordia University, Montreal QC, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp Part of the Tourism and Travel Commons Recommended Citation Szporer, Philip (2019) "Walking on Walls: Shifting Perspectives in a Post-Modern World," International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage: Vol. 7: Iss. 1, Article 11. doi:https://doi.org/10.21427/j3qn-qd13 Available at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol7/iss1/11 Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License. © International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage ISSN : 2009-7379 Available at: http://arrow.dit.ie/ijrtp/ Volume 7(i) 2019 Walking on Walls: Shifting Perspectives in a Post-Modern World Philip Szporer Concordia University, Montreal QC [email protected] In ‘Walking on Walls,’ Philip Szporer brings dance and pilgrimage into fascinating relationship. He resituates American choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown’s radical approach to the human body in terms of core concepts that have shaped pilgrimage theory. Szporer proposes that pilgrimage, place, and mobility theories provide useful lenses for an innovative re-examination of Brown’s pioneering dance pieces. Like pilgrimage, her ideas and contributions were enacted outside - and often in contradistinction to - the control of institutional authority. Key Words: Trisha Brown, dance, dance as pilgrimage, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, experimental dance, Mind-Body, communitas, pilgrimage. space, place, and the mobility of the human body. In Trisha Brown: Revolutionizing Movement[1] the process, by animating our collective imaginations, she has framed her work as journey. In this article, I American dance artist Trisha Brown’s radical approach to the human body in motion has consistently propose that pilgrimage, place, and mobility theories provide useful lenses for an innovative re-examination challenged the physical and emotional limits of dance. of Brown’s pioneering dance pieces. And like She has investigated a range of actions to repudiate pilgrimage, her ideas and contributions were enacted expressive dance, actively employing day-to-day, non- outside – and often in contradistinction to – the control heroic, anti-virtuosic modes of being, and creating of institutional authority. robust material for public and performative venues. Since the beginning of her career more than fifty-five In their pioneering work on pilgrimage, Victor and years ago, Brown has been transforming ideas about Edith Turner’s notions of liminality and communitas the making and watching of art, altering conceptions of are useful for rethinking dance as a catalyst of transformation. This is especially true of what was a 1. On March 18, 2017, as this article was being written, ‘new stage’ in American modern dance, ‘a seedbed’[2] acclaimed dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown died in San Antonio, Texas, after a lengthy illness, at the age for postmodern or avant-garde dance. Brown’s work of eighty. Over the years, her creative output included also resonates with John Eade and Michael J. over 100 choreographies and six operas. When Brown Sallnow’s categorization of the ‘meaning void’ of pioneered her inspired and innovative work in the 1960s space as a place for the clash and contestation of she redefined the limits of what dance could be and meanings. In addition, Simon Coleman’s proposals that revolutionized the field. With her art-making, this visionary discovered, as Wendy Perron notes in a tribute, the void acts as a blank space for the construction of a ‘a rigorous visual and mathematical order... [though] her (potentially more democratic) plurality of meanings is relaxed body camouflaged that precision.’ Following anticipated in certain aspects of Brown’s - literal - Brown’s death, Deborah Jowitt wrote, ‘The marvel of body of work. Geographer and environmental Trisha Brown has always been, for me, the wit and ebullience with which she tackled both new ideas and behaviour researcher David Seamon’s concepts of familiar art, without ever ceding her essential values.’ body-ballet and place-ballet are also useful. Her company, in memoriam, announced: ‘One of the ‘Chorography,’ taken from the Greek khoros, for place, most acclaimed and influential choreographers and is the study of place or space. Choreography, by dancers of her time, Trisha’s groundbreaking work forever changed the landscape of art.’ See Wendy Perron, contrast, comes from khoreia, for dance. Although the ‘Farewell to Trisha Brown,’ Dance Magazine (March 21, terms do not have the same root, their near homonymic 2017): np. http://dancemagazine.com/views/farewell- quality betrays an insight: both space and place are trisha-brown/ and Deborah Jowitt, ‘The Visionary: Trisha Brown Redefined Dance with Wit and Daring,’ The Village Voice (March 28, 2017): np. http:// 2. Sally Banes, ‘The Birth of the Judson Dance Theatre: ‘A www.villagevoice.com/arts/the-visionary-trisha-brown- Concert of Dance’ at Judson Church, July 6, 1962,’ redefined-dance-with-wit-and-daring-9820027 Dance Chronicle 5/2 (1982): 167. ~ 109 ~ Szporer Walking on Walls: Shifting Perspectives in a Post-Modern World constructed by the often-choreographed movement Brown explained her intention for the event, human beings make through that space. In this context, If you eliminate all those eccentric possibilities Trisha Brown’s innovative pieces show us a new that the choreographic imagination can conjure understanding of a certain type of pilgrimage, that is, and just have a person walk down an aisle, then the making of space into place.[3] you see movement as activity.[7] On April 18, 1970, on a gritty, crammed, and narrow Clearly this was not merely a bravura performance; Wooster Street in lower Manhattan, and set against the that wasn’t the goal. In the experimental environment dingy cast-iron buildings in the then-decaying SoHo of the time, Brown’s practice was imbued with a district, Brown premiered her guerrilla artwork, Man dangerous lawlessness.[8] Walking Down the Side of a Building. Onto the façade of a seven-story brick structure, she sent one of her The natural human activity of walking in foreign dancers, hoisted by a series of ropes, perfectly spaces, in unnatural settings, or walking lengthy perpendicular to the ground. Spectators attending the distances, is intimately linked to transformative performance watched from a cobblestone courtyard. experience. Pilgrimage itself raises the question of how walkers shape their action, including strategizing the During the performance, the man (Joseph Schlichter, degree of control, the zone of knowingness, and the Brown’s then-husband), was strapped into a standard mental state of readiness needed for the passage. In her mountaineering harness,[4] leaning impossibly forward artistic experimentation, Brown satisfied the impulse to over the threshold of the edifice until he reached a 90- find answers to wider questions of transcendence and degree angle to the building. He then calmly walked trajectory. down its side, his body absolutely parallel to the ground. An assistant on the roof slowly let out the rope Brown conceived of the seemingly death-defying stroll that held him.[5] In this unfashionable, out-of-the-way in Man Walking Down the Side of a Building as urban space, the effect made the dancer appear as creating a radically liminal space. Embracing and at though he were out for a mundane pedestrian stroll, the same time suspending perceptions of the ordinary except that he was headed straight down, at a death- and familiar action of walking was at the heart of this defying angle. The simplicity of gesture and tension in art piece. This new work was structured as a sustained Brown’s work from this period (in this case ‘the action that emphasized body volume, balance, paradox of one action working against another . direction, and sustained focus. It was anti-balletic, and gravity working one way on the body . a naturally as such emblematic of the New York downtown dance walking person in another way’[6]) altered the paradigm scene of the time and of the postmodern of what dance and performative mobility could be. choreographers who actively contested the function of theatrical dance. The project was propelled not by the usual structures of dance composition, but by the 3. See David Seamon’s mention of body-ballet as the making of space into place (David Seamon, ‘Body- inventive quality of Brown’s work, and the risky way Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place Ballets,’ in The in which she created an enigmatic and singular zone of Human Experience of Space and Place (ed. David in-between, transitory, engagement of space. Seamon and Ann Buttimer; London: Croom Helm, 1980), 148–165.) Movement imbues a place with In that SoHo moment, Brown was defying gravity in meaning. In the present special journal issue, see also the her own spectacular way, less than a year after Neil article, ‘Written by the Body,’ by Jenn Cianca on the Armstrong’s memorable first human step on the ways in which pilgrimage helped to create the very surface of the moon, well before Michael Jackson sacred places that were then visited. made history with his own moonwalk, and prior to 4. Maurice Berger, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ in Trisha Brown: French aerial artist Philippe Petit tilting our heads as he Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2011 (ed. Hendel stepped onto a high wire between the towers of the Teicher; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 17. 5. The poster for the subsequent performance at the Whitney World Trade Center. Historically, these radical events Museum of American Art, on Tuesday and Wednesday, question the very nature of entering into the void, into March 30 and 31, 1971, is titled (all in lower case) a limbo-like space.