This Music Gets Her Jazzed

Postmodern pioneer Trisha Brown has been an innovator since the early 1960s, but “El Trilogy” represents a new challenge for her at age 65. As seen Friday at Royce Hall, in the “UCLA Live” season, this full-evening plotless work is her first choreography to jazz, and she not only uses the music as an accompaniment to her typically loose-limbed, freewheeling movement, but inventively reflects its forms, moods and origins in American popular culture.

Working with a complex score by jazz composer and trumpeter Dave Douglas (played live in some engagements, on tape at UCLA), Brown gives her nine-member cast energetic loops and swirls akin to those on the black-and-white backdrop by painter Terry Winters that dominates Section 1, “Five Part Weather Invention.” The dancing remains fast, steady and remarkably supple here, marked by a very full use of the body, but often following an impulse generated in the arms.

Soon an undulating, nine-member line forms, front to back, with individuals strolling out of formation to do a step or strike a pose, then sashaying back. A follow-the-leader structure develops, much like those of classic line dances in early jazz clubs, but not only does Stacy Matthew Spence lead the others in playful gesture games, he also initiates an elaborate bounding/dodging sequence with brief duets that leads to one of Brown’s most daring and central strategies.

Hearing the musicians’ coughs and other random noises on the soundtrack, Brown wants to punctuate her dance passages with what we might call documentary motion. So she asks her dancers to periodically fall--suddenly, heavily--as if by accident, and this startling motif undermines the conventional unisons on view and gives them an edge.

After “Five Part Weather Invention” ends, the backdrop ascends and stagehands reset lights and anchor a column of nine gleaming cymbals in place. Against their non-dance tasks, Brown sets a dramatic solo for Mariah Maloney, a passage full of intense lunges, ending with her hands clawing the floor.

Later, during the set-change between parts 2 and 3, Maloney will perform another solo, this one creatively exploring the possibilities of an aluminum stepladder as a dance partner. Embracing and transforming the mundane has been a career-long preoccupation for Brown, and “El Trilogy” attacks the concept again with great freshness.

Titled “Rapture to Leon James” in tribute to a Lindy Hop icon, Section 2 chops up social dance moves and reassembles them in surprising new patterns. Staged against the bold color washes of lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, the high-speed discontinuities here--kicking, twisting, shuffling, finger-snapping--make a brilliant showpiece and remind you of Igor Stravinsky’s dissections of popular and folk music. But as Douglas’ musical line splinters toward the end, some of the weakest, most aimlessly frenetic dancing of the night takes place. Brown recoups with a final cavalcade of blues stances, show-dance formations, tap attacks and ballroom images, but as a whole “Rapture” proves uneven and forced.

“Groove and Countermove,” however, features a series of inspired playoffs and even finds room for stillness, a concept that played no part in “Rapture.” It also features another Winters backdrop--this one a suite of two dozen miniature squares laid out in a grid.

Beginning with a genial extended duet for Katrina Thompson and Brandi Norton, the choreography quickly settles into the role of matchmaker, uniting opposites with dazzling surety. Rigorously composed formal movement connects to passages of jabbing, bobbing, head-wagging spontaneity, and somehow Brown makes the two belong together, just as she alternates solos and ensembles, swirling and stationary passages, liquid and spiky dynamics.

It’s a great juggling act, and it honors the blend of freedom and discipline, instinct and technique, of great jazz playing. As the music heats up in the final moments, the dancers are continually swept up in larger and larger groupings until all nine collapse on their sides at the extreme right with the impact of one last, definitive crash of cymbals.

You could argue that much of “El Trilogy” seems far too intellectualized for ideal jazz dancing, and that Brown needs to let go and just groove long before her engulfing finale. But her brainy approach succeeds in making you think about what you’re hearing--the disparate skills, traditions and kinds of attack involved--in order to make sense of what you’re seeing.

From its start, postmodernism prioritized thinking differently about dance, and “El Trilogy” not only renews that sense of mission but encourages you to think differently about music.

In addition to the dancers previously mentioned, the Trisha Brown Dance Company includes Abigail Yager, Sandra Grinberg, Seth Parker, Lionel Popkin and Todd Stone.