Trisha Brown Dance Company.

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall Portland, Oregon October 2, 2002

What if ...? That is the question writers of speculative fiction ask themselves before they sit down to tell their stories of distant worlds in future times.

For more than four decades, since she began making dances with her students at Reed College in 1958, that is the question Trisha Brown has been asking herself--and her dancers--about movement: its shape, speed, context, design, and the possibilities for extending the limits of the human body to make art.

The answers she comes up with are different, unique to each piece. She is that rare bird, an artist who has developed her own idiosyncratic vocabulary, but invariably and generously she gives her audience something new to see and think about with every dance she makes. Her latest work, Geometry of Quiet, which received its North American premiere, shows Brown in a mood of restrained, judiciously measured eloquence.

Difficult to dance and challenging to watch--blink and you will miss a shift in balance, a transformation from rippling arms to angular ones, the way a foot descends to the floor--the work is what the title says it is and a good deal more. Visually elegant (the choreographer designed the set; Christophe de Menil's pastel costumes have a fluid chic) and emotionally contained, Geometry is, as Brown says, "tender," much of the movement serving as a metaphor for humanity's need for the consolation of companionship, the solace of touch, and the security of the ground. Gravity in this work becomes gravitas in gently subtle ways. On the infamous September 11, Brown was working on a new commission from Portland's White Bird Presents, among others. The work changed and became not so much an overt response to the events of that day but rather a dance about the impact of trauma on the human psyche.

Slow falls, duets in which the dancers are completely dependent on one another to create the movement (including one witty moment at the opening in which two dancers become one four-legged creature, exiting in a scuttling movement stage right), are all framed by a set of enormous, swooping white curtains, designed by Brown and manipulated by two of the dancers. Out of our memories of noisy chaos and frightening images of burning buildings collapsing to rubble and people running from the scene, Brown has created a quiet, beautifully designed dance in, because it is a dance, a place of ephemeral safety.

The concert opened with the 1983 Set and Reset, with a dissonant score of sound and text by Laurie Anderson and visuals by Robert Rauschenberg, whose son was in the audience, as were members of Brown's family. Brown grew up on the edge of this continent, in Aberdeen, Washington, and in Set and Reset the dancers perform much of the time in clusters, pairs, and solos, on the edges of the proscenium stage. The dancing is fleet, buoyant, lush, and downright pretty--a counterbalance to the harsh sound, which unfortunately some audience members found intolerable.

More to their liking was the jazzy Groove and Countermove--not surprisingly, since it's a hip-slung, flowing dance set to a jazz score by Dave Douglas. It's a given that anything that Brown makes is beautifully crafted, and Groove is no exception. Visually it is quite stunning, as the dancers jam and riff, using their bodies as instruments against a marvelous black-and-white backdrop by Terry Winters, who also designed the brilliantly colored, quite unflattering unisex costumes.

The dancing in all three pieces was in many instances outstanding, answering the very different demands of each work with skill and artistry and, in Geometry, quiet passion.