Beauty and Wit at the Pillow

Trisha Brown is known for being a pioneer of post-modern dance, which makes her work sound dry and intellectual. It is anything but. And to celebrate her company’s 40th anniversary, she presented four works at Jacob’s Pillow, works made in the last four decades, that showed humor, beauty and a delicate playfulness.   “Les Yeux et l’âme” starts with two couples silhouetted. A third couple joins them and they move at a relaxed, almost stately pace, befitting the Baroque harpsichord piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau.   The dancers move with clarity and elegance, with simple lifts, intimate gestures (an arm curled around a partner’s head, just for a moment) or a hand circling on the ground as if drawing in the sand. The dancers were always deliberate and controlled, never off balance. The impulse for a movement was often an arm swinging, or sometimes a partner’s arm that pushed another dancer into motion. There was a sinuous grace and sometimes even intimacy between dancers that was never overtly sexy. The other works on the program, from earlier decades, showed the same easy effortlessness and plotlessness. “Foray Forêt” also starts in silhouette, and also in silence. A faint music begins and gets louder: It’s marching band music, and it moves as if the band itself were marching outside the theater and about to burst through the door. If the circus is passing by, the dancers seem unconcerned.   They wear filmy golden costumes — pants or metallic bras and skirts — designed by Robert Rauschenberg. Sometimes the dancers fall into unison, or interact with each other, but there is no story or obvious relationships between dancers. Moments of stillness and simple walking punctuate bursts of elegant movement.  Occasionally, the performers would dance with people off stage in the wings. Depending on where in the audience you were sitting, you might have seen a hand or a foot of the offstage dancer. In “Spanish Dance,” five dancers stand in front of the curtain, spread out across the stage.  As the music, “Early Morning Rain” sung by Bob Dylan, begins, the first in the line jogs her knees, then starts walking toward the next dancer, as her arm swings and curls like a sleepy flamenco dancer. When she reaches the second dancer, she cozies up behind her and the second dancer begins jogging her knees in sync with the first. The two walk to the third and join with her, and so on, reaching and merging with the last dancer as the song ends. It’s both funny and mesmerizing. “Set and Reset,” from 1983, is one of Brown’s most celebrated works. Rauschenberg designed both costumes and set, the latter consisting of a series of grainy black and white images projected on three geometric screens. The score is by Laurie Anderson — the signature pulsing, driving electronica, with her smooth voice repeating the phrase “long time no see.”  The dancers form patterns which instantly dissolve,  mixing simple walking or jogging with sinuous rippling or sudden falls.   After a summer of complicated, passionate and not always likable dance groups, the Trisha Brown company felt like a cool fragrant breeze. For information on upcoming events at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA, call 413-243-0745, or go to www.jacobspillow.org.