The art of place linked with pitch perfect performance
Though Mother Nature nearly stole the show, the dancers’ movements were a match for the natural beauty of the venue
Trisha Brown: In Plain Site
Jupiter Artland
Every now and then, a show comes along that you know you will remember for the rest of your life. Trisha Brown: In Plain Site always had the potential to join that special list, and happily it doesn’t disappoint.
Jupiter Artland is already one of the most beautiful venues in Scotland, a contemporary sculpture park that works hand-in-hand with its environment. A lover of nature, Brown would have been thrilled to see her work staged in such an incredible setting.
Most of the works performed during this 90-minute adventure (because that’s what it feels like, walking from one lush location to the next) were created for a theatre or studio space. There, you could focus more closely on nuance – the clever symmetry, use of space, gestural language – without Mother
Nature threatening to steal the show.
What we lose in focus by placing the work in this remarkable location, we gain in experience. Dressed in bright white clothes and shoes, the dancers walk out on to Charles Jencks’ concentric grass hills, ‘Cells of Life’. Contrasting sharply against the green, they look like characters from a science fiction film, and the repetitive, synchronised gestures of Brown’s Another Story as in Falling, only add to that.
Heading into the forest, we arrive at Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone Coppice, where four dancers on low wooden stages deliver Figure 8, Locus and Accumulation – each executed with poise, precision and, at times, wit, the trees acting as a supportive corps de ballet behind them.
Delivered beneath Phyllida Barlow’s looming artwork, quarry, Floor of the Forest saw two dancers clamber over a roped framework threaded with clothing, working their way in and out of shorts and shirts.
But it is Raft Piece (originally performed by Brown on the Hudson River) that feels truly special, performed on four floating platforms against the rippling water. Breathtaking and unforgettable.