Erica Getto

Even the smallest gestures—a tilt of the wrist, a tap of the toe—seem to rumble from deep within. Her performance has the feel of a private rehearsal or a practiced ritual. Seated in the front row, at times within arm’s reach of her, I refrain from even the most discreet note-taking, not wanting to break whatever trance she’s in. But the trance pulls me in, too. She moves like a perpetual motion machine, without friction or inertia.

In 1988 Vaslav Nijinsky visited the dancer and choreographer Molissa Fenley in her New York City studio. He had been dead for nearly forty years—longer than Fenley had been alive. But as she worked on a wrenching, thirty-five-minute solo called State of Darkness, set to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in the room with her.

In March 1962 the choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown debuted Trillium, her first original performance, at the Maidman Playhouse in New York City. In the three-minute work, she attempted to sit, stand, and lie down in quick, unpredictable succession. With enough repetition and acceleration, she recalled, she’d reach a point where “lying down was done in the air.” Brown’s repertory of more than a hundred pieces, composed over fifty years, comes together in such moments of balanced precarity.