Trisha Brown Dance Company: as fresh and contemporary as ever.
Photo: NAC Set and Reset from the Trisha Brown Dance Company
Ottawa audiences were treated to an exclusive Canadian engagement by the Trisha Brown Dance Company, presenting some of choreographer Trisha Brown’s seminal experiments in postmodern dance performance. Trisha Brown began creating work in 1960 and she formed her Dance Company in 1970 so the four short works we saw, ranging over a period of 28 years, from 1983 to 2011, actually represented important moments of most of her creative career. What stood out was the way they all spoke to each other, all echoing elements that appeared in each of the other performances, each one appearing so fresh, and contemporary, without the slightest hint that anything was dated or past its time. This form of dance-performance gives one the impression that her work represents a constant process of intense research as it tries to position itself in relation to that which already exists but that is somehow insufficient and even stifling and has to be overcome.
. Take If You Couldn’t See Me, featuring a single dancer who faces upstage the whole time. Dressed in a flimsy orange dress that glowed in those strong lights, she kept finding positions that foregrounded her arms, her legs, her hips, her shoulders until one suddenly realized that this performance was in the process of changing the spectators gaze. We are watching a body with no face, no eyes, no expression, no emotion and no psychological points of reference. It erases the narrative totally, covers the head in brown hair and deflects our gaze to the back of the body. What dancer has ever had to dance from that perspective before? We watch the creation of a new dancing body, .one that performs from the back using its shoulders, its feet, its heels, its buttocks and the fluttering skirt, …and Robert Rauschenberg’s lighting and costumes helped transform this flittering bit of sparkling orange light into a new moving being… Enchanting!
Set and Reset, set to the music by the queen of postmodern performance Laurie Anderson, took us in a slightly different direction by creating a strong disjunction between the electronic sound and the dancers’ movements. This was no longer musical accompaniment but rather sound that expressed its strong pulsating beat, its powerful presence, its own very personal landscape while the dancers flowed through their own world completely devoid of resistance, slumping into each other’s arms, sliding and fleeting across the space, ignoring the powerful presence of a soundscape where urban voices echoed and morphed into huge spaces somewhere far away. This dancing rethinks the relationship between the sound /music and the performers. This was also very clear in the third piece, Rogues where Alwin Curran’s stylish piano, harmonica and saxophone went beyond a recognizable jazz language, split up the rhythms and carried us away on a fascinating soundscape. It left the male dancers on their own in a flowing sentimental pas de deux that imposed its own separate world, oblivious of the rest. The music and the bodies do not ignore each other but they do not impose their presence on each other . The final piece, Present Tense, with the music by John Cage echoing Asian sounds against Elizabeth Murray’s background of brightly coloured Chinese signs, had the dancers dressed in primary colours, collapsing into bundles of bodies that construct and deconstruct a spatial language of hieroglyphic sculptures. A piece that at moments brought me back to Béjart’s movements but without the violent passion that underlies his work.
Trisha Brown is pure form, extremely cerebral, yet her work elicits moments of humour and excitement that produce weightless bodies, in their own stratosphere. One could speak of a performance that choreographs bodies, music, sound, and lighting, forcing the spectator to rethink all the traditional ways one might ever look at “dance.” And the astonishment is ongoing….