Nashville Scene
May 15, 2015
Review: Trisha Brown Dance Company Performs at OZ Arts
Dance history is happening in Nashville this weekend. The Trisha Brown Dance Company is town, presenting a retrospective of this legendary choreographer’s work. The performances, which are at OZ Arts and Zeitgeist Gallery, are part of the company’s three-year international farewell tour. Thanks to OZ and Zeitgeist, Nashvillians are getting to see some of Brown’s iconic proscenium dances performed for the last time.
Thursday’s opening night performance at OZ featured four dances created over a period of three decades. Although there were extreme differences in some of these works — some, for instance, were performed with music, some without — they all shared certain commonalities. All the dances are derived from everyday movements — walking, arm swinging, torso bending — which have been combined into this choreographer’s instantly recognizable, lyrical style.
In the opening dance, Opal Loop/Cloud Installation (1980), four dancers, shrouded in fog, move in silence, executing a complex series of patterns. Brown’s goal was to give form and substance to ever-changing, improvisational dance (the amorphous, shape-shifting fog formations served as a metaphor for the dance). The dancers — Cecily Campbell, Marc Crousillat, Tara Lorenzen and Jamie Scott — moved with the precision of a four-voice fugue, seamlessly interweaving their steps, engaging in subtle imitation and repetition.
Newark (Niweweorce), from 1987, is a thoroughly modern work of uncompromising difficulty. In this piece, six dancers — Campbell, Scott, Lorenzen, Olsi Gjeci, Leah Ives and Stuart Shugg — sustained long, angular lines of arms, legs and spines. The austerity of the dance was accentuated by Peter Zummo and Donald Judd’s orchestral sound production, which came across as postmodern industrial white noise. This is an epic work without a story — pure, abstract dance on a bare stage. No wonder the piece is considered by many to be Brown’s supreme masterpiece.
Rogues (2011) was a short, comparatively simple and delightful duet for two male dancers. In this piece, the dancers play off one another. The first begins a spontaneous phrase, which the other repeats. A slight variation in the repeated phrase prompts the first dancer to create a new variation. Crousillat and Shugg gave a wonderfully expressive performance to original music by Alvin Curran.
My favorite work of the evening was Present Tense (2003), which Brown choreographed to some of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes. Cage’s innovative score for prepared piano makes the instrument sound like a sparkling Caribbean percussion ensemble. In this dance, the brightly clad dancers often clumped together, dancing about the stage as a single entity, one with many complex moving parts.
Trisha Brown Dance Company’s performance continues tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Zeitgeist Gallery, with Lorenzen and dancers from Nashville’s New Dialect presenting Brown’s early experimental piece Planes (1968). On Saturday at 7:30 p.m., the company returns to OZ to present In Plain Site,the company’s new performance model that reimagines many of Brown’s classic works.