I attacked Trisha Brown like a ballerina. This made the first few weeks of rehearsal exceptionally frustrating. Since ballet was the only style of dance I had substantial training in, I equated “dance” with ballet technique—if I’m not turning out and stretching through my legs and pulling up in my core, I thought, I must not be dancing. So I would look for moments in Trisha’s choreography that felt a little like ballet—“my leg is behind me, it’s basically an arabesque”—and latch onto them, letting the rest fall by the wayside. But treating Trisha Brown like modified ballet prevented me from both understanding it and feeling like I was dancing.
“The rhythm is in the construction” -Irène
One of the things I struggled with most was the lack of music. I think that in the best ballets, you are the music. This is what I always loved about Balanchine. Serenade has no story; there is only music and dancers, and beautiful as they both are on their own, it is their perfect union that makes the piece so extraordinary. I couldn’t comprehend how you could have dance without music.
But what I came to realize was that it was really the rhythm I missed, and this work does have rhythm—it’s just internal instead of external. If you want to make the right shapes, you need your bodies to interact at precisely the right time. The rhythm is even more a part of the choreography than it is in ballet: rather than fitting the movements to the rhythm, the rhythm is uniquely generated by the movements. Trisha Brown has taken what is most glorious about ballet and made it not only explicit, but absolutely essential. If you’re doing the right thing, you make a picture in both space and time, and you cannot make one without the other.
“Just be you—you are enough.” -Irène
It wasn’t until the art gallery that I felt like a performer. I know that Irène always tells us not to perform, but I think that “performing” means something different to me than it does to her. It’s not about theatricality or putting on a false act. For me, it’s always been about bringing one part of myself, however small, into the light to share with others. As a human being I am spritely, flirtatious, soft, grieving, sultry, passionate, demure, angry, rebellious, mysterious, and countless other things in different proportions. Maybe I bury a lot of those things in my daily life, but the stage is where I get to say, “See? This is me, and it’s you, too.” Trisha Brown has also made this statement explicit in a way that ballet often does not. When we perform Trisha’s work, we are not angels or ethereal beings. We are nothing but ourselves—gorgeously imperfect, unique human beings, just like the people watching us. And if the people watching think there’s something extraordinary about our performance, it’s only because they’re thinking of the extraordinary things mere humans can do.
“…like a flower blooming” –Man at gallery
I’m sorry if this sounds cliché, but it fills me with joy to think that our dancing can really touch people. I’ve always thought that good dance is a dialogue. Actually, “dialogue” is misleading, because there are really more than two players talking. The dancer’s mind and body talk to each other, and the whole dancer talks to the other whole dancers, and if the dancers are very good then they can bring the audience into the conversation, too.
The quote above was spoken by one of the museum security guards during a performance of Spanish Dance. I don’t know if Trisha or any of us associate that image with Spanish Dance, but it’s a beautiful one and I’m sure it gave that man some small new thing to marvel at.
Verbal communication is one of the most amazing things to me in the world. It’s a little ridiculous that we have sequences of electrical signals in our heads that we perceive as an infinite array of abstract ideas, and that we can take these signals and flap around meaty bits in our throats to form sound waves that, when they strike the eardrums of another person, can reliably produce electrical sequences in their brain that they perceive as the very same abstract ideas. I always worried that language was the only thing that could do that, but this man’s testimony proves me wrong, and I am so glad. Of course, dance as we know it is not language—we don’t have it standardized and refined so that we can express ideas with much precision. But the fact that it’s different doesn’t make it any less real or amazing as a form of communication. There’s something authentically beautiful about the fact that you can take six bodies and have them shuffle around to a Bob Dylan song and someone will say, “this reminds me of X.” What I saw at the art gallery, and also as a spectator at the TBDC’s performance, was that dance does speak. Loudly. Dance may not say the same thing to everyone, but what it can say is powerful. I have to praise Trisha Brown for using the communicative power of dance to its fullest potential.
“I see understanding” –Emily Coates
I’m saying a lot of wonderful things about Trisha’s work, so you must have figured out that I got out of my ballet-induced stagnation. I think what did it was realizing that what I love about ballet is what I love about dance in general; the technique and style is inconsequential. It’s as if I’m standing on a mountain now, looking back at the valley that is ballet, and realizing that the land around me is riddled many separate valleys, as far as the eye can see. Countless different forms of dance, reaching out beyond the horizon, and yet they all share something. Now I feel like I can still be a ballerina, but I’m something more, too. Like ballet once did, Trisha Brown is seeping into my blood, the “understanding” of the movement permeating every sinew and bone. I know I have but scratched the surface on this immense body of work, but I feel accomplished just for having attained this new perspective. Now that I have internalized this minimal understanding—of both how Trisha’s work is dance and how it is different from other dance—the real learning can begin.