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.

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Author Biography

Aline Nari, Indipendent Researcher

Aline Nari, artist and scholar, graduated in Modern Literature in 1995 with a thesis on Maguy Marin's dance theater at the University of Genoa, obtained the Eligibility for Research at the University of Bologna Alma Mater Studiorum in 1996 and in 2005 the title of PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Genoa. From 2015 to 2018 you taught History of Dance at the University of Pisa, Master's Degree Course in History and Forms of Visual Arts, Entertainment and New Media. She has participated in various conferences on dance, she is the author of publications on 18th and 20th century dramaturgy and dance for specialist magazines, for the publishing houses Bompiani, Marsilio, Akropolis Libri, Ephemeria. She has also worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1993 in the field of contemporary dance, opera and urban dance in Italy and abroad, trying to merge choreutic investigation and dialogue with transversal audiences, contemporaneity and tradition. From 2000 to 2020 she created several shows which, with an intimate and visionary touch, tackle philosophical and social themes. She has been a dancer for a long time in the Sosta Palmizi Company, then founder of UBIdanza, and has been part of ALDES since 2014. Her opera performances and choreographies have been performed in several European countries and have received the support of national and international institutions. His research interests focus on the history of dance in the second half of the twentieth century, on the relationships between dramaturgy and literature, dance and literature with particular attention to ontological issues (the theme of presence) and aspects linked to fruition, interests which reconcile his scientific path and artistic.

Published
2024-06-30
How to Cite
Nari, A. (2024). L’Orfeo di Trisha Brown: il mito tra danza pura ed eloquenza mimica. Mimesis Journal, 13(1), 175-191. https://doi.org/10.13135/2389-6086/9675
Section
Essays