• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

  Courtesy of UCLA Performing Arts The Trisha Brown Dance Company, a contemporary dance group, performs “El Trilogy” to new jazz scores at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

By Jinjue Pak

Daily Bruin Contributor

Postmodern dance is changing, and that change is pioneered by acclaimed choreographer Trisha Brown.

Brown is distinguished for her exploration of and experimentation with an unpredictable repertoire of diverse and innovative movements. Her dance company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, will be performing in “El Trilogy” at UCLA tonight and tomorrow night.

She began her dancing career at age 10 and in her late teens, delved into the aesthetics of choreography at Mills University. Unsatisfied with the dance repertoires she was seeing, Brown decided she was going to create her own movements.

“A natural evolution for a good dancer is to go into choreography,” Brown said during a phone interview. “I wasn’t receiving things that I thought were possible in choreography. So I thought, I should do it.”

After garnering public interest with her choreography at the Judson Dance Theater, Brown decided to form her own group, appropriately titled after herself.

The Company is comprised of 12 dancers who tour internationally for twenty weeks a year. They have performed in famous opera houses worldwide, as well as at universities and colleges.

With each individual piece her company performs, Brown offers a different style of dance. In her earlier years, Brown explored the idea of complex movements with her “Unstable Molecular Structures” technique, in which her dancers produced a fluid and geometric style.

She also developed a more vigorous style called the “Valient Series,” introducing gender-specific movements for the first time.

“The ‘Valient Series’ really pushed the dancers to their physical limits,” Brown said.

Following the techniques of this style, Brown says she directs her focus to the external contexts of her dancers, incorporating props like rooftops and walls into her choreographies.

Brown has also expanded her works to include dance to classical music and she has produced several dance pieces for operas.

Her most recent works, however, include jazz. Infusing the techniques of dancers from Harlem’s Savory Ballroom that date back to black culture in the 1930s, Brown has wrestled with the relationship between jazz and modern dance. With the musical talents of composer and trumpeteer Dave Douglas, “El Trilogy’s” choreography will show this fusion with jazz music.

Brown’s creative progress and zeal for postmodern dance has won her much recognition both nationally and globally.

In addition to receiving recognition in France, she was the first female recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and was invited to serve on the National Council on the Arts by former President Clinton in 1994.

Even today, Brown is an active member in the aesthetic dance arena as head of the Center for Dance Composition, founded by her company in 2000.

For her future choreographies, Brown plans to invoke all of her past techniques and styles while also incorporating many other forms of art and bringing dance and these arts together in her works.

“I want to integrate all the voices of expression, from visual arts, to drawing, to music,” Brown said.

DANCE: Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “El Trilogy” will be showing at Royce Hall Feb. 1-2 at 8pm. Tickets are available for $30-$45, and $14 (for UCLA students) at the UCLA Central Ticket Office. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (310) 825-2101.