Trisha Brown at Northrup

In conjunction with The Year of Trisha being launched at the Walker Art Center, Patricia and I went to the mammoth Northrup Auditorium on Friday to see a career spectrum of Trisha Brown choreography. To say the least, we were disappointed.

Trisha Brown is an interdisciplinary artist who the Walker especially loves and fit nicely into Kathy Halbreich's concept and legecy of the Walker featuring works and artists that move across medium, practice, and aesthetic branch's of contemporary art. And now that the Walker has expanded its space to more fully embrace performance and dance with a majority of the new building being used as a auditorium (and restaurant) it is clear they have an even greater commitment to artists like Brown.

Probably what astonished us the most is that compared to other works and choreographers, the work we saw at Northrup was under cooked and not sophisticated in its use of the vocabulary of present day dance. In the first two pieces, I could only imagine that given the time in which they were first performed they somehow addressed a current restriction or use of the body that struck people as interestingly outside the norm. These movements don't do so anymore.

In the first piece Present Tense it was obvious Brown wants us to be conscious of the frame and the "edge of the frame." In doing so she had dancers half on the visual stage of play and half off. Throughout, Brown seemed to be challenging the edge of the parameters set forth in her field of vision. Yet, that was about all there was - a kind of formal observance of the stages frame while the dancers made dance-like movement. If there was an emotion statement Brown fails to connect and falls short of reaching it.

And, while her piece began in silence, and we had to listen a chorus of coughing from the audience, the small University of Minnesota Alumni band began to play in the lower halls and underground tunnels surrounding Northrup itself. At first being at the University of Minnesota, as I am sure Brown intended, we could not be sure if the band was simply rehearsing for a public campus event or if they were a part of the production. It was fun for awhile. But then Brown never seemed to commit to doing something more engaging with this trick than reinforce her simple ideas about the "edge of the frame."

In fact, much of the evening was filled with choreographic tricks that never translated themselves into deep or astonishing revelations. Patricia and I could not help but compare a piece we saw this winter at the Southern Theater by local group Black Label Movement. BLM took the language and techniques that Brown uses in only a cursory and under-developed way and brings incredible insight and a brilliance of understanding the fragile human condition.

Carl Flink's BLM's piece called "Wreck" had so many layers and innovations with the frame, the dancers movements, their inter-relationships on stage yet made all the more significant by attaching humans on the brink of being sucked into the vortex of the sea. It was like watching great choreography, athletic dance movement, and at the same time experiencing a deep connection you'd experience from watching a fantastic documentary film about survival and death.

Living here in Minneapolis is another astonishing couple Toni Pierce and Uri Sands whose choreography for their company TU is also amazingly innovative but the additional significance of layers of meaning brought from references in history and society enrich their works far beyond what Brown is offering on stage. The make bold decisions and back them up so that you feel the completeness not only of movement, stage, frame and sound, they feel richly a part of a text that speaks about who we are as human beings.

A big part of the problem throughout with Brown is that she doesn't seem to want to commit to the directions in which she is heading with her work. The final piece I love my robots uses "robots" (not really) that amount to nothing more than polls on platforms connected to motion sensors that criss-cross the stage. An interesting concept to work with, however there is not much significance to this piece in the end. There is no real meaningful of revealing interaction between the dancers and the "poles" and it adds up to a sum of nothing. It feels like an interesting idea lazily executed with 1970s technology.

Going back 25 or 30 years to a school of New York and national artists, Brown I find to be emblematic of their desire to challenge forms and conventions, perhaps ever reverse directions yet also unwilling to be tied down to specifics or details. Their defense for a failure to communication with their audience was always the veil of abstraction. Todays artists are not so obtuse and evasive.

Our current dancers and choreographers would do significantly more interesting things than Brown does. Perhaps that means on her shoulders we've come so much higher in the advancement of choreography. We owe Brown a debt of gratitude for being a paradigm buster but I'd rather being watching a newer generation that takes all these ideas and concepts so much incredibly further.

MUTUM: Story of Brazil's Recent Past

Patricia and I went to the Walker Art Center to see MUTUM during the Women's in the Directors Chair series. This Brazilian film by Sandra Kogut is about a family on an isolated subsistence farm in the arid backlands of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Our central character is Thiago, a ten year old boy who knows little about the outside world except for a few horseback trips into a nearby village.

Thiago's father is distressed by a passing way of life and trying to provide for his family. His mother bares the burden of her husbands anger and frustrations and Thiago throws himself between them as his mother protector.

The feature film is an adaption of Jose Guimaraes Rosa's novel and while it is fiction, it strikes at the heart of Brazil true agrarian migration and the poverty that devastated rural Brazilian states like Minas Gerais and Bahia.

Religion plays a significant role in MUTUM, as the mystery of how nature delivers its fate evades common experience or a social consciousness thus becoming an acceptance of an authority beyond that which you can see or touch. But there is no preaching and deifying of faith.

In many ways, MUTUM reminds me of the brilliant German documentary film THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL for the intensity and detail of how they story is told. Not much dialog and visual detail aplenty, it keeps your head in the world in which Thiago lives. We feel the full power of a thunderstorm as dramatic as it can be in a place where a person is not constantly barraged with manufactured drama.

MUTUM is a mood-piece, a film that is evocative and deeply detailed in creating the sense of a simple life where children spend the day playing with insects, teaching the papagaio to talk, and chasing chickens. The pacing and lack of dialog set the viewer in a different spatial and temporal frame -- a pace of life that is nearly incomprehensible to modern western over-stimulated audiences. But MUTUM's unhurried observations are well worth the effort to persist in watching.

The young actor whose name is also Thiago is astonishing and the film, with all its subtlety and nuance pays off hugely at the end -- even with its small and unsensational emotion. The emotional impact is deep but not blunt. You may never get the chance to see this film but if you do, let it transport you into a different world than the one your are accustomed to living.

But for Patricia and I, MUTUM is a family story and tells the tale of how her own parents were sent from the warm and loving confines of a family with little connection to the outside world, out at an very early age into a world they could never have imagined. For Patricia this is the gripping backstory of Mauro and Odelva who were forced off the land in their early teens and sent to Sao Paulo with nothing to help them get their start. Life can be cruel. And this is a gripping story of a distinctive kind of cruel.