L’Orfeo di Trisha Brown: il mito tra danza pura ed eloquenza mimica

Abstract

In 1998, the American choreographer Trisha Brown, a pioneer of post-modern dance, proposed a personal reading of Monteverdi's Orpheusat the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, for which she offered her own experience as an innovator in confrontation with a founding myth of Western culture and with Monteverdi's famous score of 1607, a milestone in the history of melodrama and European theatre. For Brown, an artist characterised by a conceptual approach to choreographic composition, this was an opportunity to deepen her reflection on the relationship between narration and abstraction, as well as a chance to test and renew her research on movement, accepting the challenge imposed by the dialogue with the complexity of the musical score and the cultural stratification of tradition. However, if the intelligence of the choreographic and directorial project were essential in decreeing the opera's success, the article highlights how it is the singer's body that is the ‘place’ where to trace the signs of what Brown admits was a turning point in his own artistic career. Moreover, dwelling today on this particular aspect of Trisha Brown's artistic production seems interesting to us also in view of a retrospective assessment of post-modern dance, its historical legacy and the still generative questions related to the great experimentation on the body and gesture writing that characterised the period between the 1960s and 1980s.