Trisha Brown Dance Company Solo Olos / Son of Gone Fishin’ /
Rogues / PRESENT TENSE

[Dance]

Covering a period from 1976 to 2011, these four pieces form a repertory taking in all the richness of Trisha Brown’s choreographic art - her formal rigour and freedom of invention. A founder member of the Judson Church Theater, at the heart of which she explored the whole spectrum of combinatory elements in dance, Trisha Brown and her company took dance to its most abstract form, stripped of all artifice. In Proscenium Works, which comprises the evening’s programme, we encounter all the hallmarks of her work, ranging from this mixture of suppleness and lightness, to the arial sequences, suffused with a mathematical grace, in which all movement, from the simplest to the most elaborate, from the most mundane to the most virtuoso, finds its way into the overall structure. In the space, the different phrases take shape, fit inside, go in and out of sync, interact and build up collective constellations.

Solos Olos sees the transformation of a solo into a piece for 5 dancers via the multiplication of lines and their resonances. Using supports, lifts, immobility and sudden changes of direction, its sparse nature coincides perfectly with Trisha Brown’s lifelong search for “pure movement”. In Son of gone fishin’, her choreographic writing reaches the “apogee of its complexity”. This group composition, suspended between cloud-like and structure, opens up a whole range of intersections, inversions and ramifications, made possible by its cheerful minimalism. Set to John Cage’s Sonata’s for piano, Present tense uses the interplay between the hold or draw of the ground and vertical tension, resulting in the synthesis of abstract aesthetic and a form of emotional narration, steered in the direction of suggestion and the unexpected. In the short duo Rogues, two dancers embark on a game of hide and seek with unison: avoiding each other’s glance, they follow each other, break away, and finish off each other’s movements - like two shadows or a pair of twins making up their journey as they go along.