Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “Pure Movement” opens at the Melbourne Festival this week. Dance Australia caught up with Trisha Brown Dance Company's associate artistic director Carolyn Lucas to find out more about the founder of this renowned company.
Trisha Brown first made a name for herself during the 1960s, as a member of the famed Judson Group, a group of experimental young choreographers. In 1970 she set up Trisha Brown Dance Company. Carolyn Lucas has been working with Trisha Brown Dance Company since the mid-80s. Her attraction to Brown's work began when she was still a student. “In 1981, when I was a junior in college, a continuing education student invited me to see the company at Brooklyn Academy of Music,” recalls Lucas. “Only exposed to traditional techniques, I was thrilled to see Trisha's unique movement vocabulary and the quality it was danced with. Overwhelmed by how I was touched by the movement, I left that night knowing that I wanted to dance with Trisha Brown. For the next three years, after traditional classes in the day, at night I explored teaching myself to dance through composition assignments, based on the inspiration of that one night.”
Lucas joined the company in 1984. “Trisha's genius, pioneering spirit, and her tireless devotion to process [has kept me with the company]," she comments. "Everyday is completely fulfilling.” Lucas describes the range of Brown’s choreographic exploration as “vast”. “The first work I built with Trisha was Newark (pictured above), the second work in the Valiant Cycle, with themes of athleticism and gender neutral partnering deeply mined,” she says. “The next cycle was Back to Zero, exploring subconscious gesture, non literal, yet emotionally provocative, with softer qualities of movement. Trisha always probed new territory with every work. It was amazing to begin something with her, with her accumulative knowledge and mastery always present, and at the same time her ability to hit the dance floor like an open book. This pioneering spirit had a deep impact on her body of work, and has brought much to her audiences.”
Asked to name her favourite work, Lucas replies, “Impossible to choose just one, but I loved Glacial Decoy (pictured below); a rollercoaster of gorgeous phrase material and imagery requiring physical endurance, precision unison in time and space, and performed in silence. I loved the heightened visual and aural awareness silence brought to the mix.... expanding the senses to fully use peripheral vision, and when you needed eyes in the back of your head, to recognise the breath sounds of your partner as a form of shared song. This, combined with Robert Rauschenberg's set and costumes, was an amazing experience.”
Brown appointed Lucas as choreographic assistant in 1993. While she again remarks that it is impossible to choose a favourite work from her time working in this role, she selects If You Couldn’t See Me as a seminal work from the period. “Trisha asked me to be the outside eye, and understudy as she built this solo,” she remembers. “To witness her passion for developing uncharted movement vocabulary, with the instructions ‘I want to make leg drawings and traveling steps as my motor’ was to see face to face Trisha's use of simple structure to yield an outpouring of phrase material using the body quite democratically. We formed a bond filled with trust during this creation. I needed to give her outside feedback and physical corrections, which she always welcomed with complete openness. It was really, truly about the science/mechanics of how momentum rippled through her body, or how to keep all the geometry clearly visible, she made it fun, and there was lots and lots of laughter.”
Talking to Lucas, it seems that her relationship with Brown has been charmed. “Simply, Trisha and I saw the same sparks flying,” she remarks. “And luckily as a team, she might see one on the right, when I was looking to the left, and visa versa. We had sympatico visual and aesthetic sensibilities, filled with unison ‘That was amazing!’ reactions to the dancers responses to her directions. Trisha is so smart, witty, courageous, and generous, it was an honour and joy to provide support towards her choreography reaching the stage in its final form. And during the daily journey to that end, filled with the rigour of her choreographic process, we all learned deeply, while trying to keep up with her extraordinary spirit and vision.”
- Nina Levy
Below: Trisha Brown's Glacial Decoy (2009). Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
