After watching "Seven Works by Trisha Brown" on Thursday, included in the Whitney Museums "Off The Wall: Part 2" weekend-long performance series, ARTINFO caught up with Lee Serle, a 28-year-old Australian dancer who left Melbourne to perform as a guest with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Serle was paired with the renowned choreographer for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, which brings young talents together with artistic greats in a variety of creative fields. (Some other mentors this year include musician Brian Eno, director Peter Sellars, and sculptor Anish Kapoor, while in past years Toni Morrison, Martin Scorsese, Julie Taymor, David Hockney, and John Baldessari have taken on young protégés.)

Serle — who says he and Brown like to meet outside rehearsal to chat over coffee — spoke to us about what it's like to come under the wing of a choreographer who calls herself a "bricklayer with a sense of humor."

Brown pioneered the now-frequent practice of staging dances in museums, something she still pursues today, with another performance scheduled to take place at MoMA in the spring. Is there anything that changes when dancing in a gallery space?

I quite like it, because it’s a more informal kind of performance. It’s like what you would do in a studio showing, displaying something rather than having a seated audience and being like, "I’m performing for you."

Have you had a chance to poke around the Whitney?

I haven’t this time, since I’ve been rehearsing here, but I came a few weeks back. Trisha had a few things on before this. It’s a great museum — they have some really interesting things up.

Did you have any particular favorites?

The [Chrstian] Marclay exhibition was up, which was really cool — the simple idea of just taking written musical notation and getting people to play it — sometimes it was just the most bizarre thing. The day that we were here, there was a guy on the piano accordion, playing.

It seems like a lot of Brown’s dances, especially these early ones, are New York-centric or city-centric because they incorporate the structures of the city, the actual architectural spaces. Has performing these dances influenced how you feel about the city?

When I first got here and I got a whole heap of footage of Trisha’s work. We have such limited access of it in Australia — I’d just seen snippets on the Internet, and never anything in itsentirety. So it was really good for me to see that she’d been using these buildings since the 70s, and people still do. It has become a bit of a thing with New York City — people like to use the skyline and the architecture. And New Yorkers like to see people doing things in the architecture as well. I love site-specific work.

The dances, as evidenced by the ones you were in today, are often really athletic and require feats of balance and a lot of trust in your fellow dancers. Is that something that you adapted to easily, coming into a close-knit dance troupe?

I feel like the training that I got in Melbourne was fairly similar to the dances I’ve had here, so although some things aren’t very familiar to me, some of the techniques are. I found it fairly easy to adapt to their kind of moving, because there’s a bit of a lineage from people that I’d been taught by in college, and people that I’ve worked for that have spent time in New York and have danced with people like Steve Petronio who danced with Trisha [and who restaged the 1970 "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" at the Whitney]. There’s kind of that through-line.

Have you faced any particular challenges with the company?

Just the whole adjustment period. The company situation I’m really familiar with, so the challenge is just trying to fit in with the group. But they’re all such lovely people that it really wasn’t hard.

You had been doing some choreography before you left Melbourne. Is your style significantly different from Brown’s in some way?

I think so. I haven’t choreographed a lot — it’s mainly been short pieces here and there. My choreography is very much movement-based, so there are some similarities. But I like to use characterization and things like that, whereas, Trisha’s work is very much about the mechanics of the body.

Brown has described herself as a "bricklayer with a sense of humor," do you think that rings true?

When they’re creating work, Trisha likes to call it "building" — building like a bricklayer, with movement. Whereas people usually just say, "we’re in development." But she specifically says, "No, we’re building." And she’s funny. She’s got such a great sense of humor and she’s really playful and she’s got a really nice energy about her. So yeah, I think she’s a bricklayer with humor.

Is there anything about the way that Brown works that you think will be particularly beneficial to you either as a dancer or a choreographer?

She’s very, very specific about each movement — quite organic, but at the same time there are quirks in there. Everything’s so specific down to the minute finger details. I like that challenge, to be so specific so that you can recreate it time and time again.

This is something that’s always interested me about recreating dance: what kind of notations does she make when she’s choreographing?

I’ve seen various things, just being in the studio as they’re reworking or remounting some pieces. I mean there are folders and folders of building DVDs where there’s the original footage. There’s just so much footage of all of this stuff, which I think they’re in the process of trying to archive. And then some of the drawings that she displays in galleries are almost floor plans, or cubes that have numbers in the corners to direct movement to. But it seems that mainly it’s just the video footage, I don’t know if she necessarily writes down movement as such.

Have you had any falls? Watching "Walking on the Wall" I was holding my breath the entire time.

No, when you’re hanging you can’t really go far, you kind of just go into the wall. There have been a few mishaps and accidental somersaults. You surprisingly feel quite safe up there, because you’ve got that half-vest that covers your pelvis, so you feel really secure. If you do fall, you’re just going to fall forward or back.

It also seems like all the dancers had a pretty low-key attitude about slipping or falling when they were doing such seemingly impossible movements. When everyone was spinning around, they were smiling and laughing.

I think you need to be natural, because it is that informal setting. I think to be all austere would feel weird. And it’s nice as a performer to be casual, because you don’t always get to do that.