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The Arts Intel Report

Glacial Decoy / In the Fall / Working Title

A scene from Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Glacial Decoy.

Jan 23–25, 2025
Schaperstraße 24, 10719 Berlin, Germany

It is a salve to enter the world of Trisha Brown, for the precise, buttery, and unleashed movement and the delicate subversions of theatrical convention—such as in Glacial Decoy, revived this season. The wondrous 1979 work plays with entrances and exits so thoroughly that the four dancers seem to have avatars. Meanwhile, Robert Rauschenberg’s quixotic set won’t stay put. His costumes, semi-transparent Victorian nightgowns in moonglow white, only attest to the giddy madness of the proceedings. As for the second non-Brown work in the history of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Noé Soulier appears an unlikely choice. The French choreographer is certainly a hot item on the international circuit, but he favors “movements that are not organic, that are counterintuitive,” he has said, and you don’t get more organic than Brown. Still, she comes by her flowiness, as much as by everything else, through a rigorous logic. She and he still believe in the avant-garde. —Apollinaire Scherr