Angel Franco/The New York Times
The Brian Brooks Moving Company performing Mr. Brooks's new work, ?Descent,? at the Joyce Theater this week.
There?s an impressive set awaiting audiences as they file into the Joyce Theater, where the Brian Brooks Moving Company opened the Gotham Dance Festival on Wednesday night. An arched opening at the back of the stage is strung with dozens of fine silvery cables that extend over the stage and the audience, creating a tunnel effect and the notion of a spider web in which we are caught along with the dancers.
It?s the setting for Mr. Brooks?s ?Motor,? which had its premiere last year at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in less than propitious weather conditions. In the safer terrain of the Joyce, ?Motor? remained dry in all senses. Set to a propulsive electronic Philip Glass-lite score by Jonathan Pratt, the piece begins promisingly with two trios emerging from the opening, the dancers ducking rhythmically under one another?s arms with looping, lunging, synchronized precision.
Dressed in dark blue pants and tops, they fragment into new groupings, slow their sequence down and speed it up again, reassemble in new trio formations. The effect is of particles colliding and ricocheting within structural confines, and it?s an impressive demonstration of Mr. Brooks?s ability to spin new combinations out of a single idea.
But after quite a lot of this, the dancing begins to look like an assembly of good ideas going nowhere. (The ambient music doesn?t help.) For Mr. Brooks, if something is worth doing, it?s worth doing over and over again. A woman is ?walked? up and over the back of another (a direct quote from Trisha Brown?s ?Set and Reset?); the idea is repeated in different permutations. Two men do slow, lunging jumps while other pairs join them in endless repetition and then slight variations.
The use of rigorous repetition with small shifts in dynamics and emphasis is a time-honored one in modern dance. Lucinda Childs, Ms. Brown and others have all created pieces in which a stern minimalism proved revelatory of rhythmic and conceptual complexity, and in which identical movement paradoxically reveals individual qualities.
But Mr. Brooks doesn?t negotiate that fine line between incrementally fascinating and eventually boring. Watching a long duet in which two men, Mr. Brooks and Aaron Walter, perform endless variations on skittering hops around the stage, you note their impressive stamina and rigor of execution, without ever feeling that you are being shown something new. One problem, which recurs in the solo ?I?m Going to Explode? and Mr. Brooks?s new ?Descent? is structural. The pieces don?t build or develop, sections are carelessly joined, endings seem arbitrary.
That?s particularly the case in ?Descent? ? which feels more like a work-in-progress than a finished piece ? with its loosely linked parts, its overly whimsical (if pretty) batting into the air of floaty chiffon fabric, its dully repetitive run-and-catch partnering, and its oddly flat conclusion.
There are moments here that are visually arresting. But they don?t add up. At least, not yet.
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