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When Trisha Brown died two years ago, at the age of 80, she left behind a reputation as one of the keystones of postmodern American dance. After founding her eponymous company in 1970, the innovative choreographer spent much of the ensuing decade cooking up abstract works that were either staged outdoors or in museums and galleries. This Edinburgh International Festival presentation at Jupiter Artland, a vast sculpture park on the outskirts of the city, honoured that legacy. Performances do not get more special than this.

The art of place linked with pitch perfect performance

Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, Jupiter Artland * * * * *

Every now and then, a show comes along that you know you will remember for the rest of your life. Trisha Brown: In Plain Site always had the potential to join that special list, and happily it doesn’t disappoint.

Jupiter Artland is already one of the most beautiful venues in Scotland, a contemporary sculpture park that works hand-in-hand with its environment. A lover of nature, Brown would have been thrilled to see her work staged in such an incredible setting.

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.

"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.

Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park that surrounds the house of Nicky and Robert Wilson outside Edinburgh, is now more than half way through its summer season and with the Edinburgh Art Festival upon us has two new works showing – a permanent installation and a temporary exhibition of the work of dancer and choreographer, Trisha Brown.

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.

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.

Of all the dance companies to hash out legacy plans in recent years—to ask what comes next after a founding choreographer’s death—the Trisha Brown Dance Company stands out for going with the flow, much in the manner of Brown’s dances. 

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. 

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.