The Chelsea-based Joyce Theatre, one of the city’s principal venues for dance, has begun streaming works by companies who have performed there in the past or, in better circumstances, would have been performing there now. This week’s “JoyceStream,” running April 21-26, features the Trisha Brown Dance Company, currently marking its fiftieth year.
This was supposed to be a big year for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, founded 50 years ago. In early March, the troupe flew to France to begin a sold-out anniversary tour. The first few shows went great. Then came the wave of coronavirus cancellations, and the dancers found themselves on the last American Airlines flight from Paris to New York.
Trisha Brown’s work is more than beautifully sensual, kinesthetically inquisitive, and artistically daring: it also stimulates my mind. I find myself puzzling out Brown’s strategies, asking questions, making discoveries. Two works, Foray Forêt and Raft Piece, performed in close succession at sites in Fairmount Park, offered such delights. I am grateful to the Fairmount Park Conservancy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, along with several other organizations that partnered to bring this transcendent afternoon to fruition. Thank you too to the weather gods: a more perfect day could scarcely have been ordered.
At the Edinburgh Festival, five site-specific Brown works proved especially enthralling and poetic.
The five Trisha Brown dances at the Edinburgh International Festival here were, as the title In Plain Site suggests, site-specific: four locations in Jupiter Artland, a contemporary sculpture park 10 miles west of the city’s center. The amalgam of dance and place was revelatory; the dance animated the landscape.
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.
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.
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.
"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.