Dance review: Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, Jupiter Artland

The art of place linked with pitch perfect performance
Trisha Brown: In Plain Sight, Jupiter ArtlandTrisha Brown: In Plain Sight, Jupiter Artland
Trisha Brown: In Plain Sight, Jupiter Artland

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.

Read More
Theatre review: IAmDram, Pleasance Courtyard
Hide Ad

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.

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.

KELLY APTER