BROWN'S FORM AND FUNCTION.

BROWN'S FORM AND FUCTION TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY EISENHOWER THEATER, KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS WASHINGTON, D. C. FEBRUARY 17-19, 2000

Trisha Brown's mastery of form is awe some. In presenting the body, she highlights contours and planes. When placing her dancers on stage, she sculpts space. In working with music, she invents shapes to match sonic volume and rhythm. Because of this formalism, Brown, in her middle period about a decade ago, neglected bodies. Her performers tended to look like pawns, not generators of motion.

Nothing of the sort was apparent on this program, particularly not in the two pieces to Dave Douglas's music--last year's Five Part Weather Invention and a premiere, Rapture to Leon James.

Motion arising, shifting, and peaking or subsiding within the human frame is clearly shown in the choreography. Strangely, this realism meshes with the poetry inherent in the movement's other aspect--Brown's play with choreographic forms. Jennifer Tipton's lights and Terry Winters's "visuals" (sets and costumes), too, count as poetry. Douglas's music is and isn't jazz. Some sections have jazz's slides, vibrations, and pulses. Other portions consist of tightly structured, post-Webern sound, like the opening of Weather, for which Brown's step text bubbles with invention-diverse themes richly developed. The dancing in the jazzy passages isn't quite on this level.

Rapture, which honors lindy hopper Leon James of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in the late 1930s, begins by focusing on pairs. The first duos out on the dance floor are easy to discern even when they're not in close proximity. As the floor becomes crowded, and other dancers come between the partners, it is their mirroring or complementing movement that joins them. The action shifts from a ballroom to perhaps the outdoors where there's circle dancing, and finally to what may be a theater stage with a chorus line and blocks of dancers.

Throughout this work, Tipton is in her element with an aurora borealis, a shadow play, light bouncing off Winters's metal disc sculpture, and other surprises. Toward the end, a central figure emerges--Keith Thompson, probably portraying James. Was the final lighting effect intended? It turned Thompson's skin into ancient parchment.

Even the larger-than-life protagonists of Canto/Pianto (Song/Tears) do not seem like puppets. Katrina Thompson, symbolizing Music, suspended like a swing by two invisible wires, bends her torso as if she's actually doing the flying. Several company members linked together like vertebrae give an X-ray view of the snaking beast they represent. This suite from Brown's staging of Monteverdi's opera Orfeo is ideal for indulging in high stylization and mounting a grand display of forms. Brown does that and more. Because these excerpts have dramatic continuity and the themes of love, death, art, and wild nature are not static symbols but moving forces, the action culminates--there is catharsis.