Only a few people were present to watch Trisha Brown's dance performance Roof Piece, high above the streets of downtown Manhattan in 1973. With fourteen dancers spread out between water towers and chimneys dotting the roofs in a line stretching from 420 West Broadway into an area just above Wall Street and back again, at best you would see a fragment of the action. The contact sheet of photographs taken by the French-American film-maker and photographer Babette Mangolte in July 1973 uniquely depicts the punctual concentration and simultaneous dispersion of the performers and spectators present at the scene. For one of the few chroniclers of the spectacle, Don McDonaugh, then-editor of Ballet Review, it was a unique experience: 'You were up in a completely different world, totally removed … and nobody even knew this event was taking place except for the few other people who happened to be on rooftops that day.'¹ Similar to the children's game of Chinese whispers, Roof Piece consisted of a sequence of studied gestures, a kind of performative Morse code that travelled from one performer to the next. Independent of the spectator's spread-out position across various rooftops, Brown's choreography and its particular vocabulary of contradictory movement and repeated gestures subsequently faded away in the overlap of distance and duration.

Only one of Mangolte's photographs chosen from the contact sheet of Roof Piece was printed by The New York Times. It quickly became the poster image of the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s, despite the fact that hardly anyone saw the performance.² The image captured the atmosphere of the event in a unique way