If you go out in the woods today
You're sure of a big surprise.
The Teddy Bear’s Picnic
The Trisha Brown Dance Company shimmered into the Joyce Theatre in New York (from February 5-10) with a revival of “Foray Foret,” first performed in 1990 at the Dance Biennale in Lyon, France. Hence the bi-lingual title, though the forest suggested is clearly here. This is established by the work’s novel score: an indistinct, offstage American marching band, heard intermittently. They are playing John Philip Sousa. The hoopla of the everyday world goes on, at a distance, muffled yet cheerful.
Most of the piece transpires in silence, or silences–as if quietude could lap at you like waves. The dancers, too, are slippery. There are novel partnering strategies, and novel forms of coalescence, as if the dancers were released from a single blob of mercury, and inclined to recombine. There is a silvery calligraphy of small gestures, and the signature Brownian loft of leg, of arm, and the sweep of larger gestures that have no conclusion, but simply waft off into the choreographic aether.
