Review: Trisha Brown’s Unstable, Liquid Structures

The dances of Trisha Brown slide past the eye. The dancers — molecules in the atom of the dance — are in constant motion, limbs swinging, hips angling, bodies caught in the crosscurrents of motion, propelled ineluctably through space.

It was good to be reminded of the utter distinctiveness of that style in the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s program at the Joyce Theater, which continues through Sunday.

The program offers two notable pieces by Brown, who died in 2017. “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503” (1980) and “Son of Gone Fishin’” (1981) come from the period that Brown called “Unstable Molecular Structures,” in which complex compositional systems underpinned the liquid, silky movement.

Now headed by Carolyn Lucas, the Brown’s company has also begun to commission new work, as do other heritage troupes (Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Tanztheater Wuppertal among them). This season, “Time Again,” a work by the Australian choreographer Lee Serle, has its premiere. Serle is in many ways an obvious choice: He was Brown’s mentee in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative in 2010-11 and performed with the company for several years after that.

Perhaps he was too obvious a choice. “Time Again” has choreography credited to Serle in collaboration with the dancers, and much of the non sequitur, limbs-flung-out movement looks a lot like Brown’s. The dance is visually striking, opening with bird sounds and a tableau of four dancers, sitting on their own little lawns of green rectangles, which are soon lifted off the floor and revealed to be woven panels that variously form doorways, huts and walls. (The ingenious set design and the costumes are by Mateo Lopez, another Rolex mentee, with atmospheric lighting by Jennifer Tipton.)

Patrick Needham and Merker in Brown’s “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503.”Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times