© Graham Watts 'Man Walking' reviews recent Trisha Brown reviews more Graham Watts reviews

In this particular work, Trisha Brown sent her dancer down the façade of a seven-storey building at 80 Wooster Street in Manhattan, strapped into a mountaineering harness, without trick or illusion. The dancer simply walked down the side of the building with arms held tightly to the sides of his body. Out-of-sight from the small audience congregating in the courtyard, an assistant on the roof slowly let out the rope that held the dancer. Brown’s description of the whole process is deceptively simplistic: ‘A natural activity under the stress of an unnatural setting. Gravity reneged. Vast scale. Clear order. You start at the top, walk straight down, stop at the bottom.’

Almost 40 years later, this gravity-defying work was repeated against the façade of the Tate Modern on a wet and very windy May bank holiday. By 3pm, a small crowd (amongst whom were seen Richard Alston, Val Bourne and Zenaida Yanowsky) had huddled against the elements gazing skywards, when a head poked out from the middle of a small, square steel structure perched at the edge of the roof. For a few moments, it seemed that the performer was checking to see that the conditions were safe for his wall walk. The rain intensified but – just as postponement seemed the more likely outcome – the man loomed Christ-like out of his steel frame, arms raised out from his sides, before quickly tilting forwards into the unnatural position of being entirely parallel to the floor below.
 

The performance took less than five minutes as the man walked slowly but purposefully down the side of the Tate Modern. Having studied Peter Moore’s iconic photographs of the original performance, this replica suffered from the blandness of the Tate Modern’s brick façade comparing poorly with the contrasting surfaces of the Wooster Street building where Jed Bark had walked calmly towards the fire escape between layers of wooden-shuttered windows. Also, the simple spell of methodical walking, arms unmoving by his side was broken by the latter-day man shuffling his shirt sleeves mid-descent – although, to be fair, the weather conditions must have created more discomfort than could be discerned from the ground.

In ‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’, Brown is exploring and challenging the accepted view of gravity’s pull: Brown’s ‘man’ refuses to yield and walks steadily – without hurry - towards the ground. Although gravity eventually wins, it does so only on Trisha Brown’s terms and in her own time. Brown herself observed that the dancer’s powerful body undergoing this simple everyday motion, illustrated ‘the paradox of one action working against another…gravity working one way on the body…a naturally walking person in another way’.

This work was not her first contest with gravity, nor would it be her last. In 1968, Brown and fellow dancer, Barbara Lloyd, took on a punishing contest with gravity in ‘Falling Duet (I)’ as they repeatedly fell to the floor until they were both too tired to continue the performance. This futile war continued on into ‘Pamplona Stones’ (1974) where a dancer dropped a large rock onto the stage as Brown, like a modern-day Canute, loudly commanded it to stop in midair.

The deconstructive world of ‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ is taken into a further dimension by Bruce Nauman’s ‘Live Taped Video Corridor’ (1969-70) in which viewers had the unfamiliar experience of seeing themselves walking down a corridor, filmed from behind, thus disaggregating mind and eye from one another and freeing the former from its preconceived way of receiving visual stimulation. ‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ has a similar impact on its audience, not just because of how unnatural it is to see someone walking towards you down the side of a building but also because of the manner of viewing: the audience experiences discomfort and disorientation in having to look directly up towards their subject.

The essential concept of ‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ was taken indoors at the Whitney Museum of American Art with ‘Walking on the Wall’ (1971) where Brown and fellow performers, supported by harnesses suspended from the ceiling, walked around the walls, sometimes throwing in the odd leap parallel to the floor. A theme continued to large extent in ‘Set and Reset’ (1983), which reconstructed a solo version of ‘Walking on the Wall’.

In 1973, Brown took another gravity-defying walk in ‘Woman Walking Down a Ladder’, which was suspended at a slight angle from a water tower. Here the suspension of the audience’s belief was even more traumatic as there are no wires or pulleys evident in Babette Mangolte’s photograph of the performance.

In ‘Spiral’ (1974/5), Carmen Beuchat, Sylvia Palacios and Trisha Brown strapped themselves to ropes which spiraled around trees and pillars. During their performances (lasting only a matter of 15 to 30 seconds) the three dancers walked around the pillars, hanging out into space, parallel to the floor. Finally, in 1991, she worked with the late Dominique Bagouet’s Company - the first time Brown made a dance for a company other than her own – to create ‘One Story as in Falling’ , about diffuse shadows of falling images.

‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ is essentially about identifying and deconstructing dance as a spatial experience. Brown makes her audience see the world differently – and how different it was in the pre-computer simulation world of 1970 to show a man walking vertically down the side of a building – and, in doing so, turn metaphysical truths, quite literally, on their head.
 

One key aspect of ‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ which also exists in her in-situ ‘Accumulations’ series is that the audience could only ever see a part of the performance: in many respects, this partial view was easily dictated by the constraints of architectural perspective or the natural obstacles to vision of trees, buildings and contour. From the top floor of the Tate Modern, it is impossible to see the man walking down the side of a building and viewers on the ground could not see his colleague hidden away on the rooftop. Because of this split perspective, no-one sees the entire performance.

It is much more difficult to establish the same deconstructive principles in a conventional theatre space. Ultimately, with ‘Glacial Decoy’ in 1979, Trisha Brown took on this challenge, by moving from the diversity of outside spaces into the theatre and creating a stunningly lyrical dance to Robert Rauschenberg’s evocative photo images of mid-west Americana. In taking this plunge, she held onto her deconstructive values by giving the impression that much of the dance is taking place in the wings, outside of the audience’s sight. Having abstained from theatrical work for fifteen years, the next rich phase of Trisha Brown’s creativity had now begun.