Back to the Future: Trisha Brown at DTW

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.