Trisha Brown debuts three dances at Joyce Theater

BY APOLLINAIRE SCHERR | Special to Newsday

February 3, 2008

The Trisha Brown Dance Company perform 'I Love My Robots.' (Photo by Montclair State University/Mike Peters)

Sixteen years ago, when Trisha Brown won a MacArthur "genius" award - the first the philanthropic foundation granted a woman choreographer - she bought a small, shingled house in Hampton Bays. It stands inside a lattice of light woven by a wide circle of pines, spruces and maples.

"It was like heaven," she says of her first night on the 1 1/2-acre plot, which she shares with her husband, video artist Burt Barr. "I went out and stood in those trees all night, just looking. I wanted to see what everyone was doing! I looked at my feet and the bark, the simplest things in the world. I had been so deprived."

For three decades, the internationally known postmodern choreographer and opera director had lived in converted industrial lofts in lower Manhattan. But she grew up in Aberdeen, Wash., with a huge forest on one side and the wild Pacific Ocean on another.

"Even rhythmically," she says, "I'm still linked to what it's like to run down the side of a hill inside the forest with maybe a few creeks intercepting, and decide what's sand, what's solid ground and what's rotten wood and unstable. You're always adjusting. You don't run straight down the hill, or you'll land in the creek."

Cultivated by her early and long familiarity with nature, this luscious yet precise sensibility graces nearly five decades of dances, including the three pieces that the Trisha Brown Dance Company will perform this week at the Joyce Theater.

The premiere "I love my robots" and the revivals "If you couldn't see me"and "Foray Forêt" may span 17 years and several phases in Brown's fruitful career, but they all generate surprising drama out of simple distinctions. Inside and outside, edge and center, front and back, person and robot exchange places or seep into one another.

Before she blurs boundaries, though, Brown firmly establishes them. "I love limitations," she says softly. (Even when she's emphatic, Brown maintains a shy person's quiet.) "Postmodern dance is so capable of giving you 10,000 ideas and no traffic signs. And how do you limit it, how do you choose? The choreographer has to make up how they make up a dance - that's big."

For the 1994 solo "If you couldn't see me," she let her friend Robert Rauschenberg do the honors. When the artist got a Yamaha keyboard for Christmas, he fantasized about playing a weepy country ballad with a title like "If you never saw me again" while Brown danced with her back to him.

So she did (though without the serenade). "I learned so much about how to convey expression when the methods for doing that are all on the front of your body, your smile and hands," she says. "But at first I wanted to cry all the time, because I couldn't tell what the audience was thinking."

The audience has been affected as well. "The dance [has] had a narrative for people, like I was dancing into the void. It had a life."

Last year's "I love my robots" - receiving its New York premiere this week - highlights Brown's playful side. (She is always playing, in fact, though the rigor and subtlety of her experiments often camouflage the goofy premise.)

Designed by architect Kenjiro Okazaki, the robots in question are absurdly plain. "They don't have arms or legs or faces," Brown says. "They only have a tube to represent them." Still, bobbling on their thin stems and skimming across the stage as if by whim (actually by remote control), they become more human than the humans methodically tracing circles inside of squares inside of circles across every inch of the space.

Beyond the forest

The 1990 "Foray Forêt" borrows most directly from Brown's childhood. The dance turns the stage into a forest clearing, spacious to its inhabitants and yet secluded - however tenuously - from the outside world. "Foray Forêt" plunges us into sudden pockets of inwardness.

Brown achieves this mysterious effect by working every aspect of the theater subtly and seamlessly. There is no set or plot to the dance. Instead, Rauschenberg's shimmery costumes and shafts of light dapple the stage. Trios turn into duets and then solos in an easy, incidental way. Dancers' hands and feet creep into view at the wings like forest creatures in the underbrush. And a live marching band parades just out of sight along the theater's perimeter, the peppy tunes rising and fading as the musicians tromp closer and farther.

About those toes and fingers peeking in from the wings, Brown says, "I called that 'trouble at the border.' I told the dancers, there has to be some kind of fuss when you get onto or off the stage, like when you're getting in or out of a swimming pool."

As for the marching band, "If you grew up in Aberdeen, it was always a big deal when you heard Sousa, a marching band. It either meant Roosevelt was coming to town or the circus or something really ravishing for a kid. And I thought, I wonder if everyone goes somewhere back in their heads when they hear Sousa."

It's OK with Brown if they don't. And if the audience never imagines that she does, that's fine, too. After all, she moved to New York - in 1961 - to leave her country ways behind. " Deborah Hay came to me around then and said, 'We've got a farm in Maine. Come on up,' and I thought, I came to New York to dance, not to go back to Aberdeen."

Influential landscapes

SoHo was a light industrial district when, in the '70s, Brown bought the loft where she still lives. So many trucks were backed up to loading docks that walking down the street became its own dance. "I'd duck seven times on my block," she says.

She embraced the urban landscape. The building in the now-legendary 1970 dance-with-rigging, "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building," was a stolid brick number from the neighborhood. Another piece stretched across rooftops from Spring Street to White Street, with the water towers as the serendipitous sets. A loft's dead wires and holes in the plaster served as movement cues for structured improvisation - for example, "Collapse to the floor at the dead wire. Swerve to the right at the hole."

But once a wild girl, always a wild girl. For Brown, "landscape" - with or without "urban" - is the operative word. Whether the stage is the side of a building, a pillared SoHo gallery, a crowded sidewalk or, later in her career, a regular old proscenium theater, Brown has treated it with a wide-eyed attentiveness usually reserved for observations of nature.

One of the pleasures of Hampton Bays, she says, is "there's water on all sides" - the Great Peconic Bay, the Tiana Bay, the Shinnecock Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean "all the way to Europe." She likes to collect bricks whose edges the tide has worn away, but she doesn't need to go down to the water all the time. "I'm not avaricious," she says. It's enough to know "there's liquid everywhere."

That's how nature is in Brown's dances. Even when we can't see it, we know it's there.

WHEN&WHERE: The Trisha Brown Dance Company performs Tuesday through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 18th Street, Manhattan. Tickets $35. Call 212-242-0800 or visit joyce.org.