by Leigh Witchel
Like many things in 2020, Trisha Brown Dance Company’s golden anniversary was postponed by the pandemic. But finally, two of her works with designs by Robert Rauschenberg, made back to back three decades ago, were revived for a season at The Joyce.
Brown’s work is like an elegantly argued discourse on a philosophy of movement. The dancers moved in a loose, organic phrasing, rebounding gently from simple motion like rag dolls pulling their own strings. It looks deceptively like nothing special – but just try to do it yourself.
“Foray Forêt,” from 1990, started with a conglomeration of dancers in loose iridescent costumes; the men shirtless in pants, the women wearing bandeau tops. They appeared onstage moving like random molecules. The music was ambient: a brass band heard in the distance, perhaps as a nod to Charles Ives’ grand musical experiments.
About the worst idea when you’re watching Brown’s work is try and figure out where you are in the dance. Each individual section is beautifully constructed, but it’s not meant to have a beginning, middle, and end. Here in particular, the music released “Foray Forêt” from the structural parabola of more traditional choreography. Like Merce Cunningham’s work, it was more to be experienced like watching fish go by in an aquarium.
The four men and four women moved through a dance built out of ordinary movements, placing an arm side or swinging it, lifting a knee, but as if the body was made of rubber, and placing a limb was an experiment.
In Brown’s aquarium, most of the fish had long, decorative tails. Kimberly Fulmer, small and blond with her hair tight to her head, was a speedier minnow with a more aggressive attack: you noticed her. Stuart Shugg tapped her shoulder; she fell sideways almost all the way to the floor into his arms.
Later on, she entered, raced forward and a man appeared from the side to pick her up and lift her to gently alter her course towards center stage. Shugg stayed on to do a duet with another woman. The band music started to become the foreground, then faded as if it was moving around the theater.
Kyle Marshall peeked out from the wings to support a dancer as she exited. There was something so placid about the movement, and all of the dancers performed the phrases seamlessly. Brown’s construction of a dance was very mathematical and modular. Phrases returned or got echoed by a second or third dancer.
Towards the end, a final woman in a purple smock over her dress entered for a solo; two men backed out and exited with a hint of a bow. Then Brown released her punchline. The Jina Brass Band, which had been playing in the lobby and sounded for all the world as if it were recorded, appeared and marched across the stage. To keep it from being all about the joke (though it kind of was) the dancer went on for a few more phrases before a blackout ended the lush but spare work.
“Astral Converted” from 1991, also has designs by Rauschenberg, first used two years prior in “Astral Convertible.” Everyone wore silver unitards; the women’s had a bedazzled membrane between their legs. The sets were utilitarian metal work shelves with incandescent work lamps that were activated by sensors on the dancers’ costumes.
There was a subtle difference between the movement palette of the two works. “Astral Converted” had a hint less of a rebound and more of a push, as the dancers dropped their weight into wide pliés.
The music, “Eight” by John Cage, was a soundscape of horns; the work began with the dancers in two lines on the floor, scooting and rocking. Brown doubled many of the phrases here as well, but there were also sudden moments of breathtaking ingenuity like cold air in the soporific warmth.
She used props beautifully. Two wide brooms, each piloted by a dancer, showed up early on, again like deadpan humor, in a brief appearance to suspend two exiting dancers. The brooms, and their sweepers, then returned for a long dance that divided and partitioned the stage. Two other dancers entered and the sweepers joined them for a quartet as the phrases came together. Through that a soloist danced, who echoed the dancing pair before he exited. The sweepers, to finish, simply walked off. But at that point, the idea was complete.
“Astral Converted” was also an aquarium, but with a hint of a structure. Brown demarcated the work into sections by dancers pushing the towers on stage left closer in or further out. And in the later section of the dance she built to partnering where the dancers gently but purposefully knocked into one another.
The fecund movement invention continued until most of the lights onstage went out, and that was the end. Brown had to step away from choreography for health reasons in 2011 and died in 2017. The company continued on, but changed its focus to performing her choreography as site-specific. Still, by the end of her career, the site that seemed most specific for her elegant works was an opera house. Both these dances were elegantly constructed and performed. They were beautiful in their spareness. What they weren’t was predictable.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Foray Forêt,” “Astral Converted” – Trisha Brown Dance Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
May 27, 2022
Cover: Marc Crousillat, Amanda Kmett’pendry, Kimberly Fulmer, Stuart Shugg and Cecily Campbell in “Foray Forêt.” Photo credit © 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.]
