Trisha Brown: stepping out with Anton Webern - choreographer

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1996 by Deborah Jowitt

Picture a scene in which a traffic cop is encouraging slightly unlawful maneuvers and mild collisions. In a big white studio whose windows capture glimpses of the Hudson River, Trisha Brown sets a group of her dancers running in a sweeping curve while a trio is in progress. Some of the runners, she suggests, might try weaving through the trio. An accidental collision opens up new possibilities. Now can Wil Swanson, one of the runners, twist and turn Abigail Yager in passing, and can she, as he dashes off, continue what she's doing? Yes! Pretty soon three runners are attempting various deliberately casual hoists with the trio people. Major jam-up. Brown (entranced): "Can you do that again just as badly as you did?" And then, conferring with former company dancer Kelly McDonald, who's sitting with a score on her lap and her finger on the button of a tape player, Brown and the dancers work to mesh three staggered lifts, very subtly, with four notes of music by Anton Webern.

Brown's new piece, Twelve Ton Rose, which premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1996 Next Wave Festival on October 2 and marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her company, is only the second this remarkable choreographer has built to an existing score (if you don't count work made during her student days at Mills College and the American Dance Festival). She didn't need music back in the years when she was climbing walls. (The title of her 1971 Walking on the Wall meant just that: dancers mounted a stepladder, buckled themselves into harnesses that were suspended from pulleys mounted on ceiling tracks, and strolled along museum walls.) As she explains it now, her so-called equipment pieces made their own demands, and music wasn't relevant: "There were the sounds of the equipment, of the environment. It was more like sculpture, and a sculptor wouldn't put soundtracks with his work."

Nor did she use music when she began, in the 1970s, to choreograph dazzlingly plain movements based on the smooth articulation of joints and spine. These, gradually accumulating (l, l-2, 1-2-3, etc.), became the dance world's most beguiling laundry lists.

Brown acknowledges that a red-hot aesthetic position on purity was a vital part of the "new dance" scene back then. Like the other brilliant radicals who banded together in Judson Dance Theater in 1962, she would never have resorted to conventional use of music to accompany dance. But, she adds, avoiding musical accompaniment also had to do with the fact that she was developing her own way of dancing, which she describes as "a merge of the uncanniness of instinctive movement with selected, nondecorative gestures . . . And, you know, if you're making this form simultaneously with the hearing of music, it will affect what you do."

In the period when she was operating on (effortlessly she dredges up the term) "internal gush," she had no mirrors on her walls either. What if something should strike her as "beautiful"? Did that then become the criterion?

Sitting at her kitchen table in the SoHo loft where she's lived and worked for more than twenty years, she remembers, a trifle sadly, how long it took for the general public to accept her dances. Now people seem to see what she's doing. And, of course, what she's doing has developed beyond simple roots into luscious and theatrical art--without losing its essential purity or the message that movement and form can be profoundly expressive. Brown may still have to worry about finances, but she's no longer a struggling maverick; she's a world-class, world-famous choreographer, the recipient of numerous honors, including two Guggenheims and a coveted MacArthur Fellowship. She has fine new studios for rehearsals and for classes by company members and others. Her choreography is no longer shown in downtown lofts. Framed by decor commissioned from contemporary artists, she and her extraordinary dancers inhabit proscenium spaces from New York's City Center to the venerable opera houses of Europe.

And, yes, since the early 1980s, they've been dancing, well, not to music, but certainly with music. Laurie Anderson, for instance, saw two-thirds of Set and Reset (1983) on video while Brown was choreographing it, captured her response to it in music, and built from there, while Brown, working independently, completed the dance. Delicate live piano music probed its way in and out of an array of taped sounds in Alvin Curran's sensitive score accompanying For M.G. (1991).

But what Brown's talking about now, warmed to a glow by herbal tea and the ideas that have seized her, is finding inspiration in music by important dead composers. For critics and the public, the sensitivity with which a choreographer responds to music often becomes a yardstick for judging his or her mastery. In terms of Brown's personal development too, working with a written score was the next logical step.

Choreographing Lina Wertmuller's production of Bizet's Carmen whetted her appetite, and in 1995, with MO., she bit into a monumental main course: J. S. Bach's A Musical Offering--all fifty-five minutes of it. Now she's working with Webern's sweet yet astringent opuses 7, 28, and 5. And in 1998, the company will premiere choreography for Monteverdi's Orfeo at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. In short, Brown is now tackling music the establishment knows and treasures, written long ago by composers who could scarcely have dreamed of collaborating with such a woman.