The Trisha Brown Dance Company closes the Performing Arts Season 2024/25 at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The season, which looked back at the New York dance and performance scene, included two of the biggest names in dance from the 60s and 70s: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. If the former featured the choreographer on stage – Childs in a reworking of her Geranium from 1964, the latter considered the legacy of a company (Brown died in 2017) with a work by choreographer Noé Soulier, an open dialogue between Brown's historic movement vocabulary and Soulier's contemporary choreographic principles.
The evening opens with Glacial Decoy (1979), Brown’s famous collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg. Four black and white dias of everyday objects and views are projected onto the backdrop. With each click the sequence moves on one image, becoming the soundscape for the performance. Found objects are paired with found movements. An ethereal sylph, a dancer in a white nightgown-like dress (designed by Rauschenberg) performs a sequence of pedestrian movements emphasising swinging motions and organic interconnection of weight: the swinging limb leads, the rest of the body follows.
Mimicking the movement of the dias, as the dancer disappears from the stage, another one appears at the opposite end. In Brown’s first choreography for the proscenium stage, as more dancers slowly form an evenly spaced line, it becomes clear that the dance extends beyond the conventional space of the stage and continues in the wings. It is an ironic statement on the spatial conventions and idiosyncrasies in classical theatrical dance and clearly rooted in Brown’s Judson Dance Theatre experience, as do the seemingly easy movements, which require a clear precision that only dancers can give. The signature move: lateral attitude with soft hands in front of the heart.
More than on swing, the German premiere of Soulier’s In the Fall (2023) is, as the title suggests, a study of falling, and, like the previous piece, features a released approach to movement. To the chirping of birds, two dancers balance, exploring the unstable nature of the human body: one is suspended in a shoulder stand on one shoulder, the other explores the limits of an arabesque. Both fall and try another position and fall again. There is almost an animalistic quality to the way they catch themselves. Soon they are joined by six dancers in primary colours (blue, red and yellow), trousers and tops.
There is also a swinging quality as the dancers fall out of the balances. This creates a dynamic rhythm of falling and catching. I was hooked by the counterpoint dynamic of the group, where parts from different synchronous sequences seemed to flow through the group, making it difficult to predict who would be dancing together. One had barely noticed that the connection had shifted to other dancers. One step that had my full attention: the dancer had the knee close to their torso to kick it back into an arabesque.
The evening closed with Working Title (1985) to music by Peter Zummo. And it did feel exactly like a slightly chaotic work in progress. The chaos was also reflected in the variety of colours and the patterns on the costumes. Compared to the previous two works, the overall picture was blurred and the approach to gravity less clear. At times the dancers reminded me of children running so fast as if they wanted to take off: as well as the typical movements such as swinging arms back and forth on the sagittal plane, some of the movements were completely out of control.
These movements were not off-balance and they would not cause/lead to another movement as in the previous dances. They were somewhat ornamental. What became clear instead was that the dancers are such great movers. There were sections where they were performing strenuous sequences at an extremely high speed. But my eye needed more structure to make sense of the apparent chaos on stage. The work remained inaccessible and its guiding principles cryptic as when trying to understand the rules in children’s games.
As well described by Soulier in the programme notes, that what we see on stage is only the tip of an iceberg: “The history of dance is not only the history of works, but perhaps above all, the history of ways of rehearsing, warming up and moving: the history of unique relationship with one’s own body, invented by dancers and choreographers together”. Beyond each work, there is a whole universe of selected ideas and discharged concepts, failures and successes, good and bad rehearsal days all connected to the choreographer. It is with this history of “the intimacy of the bodies” who have gone through this journey that Soulier enters in dialogue.
