Early Works

Trisha Brown Dance Company

October 28 – 31, 2009

The Early Works of Trisha Brown at the Collezione Maramotti, once the headquarters of Max Mara and now a venue for contemporary art. An exclusive Italian première at the RED Festival for an icon of postmodern dance.

The RED (Reggio Emilia Danza) Festival, part of the new Aperto Festival, which takes place next autumn in Reggio Emilia, presents the Early Works of Trisha Brown, one of the most prominent figures of contemporary dance.

The creativity of Trisha Brown has always gone hand in hand with experimentation and the avant-garde and, ever since her early days, with creating “alternative spaces” for the stage; in the sixties and seventies she was famous for her settings in car parks, streets, on building façades, Soho rooftops and in galleries.

Through collaboration with the Collezione Maramotti and the support of Max Mara, RED, in unison with the Trisha Brown Company, has chosen the Collezione building, once the headquarters of Max Mara’s firm, for the staging of Early Works on 28, 29 and 31 October 2009. The Collezione Maramotti, dedicated since its foundation to the exploration of new forms of expression, will also be hosting the choreographer at a public meeting on Monday 19th October 2009.

The six dances to be performed at the Collezione Maramotti, stripped down and essential in character and lasting between two and 15 minutes, were created by Brown between 1970 and 1973. Brown belongs to the “liberators of dance” group, and with her anti-narrative, antispectacular work she has broken traditional codes of representation and created a new choreographic language.

Already performed at prestigious international venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Early Works were created for performance by a variable number of dancers, from two to nine, in a complex, abstract dance, at times accompanied by music (Bob Dylan in Spanish Dance) and at times silent. The dance mingles, interacts and interrelates with the visual language of the paintings, sculptures and structures present at the venue which represent some of the foremost artistic schools of thought that have emerged in Italy and the rest of the world since the end of the second world war.

This coming together of languages with shared experimental roots gives visitors and audience the opportunity to rediscover a place of art and recollection and to enrich themselves with new inspiration.

Over the years, at the invitation of Festival Aperto, performances by Shen Wei Dance Arts (2011), Wayne McGregor | Random Dance (2013), Hofesh Shechter Dance Company (2015), Saburo Teshigawara (2017), Dimitris Papaioannou (2019), Peeping Tom (2021) and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (2024) have been presented at Collezione Maramotti.