TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY
Though Brown’s career spans almost 30 years, all three works on the program at the Harold Washington Library (sponsored by the Dance Center of Columbia College and Performing Arts Chicago) were made within the last three. Yet they looked quite different–the main similarity lay in the scores, each of which used “found” sounds.
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At first the music and dancing seem to inhabit very different worlds: the band’s martial sounds are raucous, out of tune, extroverted, while the dancing is quiet, contemplative, the dancers somewhat isolated from each other and not dancing to the music at all. It’s almost as if the dancing represents one’s inner life, which goes on at its own pace and with its own logic, while the faraway march music is the outside world, the social world, just barely impinging. Yet early on Brown creates a bridge between the outside world’s forays and the forest within: in an early solo a woman’s motions subtly recall images of the hunt. In profile, she brings her splayed hand to her mouth as if blowing a horn; bent over, she rests on an opposing hand and foot, like a deer grazing.
The fact is, Brown’s movement is so stuffed with formal beauties it’s impossible to catch them all–they slip by, available on a first viewing only subliminally. In the lectures she gave as part of her three-week residency in Chicago, Brown talked about first creating yards and yards of raw movement material for her dances, then “mixing” what she had. That simple word covers a multitude of virtues: Foray Foret brings the movements of ten dancers into a remarkable variety of synchrony and difference. Moments of symmetry develop and evaporate in a blink: suddenly there are just two dancers onstage, at diagonally opposite corners, on their backs, legs straight, crossed at the ankles, and raised in the air–like deer trussed up after a kill. And then they’re gone.
Designer Spencer Brown has lit the backdrop so that the bottom third looks like a light-colored piece of cardboard torn across the top, while the darker area above seems faintly splashed by sunlight from some huge unseen window; this seems to place the dancers at the dimly lit bottom of a large room whose changing patterns of light may mark the passage of a single day. Alvin Curran’s score includes an original piano composition (which he played live) and the recorded sounds of machinery, children yelling at a distance, a fly buzzing, a noise like Lincoln Logs falling into a metal container, and other more or less identifiable everyday noises. As if this were the score of an arty French movie, the intermittent piano seems vaguely sentimental.
