Watching Trisha Brown's dances makes one feel glad to be alive--they're that pleasurable. Brown is a "modern" dancer, but don't let that scare you. A bubbling piece like Lateral Pass (1985), performed with squiggly décor and weirdly chic costumes (both by Nancy Graves), is about as far from the gloom-and-doom school of modern dance as you can get. (None of Martha Graham's eternally neurotic heroines for this artist.)
Brown's dances spill out across the stage in cool streams of flowing steps. Hers is a relaxed look--very different from ballet's taut, pulled-up aesthetic--that is nonetheless delivered with clarity and style by her company of nine barefoot virtuosos. With its backdrops painted (by Donald Judd) in delicious colors like lime and blue, Brown's Son of Gone Fishin' (1981) gives one the feeling of being inside one of those tall, frosty drinks the bartender serves with a paper parasol perched on top.
Part of what makes Brown's dances so appealing is that her dancers deliver the fluid gestures so precisely. At first glance, it looks as if the company is making the dance up as it goes along. How could anyone remember these fluid phrases? There's no story onto which the movements can be pinned. A dancer lopes onstage, causally throws an arm to the side, and then lets it flop, which causes him to bend his knees and swivel around, smooth as silk, to face a new direction. Looking at a performance by the Trisha Brown Company is a little like trying to follow a group of fluttering butterflies. Just when you think you've figured out where one of them is going, another creature darts into view, and you find that, now, you're looking at it. Brown's work is like that--delightful and intriguing at the same time.
Not Without Meaning
Though there's no story, nor even a suggestion of a dramatic situation--as in such plotless modern works as Paul Taylor's elegiac sunset--Brown's dances aren't without meaning. Their meaning lies not in a narrative structure, but rather in the particular way the steps fit together and in the way they are accompanied by whatever décor and sound Brown has chosen to go along.
As an experimental choreographer in New York City's SoHo during the 1960s, Brown didn't care much for fancy costumes or sets, and she's never been interested in setting her dances to music. But over the past decade, Brown has chosen to accompany her pieces with music or other sounds, sometimes engaging, as in Set and Reset, choreographed in 1983, sometimes irritating, as in Newark (Niweweorce), from 1987. (She also makes dances that are performed in silence, such as the shimmering Opal Loop of 1980). For Astral Convertible, her latest work, Brown has teamed up with the painter Robert Rauschenberg to produce an ambitious look at just how dance, décor, and sound work together.
Rauschenberg and Brown have collaborated twice before (he's also chairman of her company's board of directors); like Astral Convertible, both Glacial Decoy (1979) and Set and Reset feature novel combinations of dancing and décor. The beguiling Glacial Decoy, for example, is danced in pleated gossamer smocks (that the lights make translucent) against a backdrop of large panels on which black-and-white slide images are projected. The dancers in Set and Reset are clothed in square-cut pajamas that appear to be printed with images from old newsreels. The
...
Read Full Article
|
