Trisha Brown Reviews Vicki in the USA

If her name is familiar it may be that you caught her first directorial outing at the Barbican in June. Her staging of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo was a brave departure from her earlier work. As an artist at the cutting edge of the modern dance scene in New York in the 60s Brown worked a lot with untrained dancers, pedestrian gestures, alternative performance spaces, mostly without music. In the intervening years she has come to incorporate more web-like complexity into her choreography and demanded more virtuosity from her dancers yet until 1986 and the start of her 'musical cycle' she had largely avoided working closely with music as in the Monteverdi project.

Extracts from the opera were presented as the final item on the triple bill in Columbus. Titled Canto/Pianto, the dance phrases were as elusively ingenious as last time I had seen them. Shadows of narrative conveyed with arrested gestures are cast against the viscous movement vocabulary. Yet I can not see Canto/Pianto without making mental reference to the opera from which it is drawn. In this new format, the work seems choppy and contrived and in the end dissatisfying.

The first half of the programme consisted of two items. The evening began with Set and Reset (1983) followed by a solo If you couldn't see me (1994) performed by Brown herself.

If you couldn't see me plays with some of conventions of solo performance by very deliberately denying the audience a view of the performer's face. Performed by the choreographer, the only hint of Brown's age (62) is her strong shoulder length grey hair. She wears white - a filmy tunic split to the thigh. It is cut low at the back, affording a view of her spine, muscles and flesh as she moves. She negotiates the space with assurance. Her movements are both broad and intricate, calm yet somehow provocative and her moments of sustained motion and stillness are masterful. Performed in silence, the work is calm and cerebral.

The high point of the evening came early for me. Set and Reset displays a divine logic borne of chaos. The set, designed by Robert Rauschenberg, consists of transparent cloths hung at the wings allowing the audience to view the dancers both off and on stage, raising the question "when are the dancers 'off-stage' i.e. not performing if they know we can always see them?". The stage itself is bare and dark excepting a large geometric sculpture hanging over head on which a collage of black and white film clips are played.

The dancers, dressed in calf-length diaphanous screen-printed trousers and tops, wriggle and glide like molecules in a gas chamber. At times they collide into unity and a pattern like the web of nature is extrapolated from the illogical independence of their motion. The dancers melt through space like jointed plasma, eventually tracking a course from stage left to stage right. Brown achieved something rare in modern dance, commanding my total attention through every moment of Set and Reset by the mobile inventiveness of the group work and the sheer sensuousness of the movement.