I spent a lot of time at the theater this year and I feel some sort of wrap-up is warranted. What follows are thoughts on a few shows I attended, in no particular order:
Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Dance Center
Most of the respect I felt for Trisha Brown came directly by recommendation: Her name was conspicuously absent from my formal training (which, in the grand tradition of American ballet schooling, was almost wholly anti-academic) but she would pop up occasionally out in the world, at the contemporary museum, in books on 20th century art and in other credible locations. In fact, the character of passing mentions of Brown’s work was so strikingly different, had such opposite concerns (it was implied) from those who were held up as titans of the form, that I efficiently learned to regard her as an artist outside of choreography without ever having seen her work or being told to give it a try.
What I realized not long into her October program at Columbia was that it was suddenly very clear why I had had the impression of her that I did, but that she was actually an artist very much inside of choreography. So inside of it that, in sublime moments, the fetishistic perfectionism of her constructions simply falls away, for she has so effortlessly created and taught an internal logic that the work begins, casually, to speak. On all kinds of subjects, in a kind of wistful, unhurried, peacefully curious language, punctuated by easy silences coming off question marks like steam coming off tea. Which isn’t to say that the four works I saw–Accumulation, Foray Forêt, If you couldn’t see me, and PRESENT TENSE–were all gossamer triviality. Trisha Brown is an intellectual powerhouse, and she isn’t content to merely entertain herself with her own cleverness. Her dancers, as avatars for herself, prod with ruddy fingers at the spongy confines of space, memory, structure and time. By “inside of choreography” I also mean that, more than anyone in the field, her sources of inspiration are chosen democratically and on merit alone. She’s not, unlike so many dance artists, gliding along a parallel stream of relative relevance, where dance cannot be foundationally influenced by work in other media. I felt like I worked harder at her show than at any other I attended this year, and I left feeling rewarded for it. Read More…
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