Surfacing

Medley in Browns at Jacob's Pillow

by Marcia B. Siegel

TRISHA BROWN COMPANY and RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE, Canto /Pianto, Five Part Weather Invention, Set and Reset, by Trisha Brown. Ebony Magazine: to a village, Better Days, Water, by Ronald K. Brown. Presented by Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA. Closed.

Much new material was shown at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival last week by two choreographers named Brown. In addition to other dances from their respective repertories, Trisha Brown's Five Part Weather Invention and Ronald K. Brown's Water premiered, both commissioned by the Pillow. Trisha Brown also offered performances of Canto/Pianto, based on her full-scale production of Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo, which had its US premiere recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Two more-dissimilar choreographers couldn't be found on the contemporary scene, and yet, in the work of both, there's a sense that what you see is only a thin layer on the surface of a deeper, more challenging enterprise. There's always a subtext that may not be trackable, even with audience aids, and I sometimes wonder if putting the work on the stage is less fun for them than creating it is.

Trisha Brown has come a long way since her no-nonsense experimental days, when a dance could consist of partners leaning on each other until one of them fell, or of travel stories told to an audience lying down in the dark. But although her work now is more conventionally staged, it still uses problem-solving as a structure for movement and choreography, as did much of her old work.

Brown delights in games and puzzles, the brainier the better, and in her most successful dances the company looks like a troupe of cerebral acrobats, pleased with conquering the impossible. They have to learn phrases forward, backward, and in sections so that they can put them into motion at any point in the middle. Once, in a long-ago performance, a dancer sat in the audience and called out instructions, positioning the others to suit herself. On-the-spot choreography. Now those push-button, try-it-we'll-see-if-we-like-it maneuvers take place mainly in the studio; what we see on stage is the finished and rehearsed result of that experimentation. Infusing the performance with spontaneity now requires a new set of game tactics.

In Five Part Weather Invention, two dancing people have attendants who skirt around them, hovering as close by as possible but not touching them, like basketball players guarding their opponents. In another section, six or eight dancers fall in behind Keith Thompson and follow his moves a split-second after he initiates them. These episodes are most likely choreographed, but they look improvised because the dancers' timing is their own. One player can't know in advance exactly when the other will give the cue, so the piece looks like a mildly competitive game.

In an interview with scholar David Gere that is printed in the house program, Brown describes all this in technical terms -- how she manipulated the dance's limited movement material and laid out the floor patterns. So perhaps the games she appears to be playing are only the observable fallout from her own conceptual activity.

Even the movement itself has a built-in capacity for surprise. The dancers work in a continuous, inexhaustible stream of action, re-energizing the flow with new thrusts and twists before it runs out. But they can stop this flow at any point, too, and proceed again after a pause. This has a very different effect from dance forms that punctuate by stopping at the logical end of a phrase and then beginning again with the build-up of a new phrase. At the end of Five Part Weather Invention, the dancers collect in a unified group, but throughout the sequence, someone is always falling to the ground and getting up again after a pause. It's almost impossible to spot the moment of the fall, so strong is our desire to track and enjoy the unanimity of the group.

In Set and Reset (1983), Brown's movement was even more slippery and multi-directional than it is now, and the dance excels in surprise encounters, where one dancer's personal trajectory crosses another's. As if by accident, instead of by minutely calibrated planning, they collide and join up, touch and bound off, become each other's shadows, pick leaping dancers out of the air to reroute their jumps.

Trisha Brown seldom depended on music early in her career, and the musical component in her work still seems to be tangential to the dance. A sculptor friend at the Pillow remarked with admiration that she'd never seen dance where the movement, scenic, and musical elements had such equal importance within the whole. This was helpful to me in coming to terms with Brown's seeming indifference to a postmodern jazz score by Dave Douglas in Five Part Weather Invention, and with her oblique treatment of the monumental Renaissance opera Orfeo. But though I could see the value of not dancing to Douglas's quirky, atonal ensemble (riding the score would regulate the timing of the movement too strictly), I was less convinced about Monteverdi.

This music, by the founder of the modern opera form, is too glorious to be relegated to an inadequate recording by unnamed singers and used as a floor for Brown's dance. I didn't see the full Orfeo at BAM, but Canto/Pianto seemed hokey and pantomimic. Brown's movement ploys are probably the same as those that appear in her non-narrative dances, but as a gloss on the Orpheus legend, they seemed diminished. It was impossible to separate the movement from the music, so it felt like a regression to modern dance's old expressionistic days. Dancers had roles related to characters in the opera -- although three dancers took the role of Orfeo -- and they gestured almost literally at times to signify their tragic situation. I thought Brown's blend of postmodern disaffection and high musical drama made for an uneasy fit.

I got most involved in the dancing when the group action produced metaphoric images: men carried Eurydice in the air, swiping and clutching at her, as if to capture her and bring her back to the underworld. At the end, the group takes up where the choreography for the initial wedding celebration of Orfeo and Eurydice left off, except now they're bacchantes, who seize the unfortunate hero and tear him apart, with a final fade-out spotlighting his upside-down head.

Although Ronald K. Brown's images are quite recognizable, he says in his program interview with David Gere that he's using a whole lot of semi-autobiographical material to prompt his dance, and even wants that material to have a positive effect on the audience. This happens only indirectly for me, perhaps because I don't share the African-American cultural history on which his pieces are based. But I respond deeply to his movement sources, which seem always to underscore his more literary meanings.

In Water, seven dancers, in chef's aprons with random red stains on them, attack and throw each other down in an initial display of street aggressiveness. After that they subdue their frenzy, ritually wash themselves in basins, and listen to a long, lamenting, poetic sermon by Cheryl Boyce Taylor, a majestic woman in white robes and a turban who walks among them. She speaks of terrible losses and insults in the past, and of redemption in the future. There's a symbolic baptism, and then a celebratory dance to African drumming (by Fahali Igbo).

Brown's message in this -- and in all his work -- is pacification, harmony, and community. His eclectic movement is drawn from the many cultures he hopes to reform, but it seldom imitates its precedents exactly. In Ebony Magazine: to a village, four men and four women parade for the audience on and off the stage with assured, extroverted walks and plush, flowing gestures. The men have a dance where they confront each other but allow their explosive impulse to drain away in smoothing-out gestures before they come into dangerous contact. The idea is familiar -- sexy females and macho males -- but they don't look like Alvin Ailey tintypes, and somehow, unscathed, they resolve into one communal circle dance.

Among other choreographic devices, Brown uses the provoke-evade-accommodate-recoup pattern (but not the specific moves) of the martial-arts dance form capoeira to show one way of redirecting potential violence. The men's piece, Better Days, to popular music arranged by company music director MKL, began with a solo for Telly Fowler set to a gospel song, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." Dancing-miming sadness and appeal for heavenly guidance, Fowler would suddenly lapse into walking around the space. Facing upstage, he'd mime picking up extremely heavy objects, then abandoning them. The combination of his high-powered physicality and his dispassionate expression was disconcerting, but perhaps it had to do with the idea of letting go of anger or emotional baggage before it becomes harmful.

The rest of the dance is set in a sort of ornamented club-dance style, and is meant to evoke a gay bar in pre-AIDS New York. Led by a bouncy Arcell Cabuag, the men meet, check each other out, engage, sometimes confront, but never attack. After some wonderfully campy ballet lifts and poses, they're last seen in an exuberant orgy of changing partnerships and choreographed sex.