Nashville Scene
May 14, 2015
As part of its international farewell tour, Trisha Brown Dance Company follows the yellow brick road to the land of OZ Arts Nashville
By JOHN PITCHER
Imagining late 20th century dance without Trisha Brown would be like visiting the Himalayas without seeing Mount Everest. The vistas just wouldn’t be as breathtaking.
Over the course of her long career, the famed American choreographer created a vast repertoire of works that all but defined postmodern dance. Her early experimental choreography from the 1960s and ’70s freed dancers from music, from the proscenium stage, even from gravity itself. Long before anyone thought to describe her work as “site specific,” Brown had her dancers climbing walls and dancing on rooftops.
In Brown’s later pieces (her output consists of well-defined “cycles” of dance), she produced extraordinary dance collaborations with such luminaries as the painter Robert Rauschenberg, performance artist Laurie Anderson and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. It’s no wonder so many of today’s great artists, choreographers, musicians and dancers turn to Brown for inspiration.
This week, the Trisha Brown Dance Company will be in Music City, presenting some of the choreographer’s most beloved works at OZ Arts Nashville. The visit is part of a three-year international farewell tour that was announced in 2013, shortly after Brown, who is now 78, revealed she was retiring from her dance company due to health problems. But unlike the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which closed a few years ago following the death of its legendary founder, Brown’s company has no plans of dancing quietly into the night.
“We’re currently celebrating Trisha’s works for the proscenium stage, which we will not take on tour again,” Carolyn Lucas, one of the company’s associate artistic directors, tells the Scene. “But the company will go on. We will continue to license her dances, which remain timeless and relevant. And we’ll maintain an extensive archive of her work. But we’ve also come up with a new performance model that will keep her choreography before the public far into the future.”
That new model, called “In Plain Site,” is a hybrid that allows the company to apply Brown’s site-specific approach to dance to her immense repertoire of proscenium pieces. When a venue (a theater, museum, gallery or even a public park) asks Trisha Brown Dance Company to perform, the ensemble’s associate directors, Lucas and Diane Madden, will first visit the site and determine its specific spatial demands. They will then adapt Brown’s existing works to accommodate the chosen venue, creating, in essence, a new site-specific work out of previously existing material. Art demands innovation. It’s one of the fundamental laws of aesthetics. “In Plain Site” addresses this law, allowing a dance company whose creative force is no longer active to stay relevant and contemporary.
“Presenters need new choreography to bring in audiences,” says Lucas. “Our new model helps supply that demand.”
The new model certainly seems tailor-made for OZ, which routinely reconfigures its space to accommodate contemporary art and performance.
“I saw Trisha Brown Dance Company perform a retrospective in Los Angeles and was amazed at how her dance vocabulary had evolved from the 1960s and ’70s through 2011,” says Lauren Snelling, OZ’s artistic director. “I wanted them to perform some of Trisha’s proscenium works at OZ, but I also wanted the dancers to do something that interacted with our space, providing us with something that had never been done before.”
Trisha Brown Dance Company’s solution was to devise a series of programs, spread out over three days, which will be performed both inside and outside OZ, as well as at Zeitgeist Gallery. The opening-night performance on Thursday takes place inside OZ, with the company performing some of Brown’s best-known works, including the groundbreaking 1980 dance Opal Loop/Cloud Installation.
In this piece, four dancers perform in absolute silence, the rhythmic grace of their movements creating its own music. Brown famously described her choreographic style as “the line of least resistance.” One can almost see this line in Opal Loop, as one dancer’s shimmy seemingly ricochets off another, sending ripples of motion through the entire ensemble.
Brown thrives on collaboration, so it comes as no surprise that her company and OZ are joining forces on Friday with Zeitgeist Gallery and New Dialect to present the choreographer’s 1968 experimental masterpiece Planes. In this work, three dancers perform suspended along a wall as video images of rockets and celestial objects are projected over them. Two dancers from New Dialect will join one from Trisha Brown Dance Company to perform as a trio.
“This piece really plays with the viewer’s perception of gravity,” says Banning Bouldin, artistic director of Nashville’s modern dance company New Dialect. “The movements look effortless, but the amount of work it takes to create that sense of ease is extraordinary.”
Saturday’s performance begins outside OZ with Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, which will survey 11 works and excerpts from Brown’s repertoire. The performance later moves inside, where the space has been adapted for a special staging of Brown’s 1995 piece You Can See Us. Brown initially arranged this work as a solo called If You Couldn’t See Me, in which she danced with her back turned to the audience. In her follow-up duet, she continued to dance with her back to the audience while her partner, Mikhail Baryshnikov, faced the crowd. OZ has reconfigured its venue to have the audience on both sides, providing an entirely new perspective.
In addition to the dance performances, OZ has also organized a multimedia exhibit, which will feature videos and photographs of Trisha Brown and her works. That exhibit, which will be located in the entrance hallway and escaparate (walk-in humidor) at OZ, promises to deepen one’s appreciation of this amazing artist.
“Trisha’s work is always an adventure,” says Lucas. “We’re bringing that excitement to Nashville.”