It must have been heaven to be alive and watching dance in New York from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, when a group of young choreographers – Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown among them – came together in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and rethought the nature of dance.
I went there on my first trip to New York, to pay homage, and was rather surprised to find it was still just a church. I wanted plaques and statues and celebratory fireworks. Now, I just eagerly await revivals of the work, marvelling at the clarity and beauty their experiments unlocked.
Because of their collaborations with other pioneers, the dance-makers came to represent an entire artistic avant garde and so their work often ends up in museums and galleries nowadays. Tate Modern is hosting an exhibition centred on Trisha Brown’s 1983 creation of Set and Reset, with set and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, score by Laurie Anderson and lighting by Beverly Emmons.
Around the display, a sequence of performances is being staged as part of the Dance Reflections festival. In the coming week, Candoco will present its version of this seminal work, but first up it was Rambert’s dancers who recreated its shimmering movement, full of little details of arched or slashing arms and stretched feet, but giving the sense of constant, serene flow.
In addition to the structures floating over the action – a cube and two pyramids on to which a stream of black-and-white American news footage is projected – Rauschenberg provided gorgeous, floaty costumes. The whole effect is as fresh and wondrous as the day it was made; it lasts less than 30 minutes yet is so rich in scope and shape you could watch it for ever.
The contemporary contributions from Dance Reflections, however, both seemed to turn down blind alleys. There’s something mesmeric about Katerina Andreou’s BSTRD, in which the dancer walks on, puts a skull-shatteringly loud techno soundtrack on a turntable and then starts to dance, in endlessly repetitive sequences of hops, skips, runs. Watching feels a bit like standing at a bar at a rave: exhausting, frustrating, not really going anywhere.
But at least Andreou seems to have some sense of purpose. Christian Rizzo’s une maison remains stubbornly opaque. A cast of 14 group themselves into various tableaux; sometimes, they appear in animal masks; sometimes, they move vigorously; more often, they are still, heads resting often on each others’ shoulders. They change their clothes from greys to colours. The stage is dominated by a large, florescent light sculpture whose tubes intermittently judder into movement, altering the shape. There’s a pile of dust that gets thrown across the stage and went in my eyes and hair.
I think it is about home, and homelessness, and friendship, but I really didn’t care. If Trisha Brown’s fleet movement represents contemporary dance at its most generous, this work by Rizzo seems deliberately alienating.
Star ratings (out of five)
Set and Reset ★★★★
BSTRD, une maison ★★
• Rambert presents Set and Reset at Tate Modern, London; until 21 March
• Dance Reflections festival is at venues in London; until 23 March
