Trisha Brown Dance Company

REVIEWS Dublin Dance Festival:Abbey Theatre, Dublin

The lightness which permeates Robert Rauschenberg’s design and movement of Set and Reset (1983) imbues it with such fluidity you imagine you are sharing a marvellous watery world with the dancers, following their ebb and flow. The dancers in gauzy costumes shimmer off one another, to Laurie Anderson’s absorbing score. They separate and mesh like a shoal of silvery fish swimming past, natural and mysterious at the same time. Set and Reset is one part of this mesmerising show of contemporary dance from The Trisha Brown Dance Company.

Brown makes pre-ordained movement seem so accidental, a classic lifting aloft of a dancer looks merely casual, a soaring limb is nonchalant and signature small jumps a throw away afterthought.

Here, the company of nine extraordinary dancers (four men and five women) perform a range of her work for dance and opera which shows off her transformation of ordinary movement, her wit and her seamless collaborations with visual art, lighting and music. Les Yeux et L’âme ( Eyes and the Soul) from 2011 seems to echo some of the moves from the work of 30 years earlier. But here the dancers don’t just glance off one another. The contact is more physical and intimate; a head rests in the crook of an elbow, a torso wraps around another’s back.

Brown is a wizard with perspective; dancers seem elongated and more numerous than they are. Her play with bodies is particularly seen in For MG: The Movie (1991), where, bathed in a dusty, red-brown light and unitards, the dancers loom and evaporate in turn, exposing their bodies in stillness and in motion to a score that summons echoing canyon and urban wastelands. She can also transform small works into an enduring classic.

Accumulation, which opens the show, is a perfectly executed gloss on repetitive gesture and rhythm, while in Spanish Dance, the acoustic guitar strains of Bob Dylan singing Early Morning Rain are accompanied by five female dancers, lined up sideways, folding their bodies into one another and then shunting off, a moving train of flamenco-raised arms and narrowed, flashing eyes.

Dublin Dance Festival continues until Saturday