Unseen Forces

“Twelve Ton Rose,” “Foray Forêt, “You can see us,” “L’Amour au théâtre”
Trisha Brown Dance Company
Sosnoff Theater
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
July 8, 2010

By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman

 The swirl and balance of Trisha Brown’s elegant, familiar choreography is suited to the flow and swirl of Frank Gehry’s silvery roofed Fisher Center at Bard College. These cool works were tonic on the evening that the East Coast’s heat wave finally broke.

 
Brown’s dance company opened the Bard Summerscape festival with four works, including two large group pieces that throbbed with Brown’s smart, sensuous pairs, trios, and quartets. The twenty-year stretch between “Foray Forêt” (1990) and last year’s “L’Amour au théâtre” didn’t change the vocabulary or the feel of the choreography. Then, as now, it required perfect discipline with feather-soft edges and the color and light of the stage were its primary dressing. And then, as now, the musicality of her movement still depended as much on silence as on sound. The large group works were partnered with two duets, both from 1995-6. The first, a very brief excerpt from “Twelve Ton Rose,” was more a tease than a performance. The second duet, “You can see us,” was more satisfying. Originally created as a solo for Brown, it was later expanded to pair her with Bill T. Jones and then Mikhail Baryshnikov. In this evening’s program, Dai Jian and Leah Morrison danced the duet, a standout pair in an evening of graceful pairings.

The noted trick of ”You can see us” is that the woman’s role is danced entirely with her back to the audience. The pair opened in diagonal position on the wide stage, and moved around it with Morrison making tiny adjustments to stay in synch with her partner while keeping her face and the front of her body out of sight. They were perfect mirror images dancing to a light, pulsing soundtrack (one of many contributions to this evening by Robert Rauschenberg.) The expressiveness of Morrison’s back as she stretched and balanced reminded us of how much of a dancer’s body goes unseen as we watch only what faces us.

Brown’s movement is a mix of wide sweeping arms, scooping hands that seem to gather the air and space, and the play of delicate balances with sly, clever shifts and lifts. The movement is deliberate and continuous, only holding still in order to launch anew. Brown made her complex lifts core to the large group works, using combinations of three and four dancers instead of traditional pairs. There was no one moment of drama in these pieces; it was all fluidity pierced with stop-motion. She has a dancer’s unerring physics – a breathtaking combination of momentum, trajectory, and gravity.

 “Foray Forêt” began in silence, the dancers standing in silhouette against a backdrop lit pale lilac. As the lights came up, the cast, all glistening in lush golden costumes moved in and out of solos, pairs, trios and quartets. The dancers glanced past each other, sometimes connecting to create a balance or momentary lift, then moving on to new partners and groups. Later, a woman was launched onto the stage by unseen hands, another was balanced by a disembodied hand or leg emerging from beyond the curtained wings. In one brief, clever segment, several elbows emerged from each side of the stage to partner one lone visible dancer.

The slyest partnership of “Foray Forêt,” though, was between the dancers and their musical accompaniment. Just beyond earshot and consciousness, a local brass band was playing John Philip Sousa marches – outside the theater. As they circled the glorious Gehry building (a foray in the forêt,) the music moved around us. Often it was barely audible, then it was louder (and distracting) as the band came into the lobby, although never into the theater or within eyeshot. Though out of sight, the band (along with the bodies of those disembodied parts) pressed themselves into our consciousness.

 The closing piece, “L’Amour au théâtre,” was the most recent choreography (2009) set to the oldest music, vocals and instrumentals from Jean-Phillipe Rameau’s 1773 opera Hippolyte et Aracie -- along with Brown’s requisite silences. This piece had the most imaginative lifts, although some felt like intentional crowd-pleasers. Images of Diana’s hunt included a transformation of three dancers into the goddess on horseback; five dancers became human bells, legs tolling in wide full arcs, as two dancers were held aloft by three others in a single line of motion. The dancers galloped back in a swirling figure-eight for their curtain call, and brought Brown onstage, the most powerful unseen force of the evening, now visible.

copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman

Top: Dai Jin, Laurel Tentindo, Tamara Riewe, Samuel von Wentz, Elena Demyanenko  in “Foray Forêt.” Photo by Cory Weaver.

Bottom: Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, Melinda Myers, Laurel Tentindo in “L’Amour au théâtre.” Photo by Julieta Cervantes.