Who are those dancers spinning through the Broad (and LACMA and the Getty)?

Trisha Brown Dance performers turned the Broad galleries into their stage as they explored the relationship between art, audience and dance.

By Jessica GeltStaff Writer

March 10, 2017 9:25 AM PT

The dancers spin and twist in the cosmic space between Jeff Koons’ candy-colored “Tulips” sculpture and Takashi Murakami’s massive painting “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow.” It’s an easy-breezy routine — very lazy-Sunday-with-a-mimosa, accompanied by a jazzy Dave Douglas tune.

A hundred viewers have gathered at the Broad museum to watch this spectacle, part of a series winding its way through museums across the city called “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site Los Angeles.”

Presented through Sunday by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA in collaboration with the Broad, the Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery, the program presents the work of the acclaimed New York experimental dance company in the unexpected landscape provided by museum and gallery spaces. Also unexpected: the entertainment value of not just the dancers but also the audience, as performance art inspires people watching as its own form of spectator sport.

You can’t own or collect a dance, but you can collect the intelligence of that art form.

— Kristy Edmunds, CAP UCLA artistic director

For the Broad performance Tuesday night, the crowd gathered as night fell, the headlights of cars crawling down Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. cutting through the lobby windows, mingling unexpectedly with the museum’s dim, gray interior.

The clack and whir of the escalator is the only sound as the dancers, dressed in white, intertwine their bodies like tangled tree roots.

The well-heeled crowd is mostly older — dressed largely in black, silver hair in angular cuts, smart black-framed glasses. Also here is a smattering of young, scarf-clad dance enthusiasts, many lean and long, as though from a lifetime of stretching.

The pre-show star, however, is a diminutive older woman wearing a hat that resembles a soft helmet made of perky white feathers salted with dashes of red and blue feathers. Her body is enveloped, shoulder to ankle, by a chunky-knit maroon sweater that brushes against the tops of silver-sequined Ugg boots. She carries a large red purse the size of a child’s toy chest.

“Look at her; she’s got herself a costume. See her costume, mother?” an older gentleman says a bit too loudly to his wife, who is wearing sensible suede black boots. The group has moved to a gallery to watch a performance in front of Julie Mehretu’s “Invisible Sun,” and the man is trying to decide whether to sit on the floor like the woman in the feather hat.

Viewers have been split into groups of 25 and directed to different galleries for different performances. Audience-watching, art-watching and dance-watching form equal parts of the intimate experience. The dancers morph into living, breathing sculpture — at once molding, and being molded, by an environment devoted to the collection and display of objects.

Kristy Edmunds, the artistic director of CAP UCLA, muses that hopefully audience members will revisit the museum at a later date and see the dances as a ghost image in the space.

“You can’t own or collect a dance, but you can collect the intelligence of that art form,” she says. “Audiences become the archive of that experience.”

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Trisha Brown Dance performers turned the Broad art galleries into their stage as they explored the relationship between art, audience and dance. The performance, called “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site Los Angeles,” is a collaboration with Broad Museum, Getty Center, LACMA and Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. Lee Serle is the dancer.