Trisha Brown Dance Company

* Notes *
Trisha Brown Dance Company was in Berkeley for two performances last weekend. In general, I found her style to be rather slow and sculptural. It was intellectually interesting but not engaging on a visceral level. The dancers were good, but there were times when they were not consistent with each other. For instance if one person might have a stronger point of the foot, or another a higher arabesque.

The first work performed was how long does the subject linger on the edge of volume... (2005), which was supposed to be multimedia coming together to make a whole. Instead, the animated visual elements projected on the scrim competed with the movement of the dancers.

Salvatore Sciarrino's music of the second work, Geometry of Quiet (2002) was disturbing, there were parts that sounded like stylized coughing. This work was particularly slow and involved cloth banners.

The evening ended with I love my robots. (2007), which was humorous and involved 2 poles on platforms that moved on their own. It also had a speaking part.

* Tattling *
Since the music was so minimal, most of the audience was very quiet for most of the performance. A notable exception was the woman next to us in R 112. She absolutely hated the performance, so I'm not sure why she stayed the entire time. After the second piece, she made light of the choreography by imitating the movements in her chair. Before the last piece ended, she muttered about how it was "stupid." She tried to climb over us during the applause, to no avail.