TRISHA BROWN: REDEFINING STAGE SPACE

“I always feel sorry for the parts of the stage that aren’t being used,” Trisha Brown has declared, “sorry for the ceilings and walls. It’s perfectly good space. Why doesn’t anyone use it?”

A dozen years ago when Brown made this plea for spatial affirmative action, she was a choreographer noted for sparse, task - oriented dances. In the studio, abstract movement phrases would accumulate in silence, or--for a change of venue -- her dancers would perform on rooftops or clamber down the sides of buildings (years before Sankaijuku).

Yet like many experimental artists of her generation, Brown had not reached a broad audience and she had little opportunity to choreograph for the theater itself.

Not anymore.

As the Trisha Brown Dance Company returns to Los Angeles this week for performances Friday and Saturday in Royce Hall, UCLA--plus a free lecture/demonstration in CalArts Theatre II on the following Tuesday--it is clear that the choreographer has at last achieved the creative access she once mused about.

“Lateral Pass,” a new multimedia collaboration with visual artist Nancy Graves, composer Peter Zummo and lighting designer Beverly Emmons, is her most ambitious theatrical venture to date. Along with the accompanying “Glacial Decoy” (employing projected decor by artist Robert Rauschenberg), the work challenges the conventions of the stage and revels in its capabilities.

In contrast, Brown’s bare-bones solo “Accumulation With Talking Plus Water Motor” is also set for the UCLA program, so the once-minimalist Brown hasn’t exactly turned maximalist.

Indeed, one discovers that her company occasionally tours with reduced forces: “Lateral Pass,” to be seen here in its full theatrical version, nonetheless has two trimmed-down alter egos; “Glacial Decoy” has been danced, without projections, as “Decoy”; “Set and Reset” tours with a more compact collection of overhead screens than was introduced in New York; “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation 72503” lost its fog effects to become just “Opal Loop,” here two seasons ago; “Son of Gone Fishin’ ” was danced here without Donald Judd’s usual startling blue and green backdrops.

Just how truly integral, then, is spectacle to Brown’s choreographic creation?

“I didn’t even try to make ‘Lateral Pass’ in my studio,” Brown declares. “I made it in a theater.” A monthlong production residency at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis gave Brown this luxury. After “a constant dialogue” between the choreographer and designer Graves for over a year, the two were free “to collage and experiment” without the pressure of an opening--or the prohibitive costs of union time.

Graves created a variety of hanging elements--not backdrops per se but “things” as Brown ambiguously, but perhaps most accurately, describes them. Curtains and cutouts, some brightly colored and others transparent, of varying size, shape, and material all appear and disappear to constantly redefine the parameters of the stage.

Dancers move under, through, and around the hangings. Their equally ebullient costumes, also contributed by Graves, are embellished by flaps, coils, and trains that distort and extend the human form. The scenic coloration and lighting create an iridescence that further accentuates the three-dimensionality of object and performer.

And in a daring challenge to gravity, a single performer suspended by rope and harness dances up, down and sideways--solo and partnered--becoming a virtual postmodern Peter Pan.

“This head-over-heels euphoria sets the tone for the whole piece,” Brown says.

“From the beginning, we thought of the stage machinery as moving elements, part of the rhythmic and visual scheme. The set does with ropes and pulleys what I do anatomically with the body’s bones and levers.”

But such feats do not come easily. The flying dancer must be matched by a crew person in the wings who, Brown notes, “must learn his job the way a dancer does”--by visual and kinetic cues. Her original plan for a sweeping exit across the stage was scrapped because it would entail yet another stagehand--and nearly $1,000 in extra costs.

“The government ought to issue the standard stage,” Brown jokes, acknowledging a frustration with the idiosyncrasies of individual halls. “Lateral Pass” was specifically designed for a theater with ample fly-space, so, although originally scheduled to be seen here in the Wadsworth Theater, the program has been shifted to the more expansive Royce Hall.

Limited technical capability at the Wadsworth is what kept Brown’s program of 1984 so minimal (although Rauschenberg’s “Set and Reset” apparatus was shoehorned onto the stage) and prompted the critical suggestion that Los Angeles audiences were being gypped.

But Brown counters by championing “a versatility in the reorganizing of dance parts as well as visual elements,” a philosophy consonant with her experimentalist roots.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” she says, “to have the choreography stand alone.”

Moreover, Brown finds exciting the prospect of performing “something essentially low-key in a situation where everybody has the expectation of embellishment. We make a point of performing silent pieces on every program.”

Although Brown is strongly identified with multimedia collaboration, she emphasizes that movement remains at the center of her art. When she states “I’ve got my tools,” she’s referring not to the trappings of the theater but to her “valiant, individualistic” dancers who can shift “from a tender exchange into four-wheel drive.”

Brown’s movement vocabulary incorporates unpredictable contrasts of fluidity and sharp vigor, cerebral or sensual phrasing and features solo virtuosity as well as complex ensemble partnering. It is predicated, she maintains, upon “the kind of kinetic knowledge that comes from a deep place. I have excavated this movement and learned to articulate it through years of research.”

Brown predicts an eventual pendulum-swing of theatrical fashion back to “the simple stage. It will come about naturally,” she suggests, “and when it does, we’ll all be ready for it. And when it does, it will be a radical act again.”