Visual Artists for How Long . . .

To put a name to a new kind of art, call it “thinking images.”

For the imagery is in some sense alive. Having endowed it with its own structures and its own intentions, we set it free to figure things out on its own over the duration of the dance.

The essential characteristic of our imagery is this: It thinks by picturing things. It sketches the relationships it perceives as soon as it starts making them out. This keeps its frames in constant flux, for it continually re-adjusts itself as it tentatively advances its ideas. From time to time, we have it cast one kind of picture aside completely and bring another one to bear, trying out a new way of thinking.

What is the imagery trying so hard to grasp? — The same thing we are: the intricacy of Trisha Brown’s choreography that all of us are watching as it unfolds.

To do so, the imagery focuses not on individual dancers, but rather on the patterns they form together. One such pattern, most easily perceived, is the spatial composition the dancers make at any given moment on stage — the spaces between them; the similarities and differences between their shapes.

But the deeper beauty of the dance lies in patterns unfolding over time, and so our imagery also has ways of remembering past moments and tracing correspondences to the present. Many of the pictures it makes are pictures of time. Like us, it forms expectations about what might happen next, and it registers its surprise if the dancing veers off unexpectedly.

Our hope is that the imagery illuminates the dance for you in a completely new way. This feels to us like birth.