PS21’s upcoming festival, The Dark, takes place in the dead of winter. Vallejo Gantner, the venue’s new artistic and executive director, planned this festival of more than 80 performances across Columbia County sites to give the community a little lift at this cold and dark time of year. Featured artists include choreographers Trisha Brown, LaJuné McMillian, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, and the dance-adjacent theater maker Andrew Schneider.
Brown, a founding postmodern choreographer in the 1960s, was an experimentalist. Her early works played with everyday action and task-based structures, placing dances in parks, on rooftops, and in galleries, treating architecture as a partner.
The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s program In Plain Site has been ongoing for more than 10 years, continuing after Brown’s death in 2011. It includes extracts and full pieces from Brown’s adaptable repertory, chosen specifically for each site. In this case, the newly restored Masonic Hall in Chatham, home of Bath Freemasons for over 100 years, will offer its interior fluted columns, anterooms, and a servery for the performance at dusk.
That timing matters, because the company will perform without artificial light. As Iréne Hultman Monti explains, “Everything happens in natural light as it shifts from lighter to darker. The weather and atmosphere become part of the experience.”
Leading this staging is Hultman, a longtime dancer with Trisha Brown who later served as rehearsal director for the company. She describes In Plain Site as an intimate way to encounter the choreography. “You get a close up of a performance and you actually see and breathe with the dancers,” she says. “You can also see different viewpoints. You can walk around, which is impossible on a stage or concert setting. It can offer a lot of insight, both with the dancers and the choreography, that you otherwise would not get from a long-distance view.”
Hultman says the program draws largely from Brown’s early works. “It’s called In Plain Site because it includes early work plus later works that are extracted from Trisha’s different pieces,” she says. “I’m mostly familiar with the early works, so this show consists of pieces like Sticks, Figure 8, Leaning Duets, Locus, and Group Primary Accumulations. They’re all done in the 70s. I might include an Opal Loop segment, from 1980, called Message to Steve, for choreographer Steve Paxton.”
For Hultman, those dances are the foundation for everything that followed. “The early works are the building blocks for the later works,” she says. “The later works are the continuation of the early works, but in a larger setting, in a more complex environment, and more complex conceptual thought, and more complex use of the body’s ability to move. Trisha’s idiosyncratic view and her poly-rhythmical sense is built from these early works. It’s almost like they are experiments in thought process.”
One example is Locus, “a very early work from 1975, a work that happens within a cube,” she says. “It’s an imaginary cube with points in space that also represents the alphabet, and then Trisha took her biography and actually spelled out her biography within that box. It was important to reach the point, but not the transition, which means that different body parts were used at different times, but in a very rhythmical and architectural way.”
Hultman connects it directly to Brown’s process. “Trisha was a master improviser, and she was curious too if she could catch her own way of improvising and teach it to other dancers. Locus was primal in that development. So, she could see that her movements were transferable, and that was the beginning, I think, of her later excursions.”
Hultman speaks about Brown’s work as something that still must live, not simply be preserved. “I’m very happy to be doing this because I’m lucky to have worked with Trisha Brown herself,” she says. “I feel strongly that her legacy needs to continue to appreciate her artistry.
“It’s important to let her work live and affect others who can then build on her knowledge to create other choreography for the future, because we are all building on previous historical building blocks, and she’s one of them.”
Working with younger dancers requires a particular approach. “You do it by actually having them discover, themselves, how to do it,” she says. “In this type of work, you have to say yes, yes. You can’t say no. You can’t be too critical. You have to say yes to what they experience. It’s extremely simple, and it’s so simple that it becomes very complex.”
For audiences encountering Trisha Brown in this way, she hopes the experience stays open-ended. “I hope they take away an experience, whatever that is, so it can evoke something different within them, and then they can go on looking at other things as well. I hope it adds to their experience of art.”
In Plain Site runs Wednesday and Thursday, February 18 and 19, at the Masonic Hall in Chatham.
Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, writer, curator, and educator. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and the Boston Globe. Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY. Throughout her career, she has championed both innovative and legacy choreography, supported the work of artists across the field, and brought critical attention to the art form. Her latest dance, In the Wake of Yes, was noted as "powerfully animated, positively fizzy, full of droll wit" (Fjord), “The piece blended dance, art, and language into a layered meditation on love and emotional vulnerability." (Eye on Dance).
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