In the Moment with Trisha Brown

What exactly is dance? In the 1960s, during a period of intensive experiment, modern dance choreographers investigated the art's essence. Dances, especially by members of New York's Judson Dance Theater, a loose group of avant-garde choreographers, explored pedestrian movement (quite literally, since walking—not necessarily with a dancer's grace and certainly not with turnout—emerged as a signature gesture), often performed by ordinary people, not trained dancers. Dance events took place anywhere—at the Judson Memorial Church, but also in lofts and artists' studios, on rooftops, in gyms and on basketball courts, in public parks, in any available open space where people might gather to watch—and many of the dances required no music, only silence or ambient noise. Dances aspired to have no subject matter but pure movement, just as Abstract Expressionism sought to express the qualities of paint on canvas and serial music to convey the nature of sequences of tones. Through all these methods, the dance avant-garde sought to eliminate the division between dancing and its audience, and while some of that audience applauded existential works in which anything might happen at any moment and viewers had their expectations continually overturned, others wondered whether these revolutionary choreographers had abandoned all the structural and symbolic qualities that made dance an art.

In 1971 Trisha Brown, one of the Judson experimenters, formed her own company, which still goes strong. While she gradually has made her gestural vocabulary more challenging and absorbing for both audiences and dancers—her works clearly demand rigorous training and extensive rehearsal—and while more recently she has choreographed not only to music but to beautiful compositions that the dances seem to want to express, she has kept faith in some of the anti-virtuosic values with which she began making dance.

Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Trisha Brown Dance Company in August 2011 brought retrospective programs to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires, where I watched the August 10 opening performance, and to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 16. Her fine, small company of four women and four men performed numbers that ranged back to her early days—despite their theoretical baggage, they looked fresh and surprising—and included her latest piece, a rather cool, intricately restrained dance for the whole company to a lovely score by Rameau.

At Jacob's Pillow, Spanish Dance (1973), the earliest in either program, shows how a couple of clever jokes can help Brown's early minimalist aesthetic produce a witty, satisfying work. Set to Bob Dylan's recording of Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain," it takes place in the shallow space before the curtain. Across the width of the stage, at equal intervals, five women in white t-shirts and pants stand facing left. As the music begins, Leah Morrison begins shuffling forward, flexing her knees and lightly swaying her hips as she advances. She slowly raises her arms before her, then over her head in a classic, splayed-finger flamenco pose—the only thing remotely Spanish about the number. When she makes contact with Tamara Riewe from behind, they begin shuffling forward together as Riewe slowly raises her arms—and so on, until they pick up Diane Madden (Brown's rehearsal director and former dancer, filling out the cast), Laurel Jenkins Tentindo, and Elena Demyanenko. It's simultaneously dance and not dance, expressive and ordinary, and the anticipation gives the number affective structure and becomes part of the fun: will anyone break the pattern? No one does, but as we enjoy the comic spectacle of three, then four and five women slowly prancing in close formation, hip to haunch, we notice the distinctions in their ports de bras, with Morrison's and Tentindo's more seductive than the others' more pedestrian avant-garde versions. Finally, with all five women chugging left, arms raised, they reach the left side of the proscenium, and Demyanenko smacks into it—boink—on the final plucked guitar note. It's a remarkable experiment in just how little a dance requires to...