Trisha Brown Dance Company Performs At Watermill Center Memorial Day Weekend

Last Thursday morning, the Manhattan rehearsal space for the Trisha Brown Dance Company was a flurry of activity.

After a short break, explained associate artistic director Carolyn Lucas, the dancers were finally back together, busy trying on costumes, catching up and preparing for their upcoming performances this weekend at The Watermill Center—the place where the dance company’s founder and namesake was one of the first resident artists.

And so, it is only fitting that her company’s performance, “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site,” will inaugurate the center’s reACT series, a celebration of 10 years of avant-garde exploration at the Water Mill performing arts laboratory that will simultaneously and very appropriately free the dancers from the conventional stage.

This performance will be raw, natural and, in many ways, exactly how modern dance is intended: no distractions, no artificial lights, no theater and, most importantly, no barriers.

“Being on stage, you don’t see anyone out there. It’s always a dark, vacuous thing. You know people are there, but it’s harder to connect with them,” Ms. Lucas said during a telephone interview, stepping out of rehearsal. “During ‘Plain Site’ performances, you can see so much more. And, often, people are quite close to the dancers.”

The 75-minute performance will start in a vast green field, moving through the grass and the woods and ending on an outdoor stage, where the final half hour will unfold. The audience will move with the eight dancers, embracing them from all sides. It is an intimate experience, Ms. Lucas said.

For Trisha Brown aficionados, the material will look familiar. It is culled from her body of work exceeding 100 choreographies.

“Trisha has all these amazing works from the ’70s that were meant to be performed in alternative spaces, so we have everything we need,” said Ms. Lucas, who joined the 46-year-old company in 1984 as a dancer and was appointed associate artistic director alongside Diane Madden when Ms. Brown retired three years ago. “We just have to construct a program with a beautiful flow pattern. Since Trisha’s retirement, we’re not actually choreographing anything new, so we work with the material pretty much as it is.”

Within the program, old will meet new, from 1973’s “Group Primary Accumulation” and 1976’s “Solo Olos” through 1991’s “For MG: The Movie.” The audience will experience the evolution of Ms. Brown’s work and how she grew as an artist—which is easier to see than put into words, Ms. Lucas said.

“I think it’s just evident,” she said. “She would work on an idea and then move on and develop something very different from the last work. She was always pioneering and discovering. As a dancer, I always say that after 10 years of dancing with Trisha, she never repeated herself and neither did I. She was just an incredible inventor of new rhythmic vocabulary, so we were constantly challenged through the building aspect of Trisha, because it was always something new every day. She’s just a genius and she had so much wit.

“She is a wonderful woman with an incredible sense of humor and extremely smart,” Ms. Lucas continued. “She really worked harder than anybody I’ve ever met.”

She paused and gasped. “Oh boy, rehearsal starts in seven minutes,” she breathed out. “I have to get going!”

And with that, she hung up the phone and descended back into the madness, into a studio of creativity, in the spirit of Trisha Brown.

The Trisha Brown Dance Company will perform “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site” on Saturday, May 28, and Sunday, May 29, at 5 p.m. at The Watermill Center in Water Mill. Tickets are $40, or $35 for Watermill Center members. Additional performances in the reACT series will include Paula Prestini on September 24 and 25, and Jack Ferver on October 29 and 30. For more information, call (631) 726-4628, or visit watermillcenter.org/events/react.