Babette Mangolte, Watermotor (1978). Performed and choreographed by Trisha Brown.
“Back to Zero,” the title Trisha Brown gave to a cycle of works that includes two of the dances on this program--Foray Forêt (1990) and For M.G.: The Movie (1991)--seems fitting for this moment, in Brown’s practice and perhaps more generally in contemporary art (inclusive of dance), of retrospective beginnings. The uncanny and productive thing about this temporality of looking back as a way of moving forward is its potential to unearth discoveries on supposedly well-trodden ground.
For the past three years, Brown has devoted herself to restaging many of her early works. In celebration of her company’s fortieth anniversary, the 2010-2011 season features performances of works not seen in New York in decades—from the restaging this past fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art of Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), a task-based equipment piece whose title says it all, to the re-creation of Roof Piece(1971) this coming spring at the High Line. Tonight’s performance marks the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s debut at Dance Theater Workshop. And for the first time, Watermotor (1978), a signature solo indelibly linked to Brown’s own body and movement style, will be performed by someone other than the dance’s maker.
Watermotor may appear at first to be a return to Brown’s minimalist roots. At two and a half minutes (or four and a half minutes, depending on the witness), the dance is performed in silence, characteristic of more than a few Judson Dance Theatre works. The costume is about as simple as it gets: a tan t-shirt and gray pants. Created just before Brown made her first work for a proscenium stage, Glacial Decoy (1979), the dance marked a new phase in Brown’s work, demonstrating a language of movement that would shape a series of her dances to come.
The solo’s duration and speed are part of its effects on the viewer. Writing about the piece in an insightful survey of Brown’s work recently published in Artforum, critic Douglas Crimp poses questions that feel especially pertinent in the context of tonight’s program: “Lasting only two and a half minutes, Watermotor is, whether in spite or because of its brevity, a masterpiece. (Or is that a word that the dance contradicts?) Will it ever be danceable by anyone but Brown?”
Postponing for a moment Crimp’s latter question, let us consider what makes Watermotor an unlikely masterpiece. In terms of dance conventions, the solo bears the marks of a divertissement or “principal dancer’s variation.” At such moments in classical ballet, narrative is suspended so that the lead performer may enact a virtuosic display of honed skill. With Watermotor, time itself feels suspended; in its brevity, the dance exhibits the force and bravado of its performer. With very few moments of registration, the dance unfolds in near continuous motion. It is hard to see. The solo ends where it begins (almost): the dancer standing coolly, chest rising and falling in controlled breaths, facing the audience as if saying, “No sweat.” This seemingly off-the-cuff presentation of skilled work accomplished through a daily practice and presented for the mesmerized spectator may be what thrusts the work to its enigmatic, if not also masterful, status. It is also what makes the entire experience feel like a disappearing act, like magic. For Brown, this work marked a move—choreographically—from the everyday to the only one.
In 1978, Babette Mangolte recognized the sheer difficulty the dance presented its performer. Fearing Brown would not be able to continue the task of performing the work for much longer, she decided to commit the dance to film. A video transfer of Mangolte’s film–brilliantly shot twice in the Cunningham studio, once in “real time” and again slowed down to forty-eight frames per second—is on view in the theater’s lobby.
“Will it ever be danceable by anyone but Brown?” Tonight, Crimp’s question will be answered affirmatively when Neal Beasley performs Watermotor. At stake in this transfer of movement from one performer to another is the work’s materiality, its existence beyond the embodiment and interpretation of its maker. With the pressure of personality-driven culture forcefully encroaching on the autonomous zone of art, this move by Brown may be her most prescient and liberatory yet.
-B.G. & R.K.
Published by Dance Theater Workshop as a “context note” in the program for Trisha Brown Dance Company, March 16-18, 22-26, 2011.
