Trisha Brown (photo Lourdes Delgado,)
(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – The Trisha Brown Dance Company kicks off the 2014 annual Bard SummerScape Festival with three performances of Proscenium Works: 1979–2011 this Friday, June 27, at 7:30pm, through Saturday, June 28 at 2pm and 7:30pm, in the Fisher Center. The program features the final creation of MacArthur Fellow Trisha Brown, alongside revivals of two of her most beloved large-scale stage works, made in collaboration with Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg.
Brown’s esteemed company is now making its farewell tour, so SummerScape’s presentation offers one of the final opportunities to see these examples of her groundbreaking oeuvre. All performances will take place in the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s stunning Hudson River campus, with dining available in Bard’s nearby authentic Belgian Spiegeltent. As the Star-Ledger declared when the Trisha Brown Dance Company launched SummerScape in 2010, “If any dance event is worth a quick run out of town, it’s this one.”
Scene from ‘I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours,’ Trisha Brown Dance (photo Stephanie Berger)
Proscenium Works 1979–2011 offers a retrospective of the Trisha Brown Dance Company through key examples of Brown’s choreography for the proscenium stage: Set and Reset (1983) and If you couldn’t see me (1994), both featuring designs by Robert Rauschenberg and respectively set to music by Laurie Anderson and Rauschenberg, with I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours (2011), the final work of her career, which the New York Times pronounced “entirely absorbing,” adding presciently: “The transience of this work is its beauty. Here today, gone tomorrow.”
Since helping to found the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater movement in the 1960s, Trisha Brown has consistently expanded perceptions of what dance can be. She was awarded a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1991, becoming the first female choreographer to be so honored. As Dance Magazine put it, “When it comes to postmodern choreography, Trisha Brown is royalty.” The Trisha Brown Dance Company, which the choreographer formed in SoHo in 1970, soon became one of the nation’s foremost contemporary dance ensembles, and continues to command heartfelt respect more than four decades on. John Rockwell writes: “Her current company is wonderful: handsome dancers confident in their execution of Ms. Brown’s choreography. They’re a pleasure to watch, all by themselves. But they’re not by themselves; Ms. Brown’s ideas and sensibility are ever present” (New York Times).
Scene from ‘Set and Reset,’ Trisha Brown Dance (photo Stephanie Berger)
SummerScape has opened with significant dance performances each summer since 2005. On seeing A Rite (2013), a new dance-theater piece from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, co-commissioned by SummerScape to celebrate the centenary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring last season, Deborah Jowitt marveled: “Like many immersed in dance, I’ve seen a number of works set to Stravinsky’s score. … This is the first new one to pull me into the music and its history in so many unexpected and provocative ways” (ArtsJournal).