“Foray/Forêt,” “Watermotor,” “For M.G. : The Movie”
Trisha Brown Dance Company
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, NY
March 16, 2011
By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2011 by Carol Pardo
The Trisha Brown Dance Company presented a slice of its history during its first season ever at Dance Theater Workshop. Two works from Brown’s “Back to Zero Cycle” flanked a solo, performed for the first time by someone other than the choreographer herself. Brown forced us to consider the nature of dance and dancing.
“Foray/forêt” is an Anglo-French homonym might be translated—loosely—as a walk in the woods. Sure enough, the curtain rose on a crowd in a copse. The sarong-like costumes and their gold accents glowing in the dappled light immediately transported us somewhere far away and magical (designs by Robert Rauschenberg, collaborating with Brown for the fourth and final time.) It took a moment to adjust to the surroundings and even longer to discern a common impulse among the small groups of dancers spread around the stage. Eventually, common threads emerged repeated movement phrases. In the most memorable, two men surrounded a woman as they jumped across the stage. She rose the highest of the three, all but leaving her cavaliers in the dust. They, in turn, left her. She fell to earth just in time to join a new partner in some unison floor work. She’s switched elements without loosing a beat. The audience was left breathless. Gradually, band music, (lots of John Philip Sousa, a chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game, etc.), brassy, game, intentionally imperfect is heard in the distance. It grows louder, then recedes. Sitting in the auditorium, we are never quite sure of its origins. Are the dancers? Do they even hear it? Does it affect their dancing? We never quite know. Much of “Foray/Forêt” remains elusive.
The initial conceits of “For M.G. : The Movie” (from 1991, a year after “Foray/Forêt”) were obvious long before Brown let go of them. A man and a woman stood at one side of the stage, their backs to us. Another man ran on, making figures eights, running around the stage, eventually changing speed, or executing fragments of the initial partners. Velocity, repetition, the fragmentation of the whole into its component parts, OK. Brown has hidden the dancer’s face and front view in other works (and hidden the band in “Foray/Forêt”) but never so absolutely as here. The women eventually took off; her partner stayed put. In a reversal that can either be viewed as supremely ingenious or just too cute for words, roles were reversed at the first curtain call. He who was unseen now faced front, while everyone else faced the opposite direction. Group by group, they turned around to reveal themselves.
Filmed performances of “For M.G. : The Movie” in a muddy and murky print and of Trisha Brown in the solo “Watermotor,” filmed soon after its premier and wonderfully clear, ran in continuous loops on the lobby walls of the theater. This last was wonderful to see but also a disservice to Neal Beasley, who as only the second person to dance “Watermotor” had to battle with the image of the first, right out front. His performance, percussive and plumb vertical was about as far from her eel-like sinuosity as is possible. Did Brown the choreographer encourage him to get as far from her interpretation as possible? Is he still finding his way into the piece, with a rapprochement between the extremes still to come? We’ll see, but once again, Brown has got us thinking about dance, dancers and dancing.
Photograph by Yi Chun Wu; left to right: Nicholas Strafaccia, Samuel Wentz, Laurel Jenkins Tentindo