Review: Making it look so easy is hard to do

Ours is a culture that values virtuosity. We're even prone to judge our concert dance by how spectacular -- faster, higher, flashier, sexier -- the physicality of the dancers and the inventiveness of the choreography are. So the Trisha Brown Dance Company's performance at Northrop Auditorium on Friday night poses a conundrum.

In reviewing the program's three dance works, which span the last two decades of the iconic choreographer's 40-year oeuvre, there's a protective urge to explain the ways in which Brown's work is virtuosic (it's embedded in the movement vocabulary's deceptive simplicity). Still, the program's third and most recent work, "I love my robots," conveyed a sense of lost potential. Enough with the subtlety; let's see those robots affect something.

In "Foray Forêt," the casual ease with which the dancers swing their arms or torsos around the axis of their bodies, spin on the foot up off the floor, soften a line into liquid curve and turn another dancer's weightless leap into silvery spin is no everyday feat. It looks as natural as breathing. But the work's lithe execution is borne of rigorous attention to structural phrasing and a tremendous muscular elasticity.

The methodical layering of crooked gesture and tilted movement, just before they melt into an arc of fluid momentum, is like words tumbling into a sentence. The dancers splay their fingers next to their mouths or on top of their heads, as if calling out or tuning into the rhythmic drumming and brassy music of the University of Minnesota Alumni Band, playing off stage.

The dancers extend an arm or leg from the wing curtains, humorously snagging another dancer mid-flight. It all adds up to a geometry of thought, a manifestation of Brown's creative process, that acquires an airborne physicality in "Present Tense."

Set to John Cage's sonatas for prepared piano, this work begins with angled movements that cross the body like protective shielding, which are then transformed into inventive partnering. Airborne bodies -- whether being pulled by arm and leg into opposite directions or angled atop another dancer's feet -- become interlocked with other bodies underneath or over, as if the dancers were weaving together the spaces between them.

In "robots," with a score by Laurie Anderson, the movement vocabulary is more rigid, even though the bodies puzzle together in shapes as intricate and mutating as origami. The dancers pay little heed to the robots. Decidedly low-tech -- tall poles on motorized platforms -- the robots could be sentinels or passersby, but have little effect. More intriguing are the dancers' mysterious cupping gestures on the floor; a searching gesture which, maddeningly, leads nowhere.

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.