“Do Less, Feel More”: A Conversation with Lisa Kraus about Glacial Decoy

Glacial Decoy, a dance by Trisha Brown with costumes and set design by Robert Rauschenberg and commissioned by the Walker Art Center, premiered May 7, 1979, at the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis. The piece was a significant turning point for Brown. For years, she designed her dances for alternative spaces: a church gymnasium, on rooftops, on the sides of buildings—even on rafts in nearby Loring Pond. Glacial Decoy was her first work conceived for a conventional theater stage.

Although Brown and Rauschenberg had been friends and performed in each other’s works since the early 1960s, Glacial Decoy marked the beginning of a deeper, long-lasting collaboration. Rauschenberg designed the costumes and an animated backdrop of large-scale projections of his own black-and-white photographs that shift and fade over the course of the dance.

As part of research for the exhibition Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy, Assistant Curator Brandon Eng and Manager of Interpretation Janine DeFeo talked with dancers Cecily Campbell and Lisa Kraus, both of whom have performed and taught this work.

The conversation started with Kraus walking Eng and DeFeo through clips of a 2024 performance of Glacial Decoy. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Lisa Kraus: The beginning of Glacial Decoy is an opportunity for the audience to register what’s happening with Robert Rauschenberg’s design, which is four vertical, black-and-white photographic images that process across the stage. These images take a bit of doing to unpack; they’re dense and very textural. What Trisha is doing at the beginning is revealing the core material of Glacial Decoy but only as it occurs on the far right and far left sides of the stage. Later, the center of the stage will populate, and this section will repeat. 

What you’re seeing movement-wise involves allowing the weight to tip off vertical. The falling momentum that results is often channeled into an arm swinging or a leg extending into space. But Trisha also allows for a little folding of the knee or flicking of the hand or some other small gestural component on top of this falling quality so that the movement is happening all over the body and is quite nuanced. It’s like one action crumbles into another, which then crumbles into another.

Trisha, when she would give a lecture demonstration during this period, would describe her own preference for material that had the quality of S-words: “serpentine,” “slithery,” “sensual,” “slippery,” things like that. Also “sequencing”: a movement that starts at any one part of the body, ripples down through the spine, and ends in another part. 

Some of the movement in Glacial Decoy involves imagining throwing yourself onto a surface. There are some very imagistic ways of thinking about the movement. For instance, there’s the “haystack.” You toss one way and then the other as if you’re throwing yourself onto the curving surface of a haystack. There’s a sort of stuttering motion that happens at the end of that move when you hit the imagined surface. Then, you collect yourself again and throw yourself the other way.

There’s the “Japanese fisherman,” where you place your weight into the back of your heels and deeply curve lower back so that you’re skittering and falling backward, then you catch your weight so it flows forward again. These kinds of images are very helpful. Sometimes there’s architecture where you’ll go under your own hand or have a clear sense of a doorway—geometries that you image on top of the space.

Kraus: The sections that come after the initial duet have changed over time. There used to be a trio, which Trisha later eliminated. The current configuration has a duet between the two central dancers next; its root material is the same as what we saw in that outer duet at the beginning. However, there are two different things that happen with that material. The first we would call “scramble.” In earlier work, Line Up, for instance, people would take each other’s spot, interfere with, or even bump each other. This was all improvised.

Kraus: For Glacial Decoy, Nina Lundborg and I were invited to improvise with the existing material, making repeats, spacing, and interfering with each other. You see one dancer placing themselves in front of the other in a game-like structure. You see all kinds of games that were devised on the spot and remembered.

We made a second kind of variation on the original material as Trisha improvised in her studio, and Nina and I caught whatever we could. The job was to do an instant replay, but obviously it’s like a game of telephone. We each had our own version of what Trisha did. You do the ten seconds that you saw, you work it until you know what it is, and then Trisha does more.

Then you work on that and add it to the first part, building bit by bit. Or you might end up saying, “Hey, I’m sorry, I lost that one, could we do another?” Or “I don’t like what I have at all, let’s do it again.” We built these sections based on Trisha’s improvisation, and then our job was to figure out how to make them work together.

Brandon Eng: The way you describe the development of the piece brings out the choreography’s playfulness, which makes me curious how you would characterize the relationships among the dancers. Are there certain ways you talk about or describe that?

Kraus: The relationships among the dancers cannot be separated from thinking about our relationship to Trisha. Dancing her material was so much about feeling her physical power, wildness, and joy. She had, just prior to making Glacial Decoy, worked on Watermotor, which was a departure from more conceptual, task-based pieces. 

In Watermotor, she gave herself permission to dance flat-out, wild-assed, a 360-degree availability of motion. That quality is what formed the material of Glacial Decoy. You can see it in her way of upping the spirit and the ante when she danced the stage right wing. When you look at her version of it, she got quicker and almost supersonic as time went on. Nina and I had a good rapport and aligned energetically. I danced the piece later with someone who is a super dear friend of mine to this day, but I was totally frustrated because she was slow. What are you going to do? It’s always a negotiation, dancing something like this.

In the final section especially, you have to be continually aware of the space and timing of the other dancers without looking directly at them, without having any music, counts or anything. It’s all about feeling the fullness of the movement and letting that determine the timing and knowing where other people are. It’s quite a corps de ballet kind of experience.

If you look at the stage floor, you see tape marks dividing the stage in thirds. The main placement for the central duet is on those tape marks that go from the back of the stage to the front. When the dancers pass to the right of those marks, the person who is in the wings on stage left gets pulled on stage because the dancers need to remain equidistant. When they traverse the stage toward their left, the person on stage right gets pulled on. Everyone stays at the same depth and travels the same distances, almost as though they’re connected by wires. The illusion is that there could be an infinite line of dancers extending beyond the wings. In fact, there’s one moment when the dancer who comes out of one wing crosses the line herself and then brings on a fifth dancer for only one brief entrance. It was like the ultimate joke to do that.

The slides continually travel as if they, too, are on an unbroken line, extending way beyond the edges of the proscenium. Both Trisha and Rauschenberg were playing with that sense of an ever-expanding line of images and dancers. This is their answer to making a proscenium piece when Trisha had been making work for galleries, site-specific spots, gymnasiums, armories, the great outdoors, or the side of a building. 

Eng: Could you share a little bit of the backstory of how you got involved with Trisha Brown Dance Company and how you ended up dancing Glacial Decoy?

Kraus: I’ve been dancing since I was six years old. Now I’m seventy-two, which means that dance has taken many different forms and states in my lifetime. I’ve performed in other people’s companies, made work, had my own dance company, founded an online dance journal, taught a lot, and curated. But working with Trisha Brown between 1976 and 1983 was probably the most formative experience of my dance career. 

One of my teachers at Bennington College was Steve Paxton, who developed contact improvisation and was a great friend of Trisha’s. They were serious dancing buddies and had both been in Grand Union, an improvisational dance ensemble. Still to this day, they are maybe not topped in terms of their innovative creativity. I went with Steve to La MaMa in New York to videorecord a Grand Union concert, and Trisha was in it. I looked at her and really felt very puzzled by what I was seeing. She was working very clearly with body geometry, placement, and architectures. It had a kind of angularity to it, a metered, pulsing, almost accumulation quality.

I just rubbed my head and went, “I don’t know what that is. I really don’t.” And that became a lesson for me. Now, whenever I feel perplexed in that way, I think, “Okay, got to dive in there.”

Kraus: After graduation, I saw a flyer announcing that Trisha Brown was going to make a piece for this dance company. I thought, “I want to do that.” I got in touch with the company and they said, “All right, well, come and take a ballet class so we can see if you can audition for Trisha.” That was not something I was used to doing, but I passed their test. Then Trisha ended up selecting me and one other person, and we made a piece called Duetude together.

She came to Boston every week that whole spring, and I just fell in love. We did one of her exercises, which was to “dance the room.” You’re looking at and having physical responses to the features of the wall or the arrangement of the pipes and then setting them all the way around the periphery of a space. Or we did one of her angled structures. You start with a five count, and then a four, three, two, and one, and you’re physically declining in height.

I finally decided, “Okay, I have to move to New York.” I went and showed up at her house, not realizing that people did not just knock on doors in New York City; I was pretty naïve. She let me know she’d be holding auditions shortly. 

Of course, doing the audition was somewhat fraught because I wanted it so much. Both Nina and I were accepted, and I became the first new person to perform with  this configuration of her all-women’s company, which had been together for a couple of years. 

I had a lot of more traditional, technical modern dance training behind me, and that was true for Nina as well. I think that liberated Trisha because many of the people in the company up to that point didn’t have that kind of training. We allowed her to up the ante in terms of the complexity of movement.

Janine DeFeo: Are there any specific phrases or gestures that you associate with Glacial Decoy as a whole? Does it have a mood?

Kraus: The name came from Rauschenberg. There are some ice images in his work. The costumes, which originally were made of silk screen silk, were quite stiff. They recall the icy ballerina in white tulle. It’s very, very cool and spacious. And the “decoy” part, well, a decoy involves a trick, a game, a “I’m going to fool that duck” kind of thing.

And bird, dancer, swan—it all hangs together for me as a concept that Trisha and Rauschenberg shared. I taught this piece to the Paris Opera Ballet three different times, and it really feels like a ballet. They didn’t have as easy a time with the movement as the Brown Company dancers do, but they could do a quite credible version. The dance goes on; I believe it’s eighteen minutes long. For the people doing the central duet, it’s a marathon.

It’s quite demanding physically, but it’s a euphoric ride. There are sections where you’re gliding and sweeping around the space, then falling backward, catching yourself, righting yourself. Of the dances Trisha made, it’s the one that feels the most allied to what my body loves. It’s big and daring and elegant and weird and unpredictable. It’s never messy, but it’s strange.

Eng: Could you describe any sections of the choreography that you thought were especially challenging or rewarding?

Kraus: When Trisha improvised in front of us, we called it “throwing movement,” and Nina and I would be catching it. Sometimes you catch the ball, but even if you don’t, that could be interesting. It could yield something with a different, but related, quality. There’s an energetic resonance, and you end up with something like sister material.

I do have favorite moves. When I teach it, I’m always catching myself saying, “Oh, this is my total favorite.”

I think I damaged myself doing one move. It involves a hard landing on what we call a half toe, which is when you’re not up on pointe but your toes are flexed and you’re landing on the base of where the toe joint meets the metatarsal bone. If you repeat anything that’s jarring or involves a lot of force often enough, it can have a negative impact.

There are other things in there that involve a lot of torque. There’s one movement with a jump and the legs are going one way and the body is going the other way. It’s almost as if the upper body is like clouds passing over the leg. It’s so much fun, but it’s hard because it’s a lot of energy to get up off the ground and then have that happen with the upper body.

There’s one—I think it’s called “high heels”—where you’re teetering and intentionally falling forward downstage with your hands flailing behind. You’re allowing your upper body to respond to this tipped-forward falling that’s happening with your legs, and you’re trying to catch yourself by moving your feet quickly. You end up completely doubled over, hanging from your hip joint with your head down, and you just stay there for four seconds. You could really fall.

There are other places in the dance where the challenge is actually to fall but not fall on the ground. That’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to get people to find the balance between being too timid and letting it rip, skidding out onto the ground.

DeFeo: I was curious about your impressions of Brown and Rauschenberg’s collaborative working relationship.

Kraus: Trisha adored Bob. He would make her laugh uproariously, and he adored seeing her dances and seeing her dancing. You could feel it was this mutual admiration society.

Because he had good resources and a good staff, a seamstress, he could do anything. You could feel him bringing along that cadre of helpers and partners.

The dancers’ view on the process between the two of them was pretty limited. I don’t think we really had an idea of what they were making until we were at the Walker. And then it was a beehive of activity, not without drama. I don’t know exactly what the complexities were of aligning four slide projectors without the kind of computer and electronics that we have today, but there were some stumbling blocks. You could sense people were not exactly relaxed moving toward the finish.

From a dancer’s point of view, you just figured, “All right, it’s going to be what it’s going to be.” But when it comes together, it’s extraordinary.

We were not thrilled about the costumes because they were super uncomfortable. The Little Bo-Peep legs that we had to wear had constricting elastic in places. Oh, also, the top could fly up over your head. Yeah, the original costumes weren’t great.

And then back to the drawing board. That was a very cool aspect of working with him, that he was quite open to making changes based on how things actually worked.

He designed, or his assistant Cheryl designed, convertible costumes that we could wear when we were doing any Trisha piece but didn’t want to wear the original costumes. We called them the Cheryls because Cheryl made them. And they were . . . how to put it? If you go to REI and buy pants that can be converted to shorts, it was like that on the bottom. They were silk jersey in beautiful colors. There are some photos of us dancing Decoy—which is what the piece was called when we didn’t have the slides in the background—dancing Decoy in the Cheryls, and we all had our own color.

Kraus: It was very difficult to really take in the images as we were dancing. Obviously, they’re captivating and fascinating, but there’s a limit to how much attention you can pay.

However, there’s one slow section of the initial duet when poses get held for four or five seconds at a time. Everything slows down and stops. And I would always know that if I saw the image of the cow, the timing was going to end up fairly correct.

The pace of the piece could vary so easily. One day, everybody’s feeling a little more perky; another day, people are lagging a little bit. However, the pace of the slides does not change. And the goal was always to end when the railroad sign came on because that was Rauschenberg’s signature, his way of signing off.

DeFeo: It was fascinating to hear your memories of the first sets of costumes, and I was wondering if you have any memories from the second set, those dresses with the arm bands?

Kraus: They felt wonderful, actually. When we started out, we had to take turns pressing them, and that was hard because they’re all pleats, millions of pleats. We didn’t have a wardrobe person traveling with us, and we were the ones who did it.

I liked those costumes a lot. It’s hard to imagine the piece with anything else. They’re formal, but they’re loose. They’re sculptural, but you can see the body under them. They kind of play in all different ways. They’re a little bit froufrou; they’re a little bit extravagant or silly in some way. To have a pleated arm thing like that is somewhat strange.

DeFeo: Did your perspective on the piece change as you started to teach it?

Kraus: I now recognize that people move in different ways and that the goal is not to try to clone myself. Teaching the company in New York, I was reminded that I have a way of doing the work that feels right to me, and it’s useful to share my understanding of what triggers a given movement or where the weight is traveling. 

And that’s good, but it reminds me of folk songs, like how there’s a Kentucky version of a song that they sing in West Virginia, which sounds different when it gets down to Florida. I’ve seen Glacial Decoy staged by other people—Diane Madden, initially, and now Carolyn Lucas—and it looks like that. I think Carolyn’s thing currently is wanting people to find and understand a physical logic that feels good on their bodies. And that may look different than what I think it’s supposed to be.

Eng: I wonder if you could speak a little bit about teaching the Paris Opera Ballet group. You hinted that they had some difficulty with it, and I’d love to hear more about that. It’s quite interesting—this thing of who has what background and how they bring that to the piece.

Kraus: There’s a film of me teaching that Marie-Hélène Rebois made called Dans les pas de Trisha Brown (In the Steps of Trisha Brown), and in one of the very first scenes, I have them leaning against a wall and yielding and softening their weight. The fundamental challenge was that ballet dancers are trained to be vertical and light, and Glacial Decoy requires falling and giving into gravity. We had to do quite a few things to help them find that quality.

Training involves repetition, and so, even though people ostensibly knew what the movement wanted to be, you would still see habitual patterns and reflexes that were challenging to override. You can feel them at times reverting to a “balletic” version of those actions. Working with them involved helping them get the rides in the movement rather than placing themselves in the shapes.

Eng: How would you compare the “balletic” version of the movement to the Trisha version?

Kraus: Trisha worked with Elaine Summers, who did the famous ball practice and kinetic awareness—these forms of allowing the body to work in an efficient, comparatively low-tension way. Ballet also aims for an illusion of lightness, but it is a highly muscle-driven form. Moving through a “ride,” or how one movement naturally tumbles into the next, involves letting go. And a ballet dancer is trained not to let go, but to control, control, control. In Glacial Decoy, there’s a fair amount of directing into a particular shape. It’s a different physical sensibility that I think has mostly to do with the amount of tension in the musculature. The first time I was with the Paris Opera Ballet, I tried to promote this kind of letting go by saying “do less, feel more,” and the dancers had a T-shirt printed up for me with the phrase. That kind of encapsulates it. It’s about feeling but also the picture, which is what makes it tricky.

DeFeo: Do you have any other thoughts about how Glacial Decoy sits within Trisha Brown’s larger body of work?

Kraus: It was the first instance where there was a major visual arts collaborator. Later, Fujiko Nakaya made a fog sculpture for Opal Loop, Donald Judd made a series of colored drops at different parts of the stage and coordinating costumes for Son of Gone Fishin’, and Rauschenberg returned a couple times, on Set and Reset very notably and Astral Convertible. This was very stimulating for Trisha. 

From working with silence, she eventually invited Robert Ashley and then Laurie Anderson to collaborate. From working with very subtle human interaction, she gets involved with pretty serious drama in the operas. She was open to whatever next directions were right for her. Interestingly, her last solo, If you couldn’t see me, was again a Bob Rauschenberg collaboration. He was really a trusted buddy, and he was the one who gave her the concept of always keeping her back to the audience, thus the title.