Off the grid

Trisha Brown, before founding The Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, you worked with the Judson Dance Theatre – a group of avant-garde artists who rejected the confines of modern dance, creating their own aesthetic that marked the world of dance of the 1960s. What is your instinctive reaction when revisiting the esoteric works that you created at the outset of your career? I don’t even know who that woman was; it has been such a long time. The equipment pieces were made in the end of the 1960s, and were completely unique.

It is hard to imagine having both the concept, since we all have ideas all the time: but to actually do them! It was either courageous or foolish. Courageous it turns out, because nobody fell or got hurt. When I hear that they are going to perform them again, I say that I don’t want to be around. I just don’t know how I had the peace of mind of doing the work that I did then. I believed in it, and made sure everything was safe. But it is true that the artists were at a dangerous relationship to earth!

What was it that made these ideas so exciting at the time? “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building” is not just an idea to do something spectacular. It came out of ...