Who can take a couple of dance works from 1994 and 1980 and present a show that looks springtime fresh in 2010?
Better still, who can present a concert where the audience leaves the theater to find the dance continuing in a breathtaking, pre-dusk sky?
Trisha Brown. That's who.
Even the sky cooperates with this woman--salutes her--with glowing, wispy layers of winglike clouds stretched across its perfect blue.
You know how guys used to yell out stuff like "Eric Clapton is GOD!!!"?
Trisha Brown is GODDESS!!!
If you can get in, see her company now at Baryshnikov Arts Center (through Sunday evening), with two alternating casts in performances of If you couldn't see me (1994) and Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (1980).
I saw Dai Jian's elegant performance of If you couldn't see me--a poem to the articulate expressiveness of the back, in which the dancer reaches, scoops, swings, undulates, twists and swerves, never once turning to fully face the audience. But, from previous performances, I can also recommend Leah Morrison's sensuous, authoritative reading of this marvelous solo.
In the rarely-seen Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, dancers emerge like a serene flock of gulls from billowing clouds of mist. Beverly Emmons's lighting adds a soft, celestial glow, and the only sound is the shushing and gasping of Fujiko Nakaya's cloud machine. BAC's Howard Gilman Performance Space offers audiences the good fortune to be fairly close to the dancers--I saw the good-looking quartet of Jian, Elena Demyanenko, Tamara Riewe and Nicholas Strafaccia; the alternate cast is Morrison, Straffacia, Laurel Tentindo and Samuel von Wentz.
Happy 40th Anniversary to the superb Trisha Brown Dance Company!
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