“It’s amazing someone has the nerve to ask these questions in the dance world,” Streb added scarpe nike, castigating it for laziness and for being stuck with the notion that movement has to come out of music and stay on the floor. She called Brown’s career “a clarion call to dancers.”
The work itself has become legendary in the dance world, as has the 73-year-old Brown herself. Over the last four decades, few choreographers have done as much to liberate dance from its more ossified forms. “I used to do a lot of walking on walls,” she said after giving Petronio a hug. But why? She shrugged. “For the thrill of it, I guess,” she said.
Five dancers from her company had spent the afternoon rehearsing the six other works on the program, the “live” part of the summer exhibition “Off the Wall,” which closed last week. It dealt with the body in motion and included a ghostly video of “Walking on the Wall,” a 1971 piece that Brown made for one evening at the Whitney. Dancers in homemade harnesses performed it by loping across gallery walls like the proverbial flies, moving parallel to the floor and criss-crossing high and low, as if gravity didn’t exist.
And this was just a rehearsal. Petronio and Elizabeth Streb, the daredevil choreographer who has done a fair share of body-surfing on air, will perform this feat several times over the weekend, when the Whitney presents the piece, “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building,” with six other pioneering dance works by Trisha Brown, the choreographer who created it back in 1970 for her then-husband, Joseph Schlichter. No wonder the marriage didn’t last.
Streb broke into a happy grin and said, “That was the most mind-bending move of my life!” Without missing a beat, she then turned to Petronio and took his arm. “Let’s go back up!” she said.
“As long as your body is in balance,” Streb said, “there are forces in control of your body, but no forces can be accessed till you get off the ground.” She had tried the wall walk the day before, but the harness kept slipping and breaking her concentration. It was almost painful. “I don’t use the word ‘pain,’ ” she quipped. She called it “an intensely foreign sensation.” Another word that never enters her vocabulary is “scared.”
That work is also part of the weekend program taking place inside the building. In the sculpture court, the Whitney’s outdoor moat, two dancers will elaborate on the problem of finding the right thing to wear in “Floor of the Forest,” climbing across ropes strung on a trampoline-like frame and wiggling into the clothing hanging there without touching the floor.
When she started down the wall, however, she seemed in her element. Even the pigeons roosting on the museum’s window ledges gave her their full attention. “Look at her!” Brown shouted from the street below. “Go! Go!” When Streb reached the ground, Brown was the first to congratulate her. “You did it, girl!” she said.
Clearly, Brown is an experimentalist with a sharp sense of humor – and mischief, a symptom of true genius. When Streb, who is 60, takes her turn down the wall, it will be the first time a woman has performed in the role. Even before the rehearsal, she was exultant. “I’ve been waiting all my life for this,” she said.
“That was exciting,” he said as a rigger removed the harness around his waist. “The moment of letting go was the most difficult. After that, every molecule of my body felt as if it were being brushed by a car wash.” He was buzzed.
“Off the Wall: Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown” are on view through Sunday, Oct. 3, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Madison Avenue at 75th Street.
At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, a camera-phone-wielding crowd gathered at the corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street as a man on the roof of the Whitney Museum prepared to go off it. “Oh scarpe nike, my God,” gasped a passerby as the man, the dancer and choreographer Stephen Petronio, achieved liftoff. He let his body fall forward until it was perpendicular to the pavement, and then held perfectly still, looking down at the street and perhaps into his soul as well. After a few moments of awed silence scarpe nike, he began an absurdly casual stroll down the sheer 97-foot granite cliff of the Whitney’s side wall, rappelling in slow-motion and pausing, now and then, to let his seemingly weightless feet regain the wall before proceeding to the bottom, where he was greeted with an ovation.
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