Review: Trisha Brown's Unstable, Liquid Structures

New York Times

01-05-2025

The dances of Trisha Brown slide past the eye. The dancers — molecules in the atom of the dance — are in constant motion, limbs swinging, hips angling, bodies caught in the crosscurrents of motion, propelled ineluctably through space.
It was good to be reminded of the utter distinctiveness of that style in the Trisha Brown Dance Company's program at the Joyce Theater, which continues through Sunday.
The program offers two notable pieces by Brown, who died in 2017. 'Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503' (1980) and 'Son of Gone Fishin'' (1981) come from the period that Brown called 'Unstable Molecular Structures,' in which complex compositional systems underpinned the liquid, silky movement.
Now headed by Carolyn Lucas, the Brown's company has also begun to commission new work, as do other heritage troupes (Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Tanztheater Wuppertal among them). This season, 'Time Again,' a work by the Australian choreographer Lee Serle, has its premiere. Serle is in many ways an obvious choice: He was Brown's mentee in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative in 2010-11 and performed with the company for several years after that.
Perhaps he was too obvious a choice. 'Time Again' has choreography credited to Serle in collaboration with the dancers, and much of the non sequitur, limbs-flung-out movement looks a lot like Brown's. The dance is visually striking, opening with bird sounds and a tableau of four dancers, sitting on their own little lawns of green rectangles, which are soon lifted off the floor and revealed to be woven panels that variously form doorways, huts and walls. (The ingenious set design and the costumes are by Mateo Lopez, another Rolex mentee, with atmospheric lighting by Jennifer Tipton.)
The dancers bunch and separate, form interlinked groups and fragment into individual sequences as intermittent rhythms and electronic washes of sound surround them. (The score is by Alisdair Macindoe.)The tall Burr Johnson is often a loner in this group, gesturing and prancing, then suddenly swirling into larger-scale motion.
There are moments of coalescence and patterning in 'Time Again,' which Serle describes in a program note as an exploration of 'the cycles of time, the repetition of life events.' But the piece feels structurally vague. Physically it may look a lot like Brown's choreography, but the precise intention that underpins much of her work seems absent.
That intention is felt from the opening moments of 'Opal Loop,' in which four dancers perform against a backdrop of shimmering mist, an ever-changing cloud sculpture created by Fujiko Nakaya through machines that shoot water droplets into the air. (The music is credited as 'sound of water passing through high-pressure nozzles.')
The dancers at first appear to be moving in entirely individual ways. But soon their quick, loose movements, in which swinging arms often whipsaw the whole body in unpredictable directions, start to align. Little through-body ripples, hops and hitches of the knee are echoed and synchronized, only to break apart just as you notice them.
Like the billowing, mutating cloud behind them, the dancers keep forming group and individual shapes, no sooner glimpsed than dissolved. The end comes unexpectedly, but somehow perfectly, vanished but imprinted on the eye.
'Son of Gone Fishin'' was Brown's first proscenium work created to music, a soundscape score for computerized organ by Robert Ashley. (She was tired of hearing the audience coughing.) The original set design of ascending and descending blue and green panels is by Donald Judd; since these don't fit on the Joyce stage, lighting in these same colors saturates the backdrop.
This piece is a marvel of interlocking physical complexity, motored by a complex system of reversed and inversed movement that Brown once described as like the cross-section of a tree trunk. It's impossible to grasp on a single viewing, but who needs to?
The six dancers in bright blues and greens (a seventh, originally Brown, appears at the beginning and the end) ripple and squiggle through space, intersecting and occasionally aligning, ricocheting and weaving. They are all marvelous performers, but more homogenous, less idiosyncratic movers than an earlier era of Brown dancers.
They form a field of dance, a torrent of tiny moments of brilliance as a knee lifts, a torso undulates, a head flicks sharply. You see Brown's mastery of structure as duos and solos transmute into quartets or sudden group unison; several times they cohere into a circle and revolve briefly before dissipating into individual motion. When the seventh dancer returns at the end, she performs her opening sequence in reverse. The dance has completed itself.