On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance TRISHA BROWN'S EMPTY FLASHES BY LAURA A. JACOBS You can go a whole season without thinking about how a choreographer gives meaning to a dance. Then a curtain goes up, the dancers...
...on the City Center program, is about as amorphous and null a thing as I've seen from Brown...
...Judd may be tapping into inner-city semiotics, but Brown hasn't noticed: Her choreography here could have been lifted from her empty, overdesigned Lateral Pass of two years ago...
...Brown herself is a superb dancer: A fine-tuned athlete, at once silky and tense, she has achieved an unschooled, entirely spontaneous look despite extensive early training...
...One could say Brown is the choreographic equivalent of Jackson Pollock, but with this crucial qualification: Since dance is not confined to a canvas, use of the dribble-technique does not result in the amassing of dramatic densities...
...Trisha Brown has been choreographing since the '60s, when she was an integral member of the Judson Dance Theater, a postmodern Davidsbund that stripped dance of its melodrama, its overblown academic virtuosity, its fancy costumes...
...These pieces were poetically concise, bristling with emotion, and rhythmically complex—altogether a surprise...
...Watching her dance, you sense she's pursuing movements that usually fall through the cracks...
...Newark, the new work (get it...
...costumes and decor somehow don't add up...
...After all, that's one way to get meaning into a dance...
...her joints, down through the wrists and fingers, shiver in silvery agreement...
...It features a set of scrims and backdrops in fire engine-red, caution-yellow and ultraviolet, the work of the artist Donald Judd...
...Those who wholly embrace Brown explain that her works are purely about dancing...
...Having first seen Brown in the '80s, I can't say how her work looked back then, but the writings of her admirers lead one to envision dances of unadorned, straightforward clarity...
...Set and Reset, Brown's 1983 collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg and Laurie Anderson, still has immense visual interest—thanks to Rauschenberg...
...Brown also drops in some exceedingly ungainly poses—dancers balancing on one foot, stooped at the waist, the other leg lifted like a dog's—for reasons I can't fathom...
...Such shortcomings led me to ponder the matter of meaning during the latest performance by the Trisha Brown Company at the City Center in New York...
...His three fabric structures (two pyramids and a square) "lift off at the beginning of the dance and hover over the stage for the duration...
...When the dancers enter, three of them support a fourth who moon-walks sideways on the wall, as if to redefine the space and gravity of the performance...
...The choreographer isn't leading your eye in a productive way...
...Anderson's music, "Long Time No See," is as lean and prophetic as Rauschenberg's designs are full of space-age nostalgia...
...Then a curtain goes up, the dancers start moving, and the question is squarely in front of you...
...These sore thumbs spoil the only good part of the dance, its surface fluency...
...the kinetic shapes fail to enchant...
...Street clothes-randomness was the spirit of the time, and the Judson dancers were interested in the accumulation of present-tense detail rather than the creation of lasting ornament...
...The "sound concept"—also contributed by Judd, and realized by Peter Zummo—is a bullying mix of blaring emergency signals, beeping alarms and electronic hums...
...There are no structural conceits, just synaptic flashes of physical movement —a minnow-flick of the foot here, a sapling-whip of the back there—with a bare mathematical underpinning...
...Maybe so, but they seem more focused on what dancing can't express than on what it can...
...Perhaps Brown should submit more often to the constraints imposed by narrative...
...The two works employ the same overlapping phrases, with the dancers tending to move in twos and threes...
...Brown's choreography today, though broadened and fluffed up for the large stage, retains this minimalist essence...
...Last year Brown collaborated with Lina Wertmüller on an experimental production of Carmen, and her City Center programs included a prelude and two entr'actes from the opera...
...Among the images projected onto them are clips of the astronauts on the moon...
...she deliberately throws "balance" and "structure" around the stage the way a seasoned ventriloquist throws voices...
...In performance, the flashes are mostly Brown's—her dancers have a rough time approximating her style, let alone giving it nerve...
...Her limbs swirl and snake around a constantly vanishing center of gravity...
...One can respect Brown's output for its integrity, yet be bored by its lack of everything else...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 14
