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Art

Motion captured

No matter the medium, Trisha Brown turns movement into art.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 25, 2007

Trisha Brown, Compass, 2006, softground etching with relief roll, published by USF Graphicstudio in an edition of 35.

ADVERTISEMENT [Photo by Will Lytch] Trisha Brown prepares to dance on an etching plate at USF’s Graphicstudio to create a limited edition of prints based on her famous movements.

TAMPA The feet, size 7, support a lithe frame and heavy mantle. But Trisha Brown, heaped with awards and accolades, considered by most followers of the art as the biggest and brightest star of post-modern dance, treads lightly.

Named the 2007 Distinguished Master Artist by the University of South Florida, Brown was in Tampa for a few days a week ago participating in a symposium and attending various functions in conjunction with an exhibition of her drawings at USF's Contemporary Art Museum.

She returns to the bay area this week with her Trisha Brown Dance Company for performances Wednesday at USF and Friday at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg.

Sitting behind a table, the 70-year-old with a mop of gray hair and a face that has never known a surgeon's knife looks like the proud grandmother of three that she is. But when she stands, dressed in Japanese-designer black shift and leggings, she becomes the legendary dancer and choreographer who has commanded a world stage for more than three decades.

To illustrate a point about her famous improvisational method during the symposium, Brown stepped away from the podium to perform an impromptu riff on Locus, one of her most famous works. She initiated a spontaneous monologue while moving with rapid-fire agility as she referenced intersections within an imaginary cube. It is a cerebral concept, but onstage it's breathtaking in its directness and immediacy, as provocative as when it debuted in 1975.

A new way to perform

"Cant," with or without the apostrophe, seems absent from Brown's vocabulary. She continues to choreograph new dances for her company, although she rarely performs anymore. Rather than having a prima donna meltdown over her waning physical stamina, she has diverted her creative energies. She directed a restaging of the opera Orfeo in 1998 to great acclaim, using the singers also as dancers. A new opera by composer Salvatore Sciarrino set in 1000 A.D. Japan debuts under her direction at the Paris Opera House in May.

"Two years ago I asked myself what I'd really be sorry I didn't do before I died," she says. "It was opera. I had no knowledge of it but no biases either. I'm an abstract choreographer. To have the opportunity to work as a dramatist is new and I find I do it well."

Drawing, for years something she did casually, has become an extension of her dances.

"I think of them the same way I think of new choreography," she says. "That large piece of white paper - it's me wanting to develop a new way of being a performer.

"I love to skirt around a limitation."

But is it dance?

She has had her share. Martha Graham was an obvious early role model for her, but she chafed under the set pieces of choreography with an unvarying vocabulary that were the rule both for modern and traditional dance. She went to New York in her early twenties and was part of the Judson Dance Theater, a collective of dancers and choreographers who were breaking away from the confines of modern dance.

Brown's distinctive approach to movement - fluid and based on natural body gestures - began to emerge. She caused a stir in 1966 with a work titled Homemade when she strapped a film projector onto her back that projected a film of her performing everyday actions as she performed them live. But that was nothing compared with Man Walking Down the Side of a Building of 1971, in which a dancer in harness walked down a seven-story building in New York, held parallel to the ground by a handler on the roof slowly letting out the rope.

Critics were intrigued with its novelty but questioned whether it was dance.

It wasn't by most standard measures. But it dealt with dance's most elemental restriction, gravity. In its simplistic way, Man Walking defied and finally acquiesced to Earth's pull. She took dance into the streets again with Roof Piece in 1973, placing her self and other dancers on Manhattan roof tops, telegraphing movements from one to another like a monumental round-robin.

In different ways in subsequent dances, Brown has made common acts and gestures centerpieces for her choreography, building them up repetitively, inserting slight modulations or alterations. In 1983's Set and Reset, a work that made her a superstar, dancers dressed in diaphanous costumes designed by her friend Robert Rauschenberg dart from the wings, interacting with increasing intensity like molecules forming and mutating into new formations.

Her earliest works had no music.

"I got tired of hearing the audience cough," she says, explaining why she started using works by composers ranging from Bach to Laurie Anderson in the 1980s. She has increasingly incorporated technology into her choreography, fitting her dancers with sensors that trigger sound and capture images on a scrim, or positioning robots onstage that interact with the dancers.

Brown's dances are sophisticated, witty, serious, but not metaphors for any life lessons. They are motion explored, analyzed and distilled.

"What you see is what they are," Brown says.

Energy on paper

Her drawings, on display at the Contemporary Art Museum, mostly share that abstraction. They are a survey dating from the 1970s to 2006. The early ones are high-end doodles that translate her kinetic, three-dimensional movements to a two-dimensional sign language. The cubes relating to her Locus choreography, for example, pinpoint 26 stations she references in the dance that also represent each letter of the alphabet, and a 27th point at its center where she physically ends up at dance's end.

She appropriated the famous thumb-pointing gesture of Accumulations for a drawing of her hands in that same pose. She draws her left hand with her right and vice versa, superimposing them to suggest the rotations used in the dance. The dance is shown on a nearby video monitor.

More recent works stand on their own. "It's a Draw" was a series begun in 2002 in which the swoops and swirls created as she danced on paper, holding charcoal between her toes, form an elegant composition that has nothing to do with gimmickry. In them she marries dance, an ephemeral art form that is gone as soon as the dancer stops, with a permanent but nonliteral visual record.

A series of etchings made at USF's Graphicstudio is a more concentrated version using smaller plates to capture a single, dramatic step, such as the revolution of her foot in a perfect circle for Compass.

Brown herself has not yet come full circle. She is well aware of gravity's inevitability, but her life is still an arc that seems in no hurry to begin its descent.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.

REVIEW

Drawing on Land and Air

At the University of South Florida Museum of Contemporary Art, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa, through March 3. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Free admission. (813) 974-2849.

- The Trisha Brown Dance Company performs at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Theater 1 on the Tampa Campus. Tickets are $35 adults, $25 seniors and students. eps.arts.usf.edu or (813) 974-2323. The company also performs at 8 p.m. Friday at the Mahaffey Theater, 400 First St. S, St. Petersburg. Tickets are $25-$45 adults and $15-35 seniors and students. www.mahaffey.com or (727) 898-2100.

[Last modified February 25, 2007, 05:51:05]