For “Roof Piece,” first performed in 1971, dancers scattered themselves across the roofs of SoHo and played a dance version of the game telephone.
“This was supposed to be a big year for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, founded 50 years ago. In early March, the troupe flew to France to begin a sold-out anniversary tour. The first few shows went great. Then came the wave of coronavirus cancellations, and the dancers found themselves on the last American Airlines flight from Paris to New York. Scattered across the country — or in one case, back home in Australia — the dancers did what separated groups of every kind are doing: They met up virtually. They checked in on one another, commiserated about the canceled shows and started floating ideas about how they might continue to work remotely. One option quickly rose to the top: ‘Roof Piece.’ ‘Roof Piece’ is a work that Brown, who died in 2017, first performed in 1971. She and some colleagues scattered themselves across the water-tower-capped roofs of SoHo and played a dance version of the game telephone. One dancer executed a series of semaphore-like movements, which the dancer on the next roof over tried to copy exactly, and so on down the line. Spectators, stationed atop buildings, could follow the transmission and the errors, the inevitable decay in the signal that Brown intended the exercise to expose. People who didn’t know what was going on might also take notice, and that was part of the plan, too. That’s why the dancers all wore red. Like many of Brown’s early works — for example, ‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building‘ — ‘Roof Piece’ is both simple and radical. Brainstorming about how to reproduce it virtually, the dancers immediately ran into a snag: Not everyone had access to a roof. So they decided that a roof wasn’t essential to the piece; communication across distances was. The original ‘Roof Piece’ was inspired by the follow-the-leader copying in dance classes and rehearsals, a mode of transmission fundamental to how dancers learn. With all the dance and yoga instruction proliferating online now — all that imitation via screens — a virtual ‘Roof Piece’ seems right for the moment. … On rooftops, the distance between buildings, or obstructions like ledges, impair perfect mirroring. Online, it can be a briefly frozen signal, a difference in camera angle or maybe a naughty cat. Outside, a viewer can see only a part of the line and has to imagine that the signal started somewhere unseen or continues out of sight. Someone watching online can track the whole sequence, rather like a guard keeping an eye on isolated prisoners via a bank of surveillance cameras. …”
NY Times (Video)
UbuWeb: Roof Piece (1971)(Video)
1960s: Days of Rage You Can Still See Her: The Art of Trisha Brown (2020)
1960s: Days of Rage
1960s: Days of Rage 