Climbing Kopanos

Choreographer Carol Brown was first invited to the Centre in 2003 to investigate connections between dance and architecture. I observed her and her dancers’ working process and performances over a week in fall 2005, where Brown and collaborator Dorita Hannah created Her Topia, commissioned by the Centre as part the New Zealand born choreographer’s most recent residency. Brown’s dance-making grows out of a context of perpetual research; her choreographic images arise from a complex framework of ideas and conceptual linkages. In engaging with architecture, she considers a multitude of relationships—the actual to the virtual, the whole to the fragment, and the historical to the present day. “If the building carries a trace, how do we incorporate it?” she asks, challenging her dancers in a rehearsal of Her Topia, the second of her projects with the Duncan Centre. In a rigorous ten-day process, very brief for the scale of the work to be created, Brown coached a group of all-female performers by softly talking through the links to the Duncans’ story, with exceptional elegance of thought and locution.

Watching made me interrogate my perception of Isadora’s most essential qualities, and raised questions for me about the ways in which choreographers appropriate the work and mythos of others. It also fed my ongoing contemplation of contemporary performance work: how, when works are crafted out of a succession or layering of non-literal images, do they cohere and communicate meaning?

Brown created Her Topia in collaboration with scenographer Dorita Hannah, and the Centre billed the dance as a “Dance Architecture Event.” “Her Topia” is a nod to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia,” a term he coined to refer to a social “counter-site,” a space paradoxically powerful and marginal, distinguished from a utopia by being actual rather than idealized or imagined. Like Kopanos.

Brown and Hannah, inspired by many facets of the Duncans’ achievement and biography, fashioned distinct images in their work: composites of movement, sound, and objects that they “stitched” together through the recurring use of particular materials. Stones were held, placed, and carried, echoing their use as the main building material of the Centre and their connection to the mythic figures of Niobe and the Caryatids. Mirrors suggested fragmentation and the play between real and unreal. The color red recollected Isadora’s Russian epoch and the fatefully tangled red scarf that caused her death. The costume choices reflected Isadora’s iconoclastic approach to clothing: a gargantuan dress, a contemporary take on the restrictive sheaths she might have railed against, and an interpretation of her “tunics” as present-day athletic wear.

As it quotes from Isadora’s Revolutionary Dance and Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece, Her Topia layers eras of history. Recordings of Joan Baez protest singing, a musical nod to sixties political counterculture, evoke Isadora’s own maverick stance and vanguard politics, and an ominous loop of Wagner and a moving aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas recall Duncan’s passion for monumental and stirring classical music. A final section around a long mirrored table alludes to a bacchanal, recalling Isadora’s Maenad spirit and search for the ecstatic.