Time, with its mysterious elasticity, has long played muse to artists. It’s the loop in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film “After Life”, and the surrealist centre of the Salvador Dalí painting “The Persistence of Memory”. It shapes Christopher Nolan’s labyrinthine plots and imbues Nick Cave’s lyrics with gravity and grief. It is, irrespective of its shape or shade, a seductive storytelling device.
For the Australian choreographer and dancer Lee Serle, time serves as more than just a theme in his new work — it’s the material itself. In “Time again”, his latest commission for the New York City-based Trisha Brown Dance Company, time is stretched, looped, rewound, guided by a sense of lived repetition, of revisiting something familiar with new eyes. “I kept asking myself: if you had your time again, would you make the same choices? Would anything change?” Serle says.
The performance’s theme of time cycles emerged from a personal place. “I’ve recently returned to Melbourne, where I grew up, after 10 years living away in New York, then Sydney,” Serle says. “And I now find myself living in the same apartment building I once lived in.”
The 2024 re-election of US President Donald Trump was another narrative driver. “It’s as though many life events are repeating, and that’s provoked a lot of reflection for me,” Serle says. “I’m interested in how similar situations in life can unfold and how much agency we have in shaping the outcomes, or whether some things are beyond our control.”
“Time again” also marks something of a return for Serle, who first encountered the late Trisha Brown’s practice as a young choreographer through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2010. Fifteen years later, he is creating a new work for her company. “At first I was really focused on honouring Trisha’s legacy,” he says. “But I realised that my voice already lives in conversation with hers. That connection is already there, in the history, in the lineage.”
Lee Serle rehearsing with the late choreographer Trisha Brown, his mentor through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Photograph by Bart Michiels © Rolex.
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Created in collaboration with the Colombian visual artist Mateo López, a long-time creative partner of Serle’s, the work forms part of a nearly 10-year creative dialogue between the two, who met in New York and now work largely apart (Serle in Melbourne, López in Bogotá, Colombia). Their process, much like the piece, is shaped by distance, timing and chance. “When we do meet, we bring everything we’ve been working on [individually] and just see what lands,” Serle says. “Sometimes it’s something totally new, sometimes it reshapes something old. It’s a continuous conversation.”
The composer Alisdair Macindoe, another long-time collaborator, created the score for “Time again”. The process began with Serle sharing ideas, rather than movement, and allowing Macindoe to interpret the piece sonically before viewing any choreography. The result is a soundscape that pushes and pulls against the dance, shifting between sync and tension. “I didn’t want the music to follow the choreography, or vice versa,” Serle says. “I wanted the two to talk to each other, not mimic each other.”
You could argue that type of dialogue — between forms, disciplines and artists — is a defining character of Serle’s practice. His years with Trisha Brown deeply shaped his attention to context — where and how dance is presented and how space affects the work. Even on a traditional stage, he is thinking beyond it. “I try to stay open to how things might unfold differently depending on the environment,” he says. “That was something I learned from Trisha and it’s never left me.”
Serle says his involvement with the Rolex Arts Initiative has been more than a mentorship; it has been a creative anchor. “The support has been incredible,” he says. “But more than that, it has introduced me to this global network of artists who keep challenging how I think and make.”
In “Time again”, dancers return to earlier phrases, re-entering them with different energy. Gestures recur, not as exact repetitions but quiet echoes. “Dance is so fleeting,” Serle says. “Repeating something — but shifting the conditions around it — can make it resonate more deeply.”
The piece doesn’t offer answers. It isn’t supposed to be about clarity or climax. It accumulates slowly, inviting audiences to notice, to feel, to drift in and out of focus. “I don’t need people to walk away with a fixed idea,” Serle says. “I just hope they feel something — some connection, some spark of recognition.”
For those familiar with Trisha Brown’s work, “Time again” will feel something like a conversation with her ideas. For those encountering this world for the first time, it offers an open door.
“This isn’t about nostalgia,” Serle says. “It’s about returning, but not to repeat. To reimagine. To see what else might be possible.”
Protégé Lee Serle, with his mentor, Trisha Brown, in rehearsal in Brown’s New York studio. Photograph by Bart Michiels © Rolex.
Read more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative here.
