sarma

Trisha Brown announced that she was going to do "Another Fearless Dance Concert." Boy, was it. Her Failing Duet 1 (1968) is the most gorgeously fearless thing I've ever seen. People's gasps for Nureyev or Villella always seem quite formal to me - an anticipated and planned response, but we at the Whitney were gasping and squeaking and laughing with Brown and Barbara Lloyd, and afterward I wanted to cry just to release all the excitement.

The idea that triggered such a big response is not complicated. The two women walk out and stand on a big tumbling mat. One falls; the other must catch her; they take turns. Their trust in each other is phenomenal, and neither faller tries to make it easy. Often the catcher decides to run all the way around to get underneath the falling body and fall with it. Laughing and breathing hard, they pile up on the ground, take a second's rest, and get up to challenge each other's speed and coordination again. Once Lloyd chooses to fall straight backward away from Brown while Brown is still clambering up from the previous fall. This time, Brown cries out too, but she makes it. It's beautiful: one woman very still, trying to feel which way her body wants to fall; the other eyeing her warily, maybe edging around her; then the slow, treelike leaning that gathers speed (or the sudden plunge); the rapid move of the catcher; the slow tumble to the mat in a tangle; the pause to renew strength and breath; the rise to begin again.

Brown's other failing duet (1971) with Steve Paxton is interesting too, but less friendly, almost painful. This one involves lifts and carries in which the lifter then deliberately tosses or tumbles both people to the floor. More manipulating is necessary in this one - more calculating too.

Playing with gravity and weight is Brown's game these days. In her new Leaning Duets, several couples adjust themselves in communal loops of rope with small backboards for better support. The two step into the circle, place their toes together, and then gradually lean back away from each other. By moving carefully, or by instructing each other to "take" or "give," they can move in different directions or turn their own bodies within the rope to face toward or away from the partner. It's a tense little game (like racing with an egg on a spoon), and we root for different couples or try to understand why some never seem to be able to adjust to each other. Is her ass too big? Does he let his spine cave in?

In Walking on the Wall, Brown tricks gravity and our perception. She's had special tracks installed on the ceiling, close to two neighboring walls and parallel to those walls. Seven tracks-each with brown canvas sling suspended from ropes which can move along it. Each harness has ropes of a slightly different length. The dancers-one, two, three, seven at a time climb one or the other of two ladders stationed at the terminal points, choose a sling, slip into it. And walk on the wall. Really. They have to brace their feet against the wall and hold their bodies very straight. When they want to pass each other, one must step over another's ropes. The illusion is uncanny. Their shirts are brown like the slings, for camouflage, and some of them are excellent wall-walkers (no failing hair, drooping head or legs betray them). For dizzying moments at a time, you seem to be in a tower looking down on the foreshortened bodies of people promenading endlessly on two intersecting white streets. Sometimes you come down from the tower to watch the technique of it allhow they get into and out of the slings, how they pass, how they unstick a recalcitrant pulley, how they zoom around a corner. They go forward, backward, meet, separate, stand. After a while, wall-walking seems like something that you may once have been able to do. A long time ago.

The concert ends with Skymap (1969). The audience lies on the floor of the totally dark gallery and looks up. Brown's taped voice instructs us to try to make a map of the United States on the ceiling, putting in boundaries, lakes, capital cities. Words-the words that she speaks are to be our building material. She talks lovingly and quietly of words, the way animal words like "horse" will trot out to take their places. She gabbles the Lord's Prayer, apologizes, says that we need the words because there are a lot of mountain ranges to be filled in. She keeps talking, sweetly, wittily-sometimes giving instructions or reminders, sometimes reading diaries or shopping lists, but most often just saying the names of towns, lakes, rivers, cities, mountains. And the words that you haven't thought of since geography class or your last trip across the country call up pleasant nostalgias, child's dreams of a continent. Listening to her comfortable voice, you see the relief of cottonwood trees after miles of desert, or growling cascades, or steeples, or white front porches with rocking chairs, or crickets and honeysuckle at night, or roads and railroads. And I'm not sure whether you go home happy or sad.