by Leigh Witchel
Some dance companies are lucky enough to have to deal with the route forward after its founder is gone. Now it’s the turn of Trisha Brown’s dance company. Before Brown’s death in 2017, the company set a mandate to preserve and perform her works in traditional and non-traditional settings. The group’s Joyce season included two works by Brown, and the first commission the company has made.
“Rogues,” made by Brown in 2011, was a short, standalone double solo that was free of gender. Any two dancers could do it well, but interestingly both casts during the run were a man and a woman.
On opening night, it began with Burr Johnson and Cecily Campbell, both in simple blue pants and tops, moving methodically through an imaginary list of positions to a collage score by Alvin Curran seemingly built of instrument noises and sounds in the distance. While the progression of poses was almost mechanical, the movement was more organic. Rebound. Recoil.
The duet sped up as the soundtrack segued into harmonica, but shortly after the two crouched to the ground as the lights dimmed and the short duet ended.
“Rogues” felt like a beautiful fragment of an artifact, even more interesting for imagining the missing pieces. It invited you to think about why we move. The phrases were developed (according to Neal Beasley, one of the company’s dancers at the time) to explore “pure movement.” And “Rogues” had a natural rebound and flow. But what impelled the body into motion in the first place?
“For M.G.: The Movie” is from 1991, part of an elemental period in Brown’s work to which Beasley referred. Appropriately, the stage was fully stripped, with the brick alcove at the back of the stage visible.
Burr and Campbell stood with their backs to us. Spencer Weidie, (who uses the pronoun they) again to music by Curran, jogged figure 8s around the stage. As smoke started to gather at the back of the stage, they did bigger and bigger arcs. A man picked Weidie up, caught and set them down before jogging off. Weidie returned to jogging diagonals to and fro, as well as the arcing path.
Johnson and Campbell had not moved.
“For M.G.: The Movie” was both quotidian and extraordinary, like a slowly-moving kinetic sculpture to electronic bal musette. Weidie backed up in right angles, fell forward and shuffled back. Two men walked in slowly as Weidie continued, now going into and out of the wings. In a slow and obscure section, the dancers stood or lay down in the wings or at the center, as if they were a human garden or orchard.
Campbell finally moved, backing out with Patrick Needham. Johnson did not. Weidie resumed jogging backwards. People rolled at the wings, rolled on to the stage, slowly bent down. A door slammed. The smoke got heavier, the score started to buzz, then a note repeated as if tuning a piano. The music disintegrated to kitten-on-the-keyboard.
Johnson had not moved the whole time.
Weidie slowly walked back in, and Cynthia Koppe curled down. They danced a double solo as the stage gradually went to black. The obscure mystery of “For M.G.: The Movie” was its attraction, almost as if it could have taken place with or without an audience.
Johnson finally turned to face us in a wittily choreographed curtain call, as all the others turned to the back.
The company style is incredibly specific, and creating new work for it would be as momentous as for the Graham or Cunningham groups. Graham’s company decided to pivot, Cunningham’s planned from before his death to shut down. “Let’s Talk About Bleeding” by Judith Sánchez Ruíz, a company alumna, represented another path.
Adonis Gonzalez-Matos, the composer and live pianist, created a score that mixed recorded sections with what sounded like a mash-up of Erik Satie and John Cage: slow waltzes or reaching into the piano and twanging the strings. The ruched and patched costumes by Claire Fleury were simple yet striking.
The piece opened with Johnson and Patrick Needham clambering and pistoning, occasionally falling past or into one another. Two women spilled in from the sides. Jennifer Payán went to the ground, heaving her breath. Campbell staggered in quarter turns towards and away from us.
Others rushed in, stamping and clumping. Everyone spoke snippets of a simple text, an anthem to infantile needs:
“It’s my kingdom.”
“I want to know.”
“I want to see the room.”
They kept babbling, exchanging places while remaining in a tight group. Then the text morphed to “It was supposed to be here” in all its possible inflections. Gonzalez-Matos resumed with scales and arpeggios and stopped almost as abruptly.
Koppe butted her head above and into people’s outstretched arms during a slow section, then everyone softly knocked or butted into one another. The mood shifts were sudden as the pianist pounded; everyone started to shake as if we had gone from minimalism to “The Rite of Spring.” The dancers lay on the floor, shivering. Brown’s pastoral absurdity had become something more nervous.
Johnson groaned, “I want to see the room. Free the monster. Get over it!” A thrashing solo for Koppe and a tense one for Campbell led to a series of frantic solos and duets. The mood calmed as the rest of the cast jumped into Johnson’s and Needham’s arms, forming two trios. The men let the quartet down slowly two by two, and just as slowly collapsed into them.
The piano rumbled as the group tilted and adjusted together, then slowly rolled into a line on the floor as if falling asleep on one another. Very slowly, they twisted, from fetal position to recumbent and back. Taking their time, they plopped to the floor as scattered bodies, then back again. It seemed as if it could go on forever, but the curtain closed in a blackout. Still, the music wasn’t done. Gonzalez-Matos kept playing for a while, until that ended too.
“Let’s Talk About Bleeding” made sense both as a departure from and continuation of Brown’s work. The movement palette was more knotty, not just rebounding, but wound up. The dancers tossed themselves into sections. The beauty of Brown’s work is the strangely idyllic quality of its lack of purpose. If you asked “Why?” the answer was “Because.” “Let’s Talk About Bleeding” had a more aggressive pace but didn’t jettison Brown’s absurd logic. It fit in the repertory even as it added impulse and motivation. And a because.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Rogues,” “For M.G.: The Movie,” “Let’s Talk About Bleeding”– Trisha Brown Dance Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
May 2, 2023
Cover: Trisha Brown Dance Company in “Let’s Talk About Bleeding.” Photo © Stephanie Berger.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here.
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
