“The floor is not a floor,” choreographer Judith Sánchez Ruíz said during a recent rehearsal with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. “It’s a place where you jump up and keep going feeling upwards.”
Physicality meets sensation in a vivid way for Sánchez Ruíz, the first choreographer in the company’s 53-year history, other than Brown himself, who created a new work for it. In a scene from “Let’s Talk About Bleeding,” premiering May 2 at the Joyce Theater, six dancers are caught in a whirlwind of momentum, where agitation gives way to smoothness and weight meets a sense of air. During that rehearsal, the studio floor suddenly seemed softer, warmer, smoother to the touch.
Sánchez Ruíz, a youthful 51, bounced a little as she spoke, matching her charged presence. “Movements just fly out of her mind,” says Carolyn Lucas, the company’s artistic director.
The appointment of Sánchez Ruíz, born in Cuba and based in Berlin, was not an arbitrary decision. A member of the company from 2006 to 2009, Sánchez Ruíz worked with Brown, who died in 2017, before going on her own – forming a group, continuing to dance and developing teaching methods.
As a child, Sánchez Ruíz studied gymnastics, then ballet, before discovering modern dance and ending up at the National School of Arts in Havana at the age of 11. Like her dance history, ‘Bleeding’ contains more than one starting point and is, in her eyes, pictorial. In the piece, with musical direction and composition by Cuban composer Adonis Gonzalez, she has created what she called “a symphony of layers,” she said in a video interview from Switzerland, where she taught.
“I layer a lot of subjects,” she continues. “It’s like a cake. In it we find stories that create meaning or create a poetic constellation. We say it’s like” – her hands rustled the air – “an orgasm of constellations.”
When she was approached by the Trisha Brown company to be its first guest choreographer, she was shocked, she said, even though she knew Lucas was a fan of her work. After seeing her solo “Encaje,” Lucas said, “I had this feeling — it’s not an eerie feeling — but as I was experiencing it, I was so drawn to it, and at the same time, I also felt like Trisha was just really would be happy. and proud of Judith. That she would enjoy this as much as I do.”
Lucas thought back to a meeting the company had in 2003 about its future, when the idea of creating new choreographies was introduced. “Trisha talked about how she would view alumni to create new work, but she was also very clear that the alumni had to be committed, invest time, energy and knowledge as a choreographer,” said Lucas. “That was important to her. And then she said ‘or a bright young choreographer’ who is not necessarily an alumni.”
To Lucas, Sánchez Ruíz, whose time in the company was relatively short, seemed to encompass both sides of Brown’s desire. “There was kind of a nice marriage to this idea of Judith being an alumni, but time has gone by that has put her in this category of a smart choreographer,” she said. “Judith really worked so hard to create her work, her voice, her vision – just relentlessly.”
The title of the work says it all. “Because I am still bleeding,” said Sánchez Ruíz. “My friend said, ‘Everyone has left contemporary dance and you’re still moving.’ It’s very hard but that’s not in my mind I keep going It’s like I keep solving situations and obstacles over and over I’m not a materialist I’m really an artist at heart I don’t need a house with a pool to be happy. I dance and I’m happy. I make art and I’m happy.”
Last September, she asked the Trisha Brown dancers, many of them new, to show her what they had in their bodies. It was a squeeze process. How ingrained, if at all, was Brown’s movement and repertoire? “I said, ‘Pinch a lot of pieces and improvise on them,'” Sánchez Ruíz recalled. “From there, I started transforming it into my vision.”
Sánchez Ruíz’s dances are physical and fast, based on years of research. Since leaving the Trisha Brown company, she has developed two main training methods that play a role in her choreographic approach. One is based on technique, allowing an eccentric body to be grounded yet visceral; the other, entitled “Your Own God”, is an improv workshop.
Throughout the process for ‘Bleeding’, which will be performed at the Joyce alongside two of Brown’s works – ‘For MG: The Movie’ (1991) and ‘Rogues’ (2011) – she has used both methods to create an episodic , impressionistic , almost fantastic world. Men shoot their elbows. A woman emerges from the floor – as if it were earth, said Sánchez Ruíz – while another dancer stands in relevé.
“It’s like two kinds of women in different times,” she said. “One is just still on the ground trying to grow and find something to feed itself. And the other is already in a position, but she is so vulnerable that she could fall at any moment.”
“Bleeding” doesn’t refer directly to Brown’s work, but there is a key moment, which Sánchez Ruíz calls “the bridge,” that touches on her legacy. “I saved one scene of the squeezing,” she said, referring to her experiment with the dancers last September. “I transformed it, but you can see some vocabulary underneath. Now it’s like a glitch. It creates some obstacles.”
Jennifer Payán, a dancer in “Bleeding”, said the Sánchez Ruíz-Brown connection for her was in “trying to find this improvisational impulse and rhythm that also lives in Trisha’s work.”
“Of course it’s not the same, but the funkiness gives her work something familiar,” she added. “The feeling that it’s still alive, like an improvisation, is important in the piece.”
When Sánchez Ruíz left the company in 2009, she said, “Trisha was like, ‘Why? Do you need a solo? What do you need?’ And I thought, ‘No, I don’t need a solo.’ I actually had really good roles, and I loved it.
When she joined the company she was 35 with a 2 year old child. Travel put a strain on her marriage, leading to a divorce. By the time she left, there was interest in her own work, which she enthusiastically engaged in. In 2010 she founded her company and a year later she moved to Berlin to dance with Sasha Waltz. But that didn’t fit well; she didn’t dance enough. “There were so many dancers,” she said. “I came from companies where we were nine. Everyone was important. Everyone was a soloist.”
It wasn’t easy being an independent choreographer. But with everything Sánchez Ruíz has been through and her intense choreographic research, she doesn’t feel an unusual amount of pressure at the prospect of creating a dance for the Trisha Brown company. “In a way, the bigger pressure is, What do you say?” she said. “Who are you as an artist?”
She recalled a conversation she had with Brown when she was still a member of the company, in which she was told, “Judi, it is very difficult to be a female choreographer. You will learn this, because you are also a choreographer.”
“And that was really nice,” said Sánchez Ruíz, “because I think of all the companies I’ve ever worked with, Trisha Brown is the only company that supported me as a choreographer after I left many years ago.”