© Chris Callis 'Set and Reset' reviews 'Geometry of Quiet' reviews 'Groove and Countermove' reviews recent Trisha Brown reviews more Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

Presumably Trisha Brown's contribution last week was intended as a nostalgic backward glance at Dance Umbrella's roots. Brown's dance language is pure Sixties, dead hands and faces, floppy arms and a bent kneed downward emphasis.

The contemporary technique was born in the US, and if Brown deserves her reputation as a hallowed torchbearer of the genre, well, all I can say is - we now do it so much better. Where in Brown's work is the stunning, razor sharp complexity of modern thinking of Rambert's Rafael Bonachella? Michael Clarke's Godless probing into the outer limits of man's fancy? Cathy Marston's successful search for a searing voice to dance the human scream? - to name just three of the clutch of knowledgeable, artistically vibrant modern dance makers currently delighting audiences in Britain today.

In Set and Reset, Brown designs an abstract fugue for her dancers, so complex it comes over either as badly rehearsed or so minutely varied as to be as absorbing as Isaac Newton's infinite calculus. An irritatingly repetitive soundtrack plodded its turgid way from A to A 1/2 ( a half) while nearly 30 minutes later the piece ended as the dancers, starting on one side of the stage, arrived at the other. My pulse barely quickened above near death. The clue to the programme's second offering is in the title. A study in slow motion, Geometry of Quiet is more effective than counting sheep. Two couples in pink pyjamas are attended, very slowly indeed, by a man and a woman dressed as white clad hospital porters who occasionally drape them in gigantic winding sheets. We had no such lucky escape.  

Groove and Countermove
© Chris Callis

In Groove and Countermove, Terry Winters's paint box costumes against his black and white backcloth, combined with a cheery and lively jazz score by Dave Douglas, perked us up no end. But Brown soon put paid to that. Soggy and turned in on itself, the choreography resolutely refused to have anything to do with the music while Douglas's melodic shapes filled the stage with the exuberant action we were cheated of by Brown. The alienation of Brown's contrived notion of dance came when one of the boys - it must have been accidentally - beamed a smile across the stage. Such a simple, human action burned with a natural realism through the stageful of artificial, cerebral dross. I hope he doesn't get the sack.