TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY Dancing With Bob:

Review by Celia Ipiotis

It was a grand gathering of dance aficionados at the opening night program of the Trisha Brown Dance Company:Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage at BAM.

Two works, one by Merce Cunningham, Travelogue (1977) and another by Trisha Brown, Set and Reset (1983), bookended an evening of nostalgia and reconsideration of avant garde dance pioneers.

Trisha Brown’s Travelogue premiered during the launch of BAM’s 1983 Next Wave Festival. It superimposed movement, image and sound into a captivating metaphor.  Black and white film images projected on two pyramid shapes on either side of a rectangular box formed a kinetic background to Brown’s liquid motion.

Swathed in  filmy black and white pants and tunics, Rauschenberg’s costumes mated well with the film, scrims and dancers who passed movements from one body to another. Although the vocabulary looked simple–walks, leg and arm swings, bumps into one another, the mechanics were inescapably intricate and penetrating. 

In his collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, Cunningham opened his dancers to Rauschenberg’s roaming imagination.  Rauschenberg designed gayly, colorful outfits automatically adding a layer of wit and a vaudevillian flair to Cunningham’s streamlined choreography.

Quirky steps knocked into isolated body parts  against a kaleidoscope of lighting by designer Beverly Emmons.  John Cage’s scoundscape of a radio voice, screeches, whistles and drips (among other audibles) brought the outside world inside.

Circusy events emerged like a jokey “tin man” studded with tin cans that clanked as he moved; or a procession of dancers connected by a filmy white stretch of material. Overall, conspicuous detail was balanced against surrealistic imagery.

Dressed in a flower garden of unitards and material attachments, the dancers negotiated the silly and the sublime with an equal measure of consideration and mirth.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis