Brown’s anti virtuoso style, which may look easy but requires a silky smooth wave of each limb, made Kenjiro Okazaki’s motorized robots appear especially dinky. Humans, intimates Brown, hold more interest than machines. Nonetheless, Todd Lawrence Stone’s tendency to look at his hand like it was the seventh wonder of the world felt self-indulgent instead of philosophical.

Watching robots on February 6 and listening to Laurie Anderson’s collage score—where electric fans, dog barks and chimes get equal play with the composer’s plaintive, intermittent violin song—I wished I could time travel back to Judson Church, Brown’s old performance haunt on Washington Square. It might have been more fun than in the relative luxury of the Joyce Theater, where the company has a six-day run. In that barebones church space in the 1960s, Brown experimented with props and limbs while audience members sat on the floor, watched for free and sometimes joined in on the shenanigans.

The Joyce Theater’s intimate yet formal stage space worked perfectly for Brown’s 1994 solo If you couldn’t see me. In a luminescent performance, Leah Morrison’s lanky frame and rounded fluidity reminded me of Brown’s signature physicality. For ten minutes Morrison turned her back to the audience and danced to the black void of the back stage as though communicating with different people: a lover as her hips snaked left and right, a god as she lift her arms to the skies in pagan salute, a relative who makes her nervous as she turned right then left. Even Rauschenberg’s high-pitched, un-modulated musical muddle worked. It sounded like the hum of a light bulb just as Morrison shone like a flame, her Grecian-meets-minimalist white costume glowing beneath Spencer Brown and Robert Rauschenberg’s downcast lighting. For the company’s 35th anniversary season it is significant that Brown cast Morrison in a dance made for her self. Morrison, indeed, is an artist to follow.

The evening began with Brown’s 1990 Foray Forêt or forest foray. Program notes describe Brown’s reason for using John Philip Sousa’s music: She heard one of his marches on a balcony in Barcelona. Sousa reminds Brown of her childhood days in small-town Aberdeen, Washington. In Aberdeen, there were lots of patriotic marches. Are you bored yet, reader? Whenever program notes or explainers are longer than three sentences it gives me concern. In turn, Foray Forêt asks the viewer to work for meaning. I only came up with questions: Why are the dancers dressed in gold pajama outfits? Do they hear the music, heard as though coming from a great distance, or are they deaf, since they don’t appear to respond to it? What is their relationship to each other? Thirty-five minutes later I was even more mystified. I had gotten lost in Brown’s quirky world where beautiful patterns reign, and seams of meaning are so subtle it’s stupefying.

Morrison