Trisha Brown's dance passes by her eyes. The dancer – the molecules of dance atoms – are inexplicably propelled through space, constant movement, limbs shaking, hips fishing, and bodies caught up in the transverse currents of movement.
It was good to be reminded of the complete traits of the style with Trisha Brown Dance Company's program at the Joyce Theater that continues through Sunday.
The program offers two notable works by Brown, who passed away in 2017. “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503” (1980) and “Son of Gone Fishin'” (1981) come from a time when brown called “unstable molecular structures.”
Now, Brown's company, led by Carolyn Lucas, has begun commissioning new jobs, as well as other heritage theatre companies (Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Tanziater Wuppertar). This season, “Time Again,” a work by Australian choreographer Lee Sel, will premiere. Cells are obvious choices in many ways. He was a Rolex mentor and Brown mentee of Protege Initiative in 2010-11, and played with the company for several years afterwards.
Perhaps he was a very obvious choice. “Time Again” is a choreography that Cell has been praised for working with the dancers, with many of the non-extraordinary limb-covered movements resembling Brown's movements. The dance was visually striking, opening with bird sounds and tableaus of four dancers, sitting on a small, green rectangular lawn, quickly lifted off the floor, revealing woven panels that formed doorways, sheds and walls in a variety of ways. (The ingenious set design and outfit is by Mateolopes, another Rolex mentor, with atmospheric lighting by Jennifer Tipton.)
Dancers flock together, forming separate, intermittent rhythms and electronic washing of sounds, surrounding them, and fragmenting them into individual sequences. (Scores are by Alisdair MacIndoe.) Tall Ver Johnson is the loneliness of the group, gestures and bouncing around, suddenly swirling into massive movements.
“Time Again” has moments of merging and patterning. This is explained in the program notes as a survey of “time cycles, repeating life events.” However, this work feels structurally ambiguous. Physically, it may look very similar to Brown's choreography, but it appears to lack the precise intentions that underpin many of her work.
This intent can be felt from the opening moment of “Opal Loop.” At this moment, four dancers perform against the background of sparkling mist. This is a constantly changing cloud sculpture created by second hand through a machine that shoots water droplets into the air. (The music is believed to be “the sound of water passing through a high-pressure nozzle.”
The dancers seem to move in a completely individual way at first. But soon their quick, loose movements begin to align with arms often shaking their arms, whipping their entire bodies in unpredictable directions. The ripples, hops and hitches of the small through-body on the knees echo and synchronize, but as you notice, they fall apart.
Like swirling, changing the clouds behind it, the dancers were no longer able to glimpse them sooner than they melted. The end comes unexpectedly, but somehow it disappeared, but is engraved on the eyes.
“Son of Gone Fishin” was Brown's first proscenium work, created to music, a computer organ soundscape score by Robert Ashley. (She was tired of hearing the audience cough.) The original set design of the ascent and descending blue and green panels was by Donald Judd. These same colored lighting saturates the background, as they do not fit in the Joyce stage.
This piece is a marvelous, lining up the physical complexity, once moved by a system of intricate reverse movement, which brown once described as a cross-section of a tree trunk. It's impossible to grasp a single viewing, but who do you need it?
Six dancers, bright blue and green (the seventh originally appears in brown at the beginning and end) ripple through space, ripple, cross, sometimes align, bouncing and weaving. They are all great performers, but they have less homogeneous and singular movement than the early days of brown dancers.
They form a field of dance. As I lift my knees, I feel a rapid and swell of small moments of glow, my torso swells, my head bounces sharply. Brown's mastery of structure is seen as a conversion of duo and solos to quartets and sudden group unisons. A few times, they temporarily turn into rings and rotate temporarily before dissipating into individual movements. When the seventh dancer returns to the end, she runs her opening sequence on the contrary. The dance has perfected itself.
Trisha Brown Dance Company
Until Sunday at the Joyce Theatre in Manhattan. joyce.org.
