The dances of Trisha Brown slide previous the attention. The dancers — molecules within the atom of the dance — are in fixed movement, limbs swinging, hips angling, our bodies caught within the crosscurrents of movement, propelled ineluctably by means of area.
It was good to be reminded of the utter distinctiveness of that fashion within the Trisha Brown Dance Firm’s program on the Joyce Theater, which continues by means of Sunday.
This system affords two notable items by Brown, who died in 2017. “Opal Loop/Cloud Set up #72503” (1980) and “Son of Gone Fishin’” (1981) come from the interval that Brown referred to as “Unstable Molecular Buildings,” by which advanced compositional techniques underpinned the liquid, silky motion.
Now headed by Carolyn Lucas, the Brown’s firm has additionally begun to fee new work, as do different heritage troupes (Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Tanztheater Wuppertal amongst them). This season, “Time Once more,” a piece by the Australian choreographer Lee Serle, has its premiere. Serle is in some ways an apparent alternative: He was Brown’s mentee within the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative in 2010-11 and carried out with the corporate for a number of years after that.
Maybe he was too apparent a alternative. “Time Once more” has choreography credited to Serle in collaboration with the dancers, and far of the non sequitur, limbs-flung-out motion appears so much like Brown’s. The dance is visually placing, opening with hen sounds and a tableau of 4 dancers, sitting on their very own little lawns of inexperienced rectangles, that are quickly lifted off the ground and revealed to be woven panels that variously type doorways, huts and partitions. (The ingenious set design and the costumes are by Mateo Lopez, one other Rolex mentee, with atmospheric lighting by Jennifer Tipton.)
The dancers bunch and separate, type interlinked teams and fragment into particular person sequences as intermittent rhythms and digital washes of sound encompass them. (The rating is by Alisdair Macindoe.) The tall Burr Johnson is commonly a loner on this group, gesturing and prancing, then all of a sudden swirling into larger-scale movement.
There are moments of coalescence and patterning in “Time Once more,” which Serle describes in a program observe as an exploration of “the cycles of time, the repetition of life occasions.” However the piece feels structurally obscure. Bodily it might look so much like Brown’s choreography, however the exact intention that underpins a lot of her work appears absent.
That intention is felt from the opening moments of “Opal Loop,” by which 4 dancers carry out towards a backdrop of shimmering mist, an ever-changing cloud sculpture created by Fujiko Nakaya by means of machines that shoot water droplets into the air. (The music is credited as “sound of water passing by means of high-pressure nozzles.”)
The dancers at first seem like shifting in solely particular person methods. However quickly their fast, unfastened actions, by which swinging arms typically whipsaw the entire physique in unpredictable instructions, begin to align. Little through-body ripples, hops and hitches of the knee are echoed and synchronized, solely to interrupt aside simply as you discover them.
Just like the billowing, mutating cloud behind them, the dancers maintain forming group and particular person shapes, no sooner glimpsed than dissolved. The top comes unexpectedly, however one way or the other completely, vanished however printed on the eye.
“Son of Gone Fishin’” was Brown’s first proscenium work created to music, a soundscape rating for computerized organ by Robert Ashley. (She was bored with listening to the viewers coughing.) The unique set design of ascending and descending blue and inexperienced panels is by Donald Judd; since these don’t match on the Joyce stage, lighting in these similar colours saturates the backdrop.
This piece is a marvel of interlocking bodily complexity, motored by a fancy system of reversed and inversed motion that Brown as soon as described as just like the cross-section of a tree trunk. It’s inconceivable to know on a single viewing, however who must?
The six dancers in vivid blues and greens (a seventh, initially Brown, seems in the beginning and the tip) ripple and squiggle by means of area, intersecting and sometimes aligning, ricocheting and weaving. They’re all marvelous performers, however extra homogenous, much less idiosyncratic movers than an earlier period of Brown dancers.
They type a area of dance, a torrent of tiny moments of brilliance as a knee lifts, a torso undulates, a head flicks sharply. You see Brown’s mastery of construction as duos and solos transmute into quartets or sudden group unison; a number of instances they cohere right into a circle and revolve briefly earlier than dissipating into particular person movement. When the seventh dancer returns on the finish, she performs her opening sequence in reverse. The dance has accomplished itself.
Trisha Brown Dance CompanyThrough Sunday on the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.
