The Portal

Archiving the Gesture

ACCUMULATIONS: Exploring the Legacies of Trisha Brown is a one day symposium focused on the creative legacies of experimental visual artist Trisha Brown. Curated by Thomas F. DeFrantz and presented by SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, in association with Duke Performances, the event brings together artists and researchers for discussion, performance, and film showings.

As part of the symposium, Cori Olinghouse and Shelley Senter share their evolving practices around the archiving and transmission of Trisha Brown’s artistic work, from two distinct vantage points. Olinghouse maps Brown’s interdisciplinary mind in movement, revealing the kinds of documentation that have emerged to encapsulate Brown’s elusive, improvisational approach to moving. Through a series of improvisations, Senter adapts a selection of Brown’s early works such as Glacial Decoy, Locus, and Group Primary Accumulation in an exploration of the body as an archive. Newly restored video and film excerpts from the Trisha Brown Archive will be unveiled. Together, they re-imagine the concept of a performance archive, in a space between documentation and embodiment.