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Trisha Brown: In Plain Site: A midsummer night's dance

It is a treat to see dancers in places where they would not normally be found, or in situations in which you wouldn't normally find them; in among tall trees, spreading ferns and rough hewn rocks; floating serenely on square rafts on a geometric lake; getting dressed horizontally. The union of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Jupiter Artland is one full of surprise, delight and tranquillity and its success owes as much to the careful choice of setting for each dance in the Jupiter grounds, as to the clean lines of Brown's choreography.

Trisha Brown Dance Company Interview: 'Art is an emotional thing, and I think it moves you in a different way when you see works unfolding outside of formal settings'

"Wow!” Like many people, Carolyn Lucas’s response to seeing Jupiter Artland for the first time was visceral. Unlike the rest of us, however, the associate artistic director of Trisha Brown Dance Company was about to use the West Lothian art park as her playground.

Festival reviews: Roots; RSNO; Trisha Brown; Shooglenifty

Outdoors, at Jupiter Artland.  It had rained heavily  - the green swards squelched muddily underfoot as we took to the Artland’s terraced earthworks to watch the Trisha Brown Dance Company move free of conventional spaces.The moment when nine figures, in pristine white trousers and tops, took up their positions on the slick wet grass felt thrillingly elemental. Slowly, precisely, their limbs unfolded into the clean-cut lines of Brown’s Another Story as in Falling (excerpt) 1993: an outstretched arm, a spraddling walk, a held balance - never hurried, never flamboyant, sometimes coinciding in unison, sometimes in a kind of visual counterpoint and all juxtaposed against the rising curves of Charles Jencks’s Life Mounds.

A bricklayer with a sense of humour Trisha Brown pioneered a new style of movement and dance

The first solo exhibition of her work in Britain explores her preoccupation with gravity, momentum, balance and repetition.

TWO PEOPLE stand side by side, the edges of their feet pressed together. Grasping each other’s wrists, they lean out to arm’s length, their backs straight; thus joined, they take a tentative step, and then another. If one partner falls, the other hauls them back up, keeping their feet in contact all the while. In Trisha Brown’s film, shot on Wooster Street in New York’s SoHo district in April 1970, the dancers evoke sailboats. Navigating the wide space of the street, their bodies are masts, their arms sails.

Cecily Campbell, "Ballet (1968)",  BAM, Brooklyn, 2018.  Photo: Stephanie Berger.

Trisha Brown at BAM Review in the Dance View Times

Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden, who are the directors of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, seem to be making all the right decisions on how to proceed after the founder’s death eighteen months ago. Last year the company presented a splendid concert of late Brown works at Jacob’s Pillow, and at BAM Fisher this week the group showed earlier pieces with the same exactitude and sense of joy. 

New York Times Critics Pick the Dance Moves (and Objects) to See This Fall

No! No! No! Every generation of modernist artists has applied a firm negative to points championed by the previous generation. In the 1960s, when large parts of the world were still taken aback by the dance negations implied or stated by Martha Graham (no to frivolity or merely surface psychology), George Balanchine (no to most décor or costume excess), and Merce Cunningham (no to conventional musicality), the young rebels around the Judson Memorial Church in New York went further.

 

 

Photo © Lois Greenfield

Voluptuous Rigor -  Trisha Brown Dance Company at ICA Miami

Luscious and austere. Severely abstract and exuberantly physical. In her half-century long career, choreographer Trisha Brown traversed the limits of expression to create a unique and profoundly influential body of work. Which makes it an extremely big deal that the Trisha Brown Dance Company is performing at the ICA Miami this week, their first time in Miami since 1990. (When the Miami Light Project presented them in the Robert Rauschenberg-designed Astral Convertible on the sands of Miami Beach.)

Photo © Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

An Incandescent Journey Through 20th Century Dance

Isadora Duncan wrote in her autobiography: “I am an enemy to the ballet, which I consider a false and preposterous art, in fact, outside the pale of all art.”

What would she have made of Sara Mearns, a ballerina whose body seems to hold the air around her? On Sunday evening, Ms. Mearns, a principal at New York City Ballet, performed “Dances of Isadora,” staged and directed by Lori Belilove as part of the Paul Taylor American Modern Dance program “Icons.”

Now in its second season, “Icons,” presented with American Dance Festival, celebrated three of the world’s most important choreographers: Duncan; Trisha Brown, with “Set and Reset” (1983); and Paul Taylor, represented by “Esplanade” (1975). It was an incandescent journey through 20th-century dance.

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