Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Paying Heed to the Mysteries of Trisha Brown

190 | Paying Heed to the Mysteries of Trisha Brown New York Times, July 8, 2001 As I look this piece over, I think of the last time I performed Trisha’s work, in January 2012. It wasn’t on a stage, but in an art gallery for a benefit to raise money for the Trisha Brown Dance Company archives. As part of the event, which doubled as her seventy-fifth birthday party, five of us alumnae—all women in our sixties—lined up to do her “Spanish Dance.” This is the iconic four-minute dance to Bob Dylan singing Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Mornin’ Rain.” Accumulating one at a time, we slowly tread across the space, loose in the hips, raising our arms in mock flamenco magnificence. Finally, as tight as packed sardines, there’s a five-woman pile-up at the wall. But on that evening, as we passed by Trisha standing among the well-wishers gathered there, she was looking each one of us in the eyes, mouthing the words, “I love you” over and over. Knowing that Trisha had already had a series of debilitating mini-strokes, I lost my composure during the bows and burst into quiet tears. Twenty-five years ago I was rehearsing with Trisha Brown and three other dancers in a former sheep fold in a wooded area near Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. We were creating Line Up, which we made by improvising for maybe twenty seconds at a time, and then trying to recall, edit, and set our improvisation. (This was way before anyone used video to record the rehearsal process.) The instructions were to create lines in space while relating to one another and the environment, so there was lots of interaction among the five of us. At one point during the recalling stage of the process, Trisha seemed to space out. I knew she was supposed to be standing next to me, so I beckoned to her, saying, “C’mon, Trisha, you’re over here.” But she just stared at me without moving. Again, I curled my hand invitingly: “C’mon,Trisha, c’mon.” Keeping her eyes on me, she backed away, then blurted out, “That’s what I want!” What she wanted, I finally realized, was to put my coaxing gesture into the piece. Or, more generically, she wanted to capture the informal activity of creating the piece, and put that into a performance. Trisha is in love with the process of making and performing dances. The behind-the-scenes aspects fascinate her. In 1983, for Set and Reset (which became a masterpiece of the postmodern era), Robert Rauschenberg designed a partly transparent set that let the dancers remain visible after exiting the stage. For viewers, the separation of onstage and offstage was blurred. In the “Sticks” section of Line Up, we talked to one another in performance not From 2000 to 2004 | 191 only to get our sticks connected up in one long line but also to let the audience in on the game. In a recent conversation in her SoHo loft, Trisha said, “On long tours I look at my choreography from backstage. I get a lot of ideas from seeing the sides of my work. It’s a skewed view. I spend hundreds of hours back there.” She likes seeing the dancers throw on ratty sweat pants over gleaming costumes to warm up for a performance. For the New York premiere of her jazz-saturated El Trilogy, July 18 to 21 as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2001,Trisha has made two interludes for a solo dancer that are performed while stage-crew work proceeds in full view. During the first one, which has uncharacteristically fierce, almost desperate moves, like clawing the floor, scenery changes are made and musicians rotate in and out of the pit. A crew member changes the color gels in the lights, unfazed by the gripping solo. During the second interlude, the same dancer enters with her head poking through the rungs of a ladder—Trisha calls it a ladder necklace— and explores movement using that essential piece of backstage equipment while other dancers stretch out and warm up in a corner. As in Asian forms of theater like Noh and Kabuki, the labor of preparation is deemed worthy of aesthetic delight. The paradox is that while Trisha reveals what is usually hidden, she conceals what is usually visible. It’s almost impossible to see where a chain...