sarma

Admirers of Trisha Brown pack the NYU gym so full that I begin planning how I'll get out if there's a fire. A lot of people who admire Trisha Brown bring their children to admire her too. But what the children really like is sliding, screaming, failing on the slick floor, and making paper airplanes to sail. They provide the entractes, and sometimes more.

Brown is still into hanging and the peculiar perspective that she can give her audience by hanging. Planes is a calm and beautiful climb by Brown, Carmen Beuchat, and Penelope. They climb in black-fronted, white-backed (or the reverse) suits; they climb on a rectangular white "wall" with evenly spaced holes in it. There is backing so that the holes are not visible as holes. Framed in the light from a film projector, the three women ascend and descend the wall, cross it and recross it. They move so smoothly and skillfully that you can hardly see their hands grip the holes or their feet stand in them. The illusion works. You begin to see them as if from above; they are on their hands and knees crawling over the geometrical white terrain. Only, because they are really vertical and clinging to a wall, they can move with a fluidity that they couldn't achieve if they were crawling on the floor. So sometimes they remind you of the life trapped in a drop of water on a microscope slide, and, like that life, their purpose is as mysterious as their activity is clear.

Trisha Brown's solo, Accumulation, begins with simple rotating arm gestures based on pointing (thumbing, actually). She's standing in one place facing the audience, gradually increasing a gentle sway of knees and hips. She adds a few careful gestures bit by bit; they're all of a piece with the original ones. She's very accurate about what she's doing, but beautifully relaxed-a watched kettle building up steam so slowly that each new ripple and bubble becomes immensely significent.

Rummage Sale and the Floor of the Forest is a big happy mess composed of two peculiarly related elements. One is Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat up on a low-hanging grid of ropes climbing into and through the clothing that has been threaded along the ropes. The other is a rummage sale going on right underneath them, so close that one shopper could ask Trisha Brown's upside-down head the price of a tie. The group in charge of hawking the heaps of old clothing attracts a crowd under the grid by their helter-skelter selling techniques and crazy prices. There is, in fact, no sensible relationship between goods and prices: a fairly nice sweater sells for 10 cents, a dilapidated skirt for $ 1, and so on. The excited, haggling bazaar makes and dissipates itself, and many of those shopping take no notice of the clothes-climbers above. The snake charmer who shares a booth with the rug-seller. The recycling of our detritus. Who knows what it is?

A few others try climbing on the grid, and when the children fall asleep or get heavy or fall down so often that they cry, the people go home. Wearing their new 10-cent sweaters.

This was the first time I had concentrated on Trisha Brown's dancing. I was so impressed by her fluidity that I failed to define the structure of Accumulating Piece. As in subsequent Brown dances built on this form, she accumulated a sequence, movement by movement-always returning to the beginning after each addition (i.e., 1, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc.). At a lecture demonstration at Connecticut College in the summer of 1975, Brown remarked that she had never again performed Floor of the Forest with a rummage sale going on underneath, since she had found to her dismay that art couldn't compete with bargains.