{"id":137,"date":"2011-08-24T12:36:03","date_gmt":"2011-08-24T16:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=137"},"modified":"2011-08-28T09:41:07","modified_gmt":"2011-08-28T13:41:07","slug":"forty-years-of-magical-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2011\/08\/forty-years-of-magical-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Forty Years of Magical Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trisha Brown's Spanish Dance. Photo: Karli Cadel<\/p><\/div>\n

Labels like \u201cordinary\u201d and \u201ceveryday\u201d have often been pasted onto Trisha Brown\u2019s movement, especially when someone is alluding to her early work as a member of the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater. But when has anything she\u2019s ever made been ordinary? Walking may be ordinary, but getting a dancer (to whom she was married at the time) to walk down the side of a very tall building is not your usual stroll (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building<\/em>, 1970). Many people have rummage sales, but what choreographer stages one underneath a cargo-net ceiling with clothes strung on it, through which dancers have been crawling (Rummage Sale and Floor of the Forest<\/em>, 1971)? A performer romping around with a film projector strapped to her back so that she acquires a little bouncing-off-the walls double doing the same dance. . .is that an everyday idea or image (Homemade<\/em>, 1965)?<\/p>\n

Making mischief seems to have been imprinted on Brown from the beginning. She messes with our eyes, makes us see space and time differently. Remember her Glacial Decoy<\/em> (1979)? She built a dance that was too wide for the stage it was performed on, so that one of its four women might have to her movement in the wings? This serious, thoughtful artist has always enjoyed fooling us with her brilliant structural games. That has remained true even as she developed her movement style into a uniquely evasive kind of virtuosity, and even as she allowed traces of narrative to sidle into her works. Think of her titles: If you couldn\u2019t see me<\/em> (1994) or how long does the subject linger at the edge of the volume<\/em> (2005). . . .<\/p>\n

Brown founded her company in 1970, and its 40th anniversary celebration has continued into its 41st year, with revivals and re-envisionings of older works, plus new ones. The group\u2019s recent performances at Jacob\u2019s Pillow featured a work from each of four decades, and you could see clearly what changed and what remains the same. The movement is simplest in the 1973 Spanish Dance<\/em>. Five women in plain white pants and long-sleeved matching tops stand profiled in a spaced-out line across the front of the stage. When Bob Dylan\u2019s voice stumbles into \u201cEarly Morning Rain,” the woman at the back of the line starts trudging forward in baby steps, hips swinging, arms rising slowly in imitation of a flamenco dancer\u2019s port de bras. When she reaches the woman in front of her, her knees and feet nudge that person into motion. Pretty soon, the audience gets it and starts chuckling. In the end, a five-layered female sandwich bumps into the proscenium arch, halting just as the song ends.<\/p>\n

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Set and Reset. Photo Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

Set and Reset<\/em> (1983) is not a witty spatial game like Spanish Dance<\/em>. It, too, challenges your eyes and your ideas of form, but it\u2019s bent on defeating expectations. It\u2019s one of the dances that Brown terms her \u201cunstable molecular structures,\u201d and there\u2019s no predicting the outcome of anything. The semi-transparent wings into which the dancers never fully vanish, the hanging polygonal sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg that capture montaged black-and-white film clips; Rauschenberg\u2019s pale, filmy costumes silk-screened with newsprint; and Laurie Anderson\u2019s questioning voice in her original musical score\u2014all these combine with the choreography to create an image of fluidity and impermanence.<\/p>\n

The seven dancers slide in and out of what might become formations and alliances, but these either don\u2019t resolve, or coalesce so elusively and quickly that you can\u2019t grasp them. The movement, even though energetic, has a loose, casual dynamic. The performers often swing one knee to the front, throw a straight arm into the air, or hang a leg put to the side, but these moves aren\u2019t emphasized and immediately twist or melt into something else. People spring into the air as if dropping spongily down again were of equal importance. When they bump into one another, they appear unaware of what caused them to do so and shrug off in a new direction. All is slippery, complex. There\u2019s no point in trying to parse a scene in which seven people all perform different steps in close proximity.<\/p>\n

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Laurel Jenkins Tentindo and Samuel Wentz in Foray For\u00eat. Photo Karli Cadel<\/p><\/div>\n

Brown had tamed her rambunctiousness by the time she made Foray For\u00eat<\/em> in 1990. Only somewhat, though. The dancers in their golden clothes by Rauschenberg pause occasionally to let your eye alight before they slide away, their limbs and bodies slipping into invisible, intricate channels. When they collide in midair or use another\u2019s thigh as a springboard, you see cause and effect, however speedy. Brown was having physical problems when she made the piece and worrying she might have to retire. The concluding solo she made for herself (now performed by Leah Morrison) suggests a choreographer quietly assessing her own movement vocabulary; her company members stay in the wings, now and then reaching a leg or an arm into view, like fragmented memories.<\/p>\n

The piece is a foray into a forest that perhaps evokes one in the Pacific Northwest, where Brown grew up. Things glint into view as you move through a forest, trees obscure then reveal, objects appear and disappear, and you can\u2019t always tell where a sound is coming from. Ideally, Foray For\u00eat<\/em> is performed with a live marching band outside the theater. It approaches from far away, is heard faintly, gradually becomes louder, and then diminishes. At Jacob\u2019s Pillow, of necessity, the band was on tape, but strategically placed speakers created a semblance of that illusory village beyond the confines of the stage.<\/p>\n

Lighting is a crucial part of Brown\u2019s visions. Rauschenberg lit Set and Reset<\/em> with Beverly Emmons, and Foray For\u00eat<\/em> owes some of its glow to him and Spencer Brown. Jennifer Tipton\u2019s gift for purity serves Les Yeux et l\u2019\u00e2me<\/em> by creating a kind of Eden. In 2011, Brown separated this dance from Jean-Philippe Rameau\u2019s one-act opera Pigmalion<\/em> (1748), which she directed and choreographed\u2014an event produced by the Festival d\u2019Aix, the Holland Festival, Brown\u2019s company and William Christie\u2019s Les Arts Florissants. As Pygmalion<\/em>, the opera premiered in Amsterdam in 2010. (I wish I\u2019d seen it there; Brown\u2019s work in opera has always been distinguished by the way she melds the singers and dancers into an intimate ensemble.)<\/p>\n

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Building a Bower: Les Yeux et l'\u00e2me<\/p><\/div>\n

Les Yeux et l’\u00e2me<\/em> floats upon and wreathes around Rameau\u2019s supple, honey-tongued dance tunes. From the beginning of her career, Brown has been in love with forms\u2014at first, ones she created to generate movement. Once she began to use existing music as accompaniment, it was the music\u2019s structure and atmosphere that she allied herself with; rarely does she phrase her movement to its melodies, rhythms, or climaxes.<\/p>\n

The dancers in Les Yeux et l’\u00e2me<\/em> (Neal Beasley, Elena Demyanenko, Dai Jian, Tamara Riewe, Nicholas Strafaccia, Laurel Jenkins Tentindo, Samuel Wentz, and Morrison) wear simple clothing by Elizabeth Cannon: pale blue tunics for the women, gray pants and tee shirts for the men. As in all Brown\u2019s works, they\u2019re superbly sensitive to the nuances and gentle complexities of Brown\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n

One thing you notice right away is how\u2014coming and going, joining and separating\u2014 they wind closely about one another, whether in pairs or groups. Often a dancer curves an arm to reach over and around another\u2019s waist and swing that person off the ground. They form wreathes and arches through which comrades slip. At one point, they assemble into a line stretching away from the audience. There, they create a bewitching, three-part contrapuntal pattern that turns a fence into a sprouting hedgerow. The image is as ornate and as controlled as an 18th-century garden, with a breeze waiting to muss it.<\/p>\n

The lobby of the Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob\u2019s Pillow exhibits drawings that Brown made in 2005. She calls them \u201cThe Handfall Series.\u201d Their slim black lines loop and skim over the page, sometimes forming a shape your eye can identify. The explanation is that one hand was attempting to draw the path formed by the other hand as it moved over the page. Sometimes a vague outline of fingers emerges. Try to imagine doing this. Only an artist with Brown\u2019s entrancing imagination would conceive of such a venture. It\u2019s like attempting to pin a flower\u2019s windblown shadow to a wall, all the while laughing because you can\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Labels like \u201cordinary\u201d and \u201ceveryday\u201d have often been pasted onto Trisha Brown\u2019s movement, especially when someone is alluding to her early work as a member of the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater. But when has anything she\u2019s ever made been ordinary? Walking may be ordinary, but getting a dancer (to whom she was married at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[115,116,114,111,113,110],"class_list":{"0":"post-137","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-contemporary-dance","8":"tag-foray-foret","9":"tag-jacobs-pillow","10":"tag-pygmalion","11":"tag-robert-rauschenberg","12":"tag-set-and-reset","13":"tag-trisha-brown","14":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}