"If you couldn’t see me” and “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503”
Trisha Brown Dance Company
Howard Gilman Performance Space
Baryshnikov Arts Center
New York
April 7, 2010
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
As part of its ongoing 40th anniversary celebration, the Trisha Brown Dance Company showcased two of its founder’s short but telling works in a little amuse-bouche of a program at the Baryshnikov Art Center’s Howard Gilman Performance Space. Taken together, Brown’s 1994 solo “If you couldn’t see me” and her 1980 quartet “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503” clock in at just under a half–hour, but they form an apt synopsis of what’s wonderful about Brown’s work—and what’s disconcerting about it, too.
The easy sweep of Leah Morrison’s long, eloquent limbs through the meditative glow of “If you couldn’t see me” was balm for both eye and mind on a hot night in a noisy city. It was Brown at her most beguiling: supple waves of movement—propagated now by the gentle ripple of a shoulder, now by the brisk brush of a foot—washing through the body into space and resolving in ways unanticipated, but never illogical. Little gestures momentarily evoked other dances, other traditions: a flexed foot in a moment of repose suggested Bali; a few quick flips of the hands called forth Brown’s own “Accumulation.”
***Spoiler alert!*** Not once did the dancer turn to face the audience! All joking aside, it would be wonderful to experience the work naïve to that fact. The interesting plot twist wasn’t that Morrison danced with her back to us, it’s how natural it looked nonetheless, how little anxious tension it created—and how easy it was to imagine a parallel universe in which every dance is likewise seen from behind. It’s classic Brown: take something that could easily devolve into a mere gimmick—or worse, a ham–fisted metaphor (the dance was deliciously free of “aboutness”)—and imbue it with grace and wit.
The costume, designed by Robert Rauschenberg, worked beautifully to turn back into front. The skirt, slit up its sides into long, sheer panels, emphasized the free movement of the legs but hid the obvious back-of-the-body mechanism of the glutes. The bodice’s deeply scooped back exposed to our gaze a part of the body capable of potent expression—its slightest stiffening can communicate volumes—but so often hidden from view. Morrison turned her back on us, not to shut us out, but to speak to us in a different register.
Rauschenberg is also credited with the electronic score, but it was no more—and yet also no less—than than a gauzy aural backdrop punctured by the occasional eruption of silence. Like the lighting (by Spencer Brown, with Rauschenberg), it was part of the environment in which the dance happened; it didn’t inform the movement—it informed the audience’s perception of the movement. Brown and Rauschenberg used music, costumes, and lighting in much the same way that a film director and cinematographer would have: to shape our response to the script.
The mist that billowed around the dancers in “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503” wasn’t incidental to the dance, but like the Rauschenberg’s music for “If you couldn’t see me,” it wasn’t integral to the movement. The dancers’ steps looked beautiful wrapped in Fujiko Nakaya’s cloud sculptures, but they’d have looked just as beautiful—and neither more nor less inevitable—etched against a bright blue cyclorama. (In its stolid permanence, however, that blue cyclorama would be nowhere near as beautiful as Nakaya’s shimmering, evanescent clouds.)
The dance began when a dark curtain at the back of the performance space was drawn aside to reveal four dancers (Tamara Riewe, Nicholas Strafaccia, Laurel Tentindo, and Samuel von Wentz—all excellent) silhouetted within a softly lit shroud of cool mist that tumbled gently towards the audience. (It felt delightful in the stuffy confines of the theater.) As the glow of the lights deepened, the dancers moved forward too, accompanied only by the sound of their own footfalls and the gentle hiss of the mist escaping from its piped apparatus.
The dancers proceeded to cross each other’s paths in a dense hubbub of chaotic, thuddy motion. Their flung limbs levering off of their bodies, they stepped into sudden turns, jumps, and stretched-out balances, seemingly oblivious to the close proximity of their neighbors. Soon order began to emerge: two dancers mirrored each other’s steps; two moved in canon. Two coalesced into a partnership and two flanked them, replicating their moves as solos. The work was peppered with piquant little events: the two men stopped short, and their heads began to bobble together in tiny tremors. One dancer unexpectedly caught another’s gaze, then looked out at the audience with pointed intensity. Riewe bent down, caught Strafaccia by the heel, and effortlessly tipped him into handstand.
By the work’s end, the dancers moved in clear, geometric arrays: the fog dispersed, they crystallized. Were we to make something of that juxtaposition? Maybe; maybe not: the same steps could just as easily have been performed to a soundtrack in lieu of mist, under lighting that suggested dark giving way to dawn, the full flood of noontide, or absolutely nothing at all. The steps would be the same, but the dance—understood as a theatrical event—would be different.
If we’re accustomed to dance that roots its theatricality in its steps and assume that its implications are therefore relatively impervious to the vagaries of décor, the porosity and contingency of Brown’s work—its reliance on the seemingly incidental—can be disconcerting. But Brown isn’t throwing dice; unlike Cunningham in “Split Sides,” say, she didn’t leave the interplay of sound, light, and movement in these two works to chance: she chose them. And when she chooses well, it’s magic, right here and right now.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Julieta Cervantes
Top: Leah Morrison and Nicholas Strafaccia in “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503”
Middle: Leah Morrison in “If you couldn’t see me”
Bottom: Leah Morrison and Laurel Tentindo in “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503”