January 11, 2004

Trisha Brown, the Artist's Dance Partner

hile I was roaming through "Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo recently, a photograph in the display case caught my eye. It was Babette Mangolte's 1978 image of "Spanish Dance," a segment of a larger work called, appropriately, "Line Up" (1976). It shows a line of five women, pelvis to pelvis, arms curled in a mock flamenco manner. I'm the second one from the right.

Seeing it, I could almost hear the music, Bob Dylan's rendition of Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Mornin' Rain." To the steady beat of the song, one dancer would tread across the performance space until she reached the next dancer, and so on until the five of us, sardinelike, would make our way to the other end of the stage. And then, on the last note, the front dancer would smash into the far wall.

That was early Trisha Brown: master of simplicity with a dose of humor. The idea of a line, and the endless possibilities of how it could be assembled and dissolved, was a theme in her work. Looking at the rest of the exhibit, which includes sculptures, drawings, videos and artifacts, one sees some of the preoccupations that have marked Ms. Brown's four-decade-long career. Over the years, she developed a distinctive movement vocabulary — fluid, slippery, studded with angular shapes — that has influenced a generation of modern-dance choreographers. (On Thursday, some of her early works will be performed at the museum.)

In the 80's, after I had left the company, Ms. Brown began the artistic collaborations that form the core of this exhibit, which closes on Jan. 24. Unlike Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who worked separately on projects and left it to the viewer to put the elements together, Ms. Brown and her collaborators worked toward a shared vision — always, however, in keeping with her postmodern sensibility, leaving room for ambiguity.

On the ground floor at the museum are the four tall screens on which Robert Rauschenberg projected slides for "Glacial Decoy" (1979), the first piece Ms. Brown made expressly for the proscenium stage. Black and white photographs — the bottom of a truck, a lone orchid, a shattered windshield — move from screen to screen, until each image seems to move off the stage. Similarly, the dancers skip and skim in an arc too big for the stage, creating the illusion that the dance continues outside the theater.

The first time I saw "Decoy," I thought: "How perfect! After all those performances in galleries, on rooftops, in plazas and on lakes, her first piece in a theater defies the borders of the stage."

At the top of the museum's staircase are the metal towers, resembling sections of a jungle gym, that Mr. Rauschenberg designed for "Astral Convertible" (1989). Ms. Brown was so comfortable with Mr. Rauschenberg that she allowed him not just to define the look of the dance but also to give shape to the choreography.

The towers are equipped with glaring lights and sound sensors that respond to the dancers' movements. He also designed silvery unitards with a triangle of shimmering fabric between the legs, making the dancers look a bit like mermaids. On the soundtrack in the video shown here, Mr. Rauschenberg (who was Mr. Cunningham's lighting designer in the 60's) says, "I wanted the dancers to appear as filaments of the light bulbs."

Also on the second floor are two small bronze sculptures by Nancy Graves that look like tree roots floating in the air. They can be seen as precursors to the set she designed for Ms. Brown's "Lateral Pass," a 1985 dance represented here by posters, a video and fabric swatches from Ms. Graves's costume designs. For it, she created masses of squiggly lines that are raised and lowered into the upper reaches of the stage space as the dance unfolds. She also costumed the dancers in carnivalesque get-ups, suggesting a kind of levity. Ms. Brown, always interested in defying gravity in her work, rigged one of the dancers so he could float along with the squiggles, hovering and swooping just above the other dancers.

Back on the ground floor is the Japanese sculptor Fujiko Nakaya's fog machine, which Ms. Brown commissioned for "Opal Loop," a 1980 work in which four dancers disappear into a gathering fog. The way movement can dissolve before one's eyes is also a motif in works like "Set and Reset" (1983) and "Foray Forêt" (1990). At the museum, the fog machine shoots out millions of water droplets, forming a curtain of mist onto to which a video of "Opal Loop" is projected. One gets the eerie sense of witnessing a dream within a dream. Elusiveness is Ms. Brown's forte.  

Wendy Perron, a senior editor at Dance Magazine, was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 1975 to 1978.