Trisha Brown: The air is full of pictures

The air is full of pictures no matter where you reach in.

(Jack Gilbert, "The Difficult Beauty" from The Dance Most of All)

I was reading The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert's book of poems, during intermission at Dance Theater Workshop's presentation of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. I came across the line above and thought, "Wow, that's really true. That's exactly how I experience Brown's spacious world." And we reach in, again and again, because it is such a joy to do so.

Particularly true of Foray Forêt (1990) with the subtly Near East opulence of its Rauschenberg costumes, the tantalizing near/far wanderings of its offstage/outdoors marching band, and its generous abundance of movement. Particularly true of the easy-flowing yet precisely connected and rendered macro- and micro-movements danced by Brown's tribe with their yielding knees and wafting arms and the assured and articulate, if arcane, hieroglyphics of it all.

The invisible, peripatetic band--conductor Tom Goodkind's TriBattery Pops, a volunteer crew of Tribeca and Battery Park residents--plays a repertoire stretching from "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" to jazz. The strange effect of "following" them with our ears alone as they move outside our vision creates a sense of a wider space in which Brown and the dancers make their work. It's a distinctly American and diverse environment, one with complicated history encoded in the very things that are meant to entertain us or rally us. At first, Brown's serene dancers seem to inhabit a rarified enclave, but then you realize that they're co-existing with the world implied by the music, not contradicting it, and maybe it is gently informing what they're doing. After all, Brown is an American shaped, as we all are, by popular culture and circumstances. Although nothing is crudely underscored, you begin to see places where music and movement fondly caress each other.

In the midst of all of this heady material, please be sure to keep an eye on Elena Demyanenko. The way she places her feet, cocks her head, draws and expels her breath are all of a piece, a deep, connected way of dancing the incredibly complex coordinates that looks like a way of addressing the incredibly complex demands of life--burning within, alert, intuitive and wise.

More power to Neal Beasley for taking on a legendary, iconic Brown solo--Watermotor (1978). Perhaps it's a matter of physical difference--he is compact--but his explosive attack turns Watermotor into a very different dance (which might be just fine with Brown). I found it hard to see the movement slip through his body the way it slipped through hers. I saw the periphery of the rapid movement instead of the play of the rapids. I saw the end result of the force, a virtuosic, if considerably less interesting, performance.

For M.G.: The Movie (1991)--with its audacious stillness, even more audacious repetition (check out that nearly endless opening sequence), cheesy theatrical special effects and stilted movement aesthetics--seems to be anything but a dance critic favorite. However, the key to it, I think, might be Time--both literally giving it time to work on you and, after you've seen how it shapes up, thinking back over how Brown fractures and distorts time throughout. I can't claim that I feel drawn to this work, but I do think Brown's doing something here around time that's intriguing.

Hard to believe that this season marks this company's debut at Dance Theater Workshop. Trisha Brown Dance Company. Dance Theater Workshop. All I'm sayin'.

See Trisha Brown Dance Company tonight through Saturday at 7:30pm (program and ticket information)

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)