Trisha Brown’s “Set and Reset”, one of the most cherished and enduring works of postmodern dance, excitingly excavates the tension between freedom and form, spontaneity and detail.
The five central principles, including a direction to “act on instinct,” have been interpreted and reinterpreted by different dancers with different instincts, since its 1983 premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
This weekend, a reconstruction of the dance, “Set and Reset/Reset”, comes to the Brooklyn Academy as the London-based Candoco Dance Company makes its New York debut. Founded in 1991, Candoco is an inclusive or integrated group, with a mix of disabled and non-disabled dancers – one of the oldest and most acclaimed companies. (Axis Dance Company in the Bay Area is arguably the best-known integrated company in the United States.)
Candoco’s reconstruction of “Set and Reset”, with movement meticulously faithful to the original in its quality and architecture, but also tailor-made for his dancers, heightens many of the work’s preoccupations: inviting the audience’s gaze and hiding from it, finding naughtiness within rigidity, balancing simplicity and complexity.
Brown’s dancers always seem to fall through space in “Set and Reset,” but some of the Candoco performers have different relationships with weight and gravity: Joel Brown, who dances with a wheelchair, can tilt and swing; Marketa Stranska, who dances with crutches, has extra leverage and extension, which she uses to propel herself or lean in precarious places.
“Set and Reset/Reset” was not intended to be a project that would open Brown’s work to disabled dancers. It was designed in the late 1990s by a former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Lance Gries, at PARTS, a Belgian contemporary dance school, as a way for students to experience a masterpiece from within. That is, the students learned the ‘Set and Reset’ choreography, but also learned how it was created by recreating it themselves – they ‘reset’ it with movement they created along with Brown’s. Since then, other educational institutions have done their own resets, including most recently at the Juilliard School’s annual spring dances.
In 2011, when Candoco first danced the piece, the idea of an inclusive company performing such canonical work “was considered a radical proposition,” said Charlotte Darbyshire, the company’s artistic director. Also radical: a new look at the designs of Robert Rauschenberg. Candoco’s version features costumes by Celeste Dandeker-Arnold and sets by David Lock, each inspired by Rauschenberg, along with original music by Laurie Anderson.
In the 11 years that Candoco has carried out the work, there have been several iterations. Because when dancers leave the company, others do not just take over their role. Instead, they start from scratch with an exploratory and improvisation-based process, generating movement that is linked to the original choreography, yet specific to each dancer’s body and impulses.
The version that the New York public will see at the Brooklyn Academy, and which recently had a run at London’s Tate Modern, had a longer incubation period than usual due to the pandemic. (The Brooklyn performances were first scheduled for 2020, as part of a celebration of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s 50th anniversary.)
Yager said her process is the same as teaching dancers the recipe for the piece and then seeing what comes out of the oven. She and her co-director, Jamie Scott, learned the fabric of expression that makes up the fabric of Set and Reset. Dancers then improvised with Brown’s five principles for the piece: Keep it simple, act on instinct, stay on the edge, work with visibility and invisibility, and get in line.
Because Brown and her dancers developed the movement through improvisation before setting it, Candoco’s approach to “Set and Reset” honors the spirit of the original work more than a traditional staging would. (There the dancers learned the choreography as close as possible to how it was originally performed.)
But the relationship between that movement and what Candoco performs is constantly changing and differs per dancer. For Stranska, translating the piece often meant choosing whether to use her crutches to perform choreographies intended for the legs or the arms. She found that she could be guided by the way the original dancer’s torso moved, and then let her limbs fall into place naturally.
Stranska, who had danced only in her own work or work for her until ‘Set and Reset/Reset’, says it was an education. “I’ve learned that I can enter someone else’s choreography,” she said. “I get to have my own translation, which I wasn’t sure about at the beginning.”
Candoco dancer Ihsaan de Banya said learning “Set and Reset” felt like detective work, decoding the movement to find its essential properties. “It fills you from within,” he said, “rather than feeling like you’re wearing someone else’s clothes.”
While Yager said she always saw the reconstruction process as an attempt to bring dancers as close as possible to the platonic ideal of the piece, she has learned that “the ideal doesn’t exist – you always get closer, never arrive.” Her work on “Set and Reset/Reset” has influenced how she views the more conventional interpretations of Brown’s dances she performs. “If we stick to something too narrow, there’s no life in it,” she said. “If we give some freedom, it’s basically a back door to find the specificity of the detail.”
What new richness or complexity could we see in repetitions of other classical dances if there were more explicit freedom of interpretation? This question is particularly relevant for a company like Candoco. But Darbyshire said loading existing works by non-disabled artists can be fraught. “On the one hand, I feel like this is a time to… not recreate groundbreaking works,” she said. “Now is the time to support disabled creators and new artistic voices.” (Most of the company’s commissioned works are by non-disabled artists, including the one who shares the program at the Brooklyn Academy: “Last Shelter,” by New York choreographer Jeanine Durning.)
Still, Darbyshire believes the “Set up and reset/reset” process has been pioneered, “is actually a best practice for all of us,” she said. “We shouldn’t make assumptions when we work with someone, disabled or not. There should be room for each of us to bring our own experiences into every collaboration. If there is room for that, more is possible.”
