Trisha Brown Dance Company
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These works make clear how postmodern dance reflects the beliefs and conventions of modern literature. (Apparently the dance world is one step behind the literary: it took a second world war to convey to dancers what writers had grasped decades earlier.) European literature of the early 20th century seeks to convey all faces of the loss of meaning–absence, atomization, alienation–with linguistic tools ranging from harsh clarity to dense obscurantism. This catholic approach means there are moments of great beauty and simplicity in T.S. Eliot but also long stretches of pompous, in-jokey intellectual gamesmanship. Both are intended to evoke the aridity of modern life, and both succeed; but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll take my existential pointlessness with a heaping side order of beauty. What holds for poetry goes double for dance.
Geometry of Quiet and Twelve Ton Rose (1996), the evening’s opener, share an argument: that genuine human connection is difficult and painful. But Geometry of Quiet is more persuasive because it actually makes those connections. The difficulties of Twelve Ton Rose begin with the music, 12-tone compositions by Anton Webern. “Why dance to this music?” I scribbled, followed shortly by “joyless” and “dessicated.” Though Brown’s combinations have a certain kaleidoscopic appeal–resembling a hyperactive game of checkers as dancers outfitted in red or black work their way across the squares marked faintly on the floor–none of the piece’s four movements engages or satisfies. Duets and ensemble sections are distinguished largely by the brevity of the contact: lifts are all done from weird angles (a fireman’s carry with the carried dancer’s knees over the other’s shoulder) as if to compel their being cut short. The dance looks like a portrait of people allergic to touch or unable to imagine contact that doesn’t hurt, an impression reinforced by the dancers’ blank faces. The lack of affect is clearly deliberate but nonetheless tiresome: What is everybody so solemn about? This is music and dancing, for Christ’s sake; if it’s so unnourishing, let’s skip it and go back to our drab, wretched little lives.
