Happy Holidays! Trisha Brown repertory at The Joyce

Trisha Brown Dance Company in
Brown's Groove and CountermoveBelow: Geometry of Quiet
(photos: Stephanie Berger)

Imagine The Joyce Theater, or some other lucky venue, making Trisha Brown Dance Company an annual holiday-time tradition! Works like what the Joyce has aqcuired for this season--L’Amour au Théâtre, 2009; Geometry of Quiet, 2002; Groove and Countermove, 2002--possess both the late choreographer's postmodern-pioneer cred and her luscious, eye-pleasing appeal in a time when we all could use some reassurance and soothing. I can easily foresee a future in which Ailey and the usual Nutcrackers share the bounty of the holiday season with TBDC, now under the leadership of Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden.

This is work, too, that might aspire to heal the desperate rawness we feel now across the spectrum of gender. The dances persist in showing egalitarian interactions between and among bodies. L’Amour au Théâtre, set to excerpts from Rameau's opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, is particularly good with this as gender never determines who will grasp, lift and support whom. Brown seems to advise, "Just do the next thing that needs doing." Bodies quietly, efficiently align themselves to be as ready and humbly useful as possible, no one more powerful than another in an unpredictable landscape they create and re-create by their moving. No one flies tremendously high, literally or figuratively. One's virtuosity--if we choose to call it that--lies in the ability to go all quicksilver fluid and responsive in that space between heaven and gravity.

A duet of two women opens Geometry of Quiet, a quartet set to music by Salvatore Sciarrino, taking a different route to the same locale. The music--played live by flutist Sato Moughalian stationed at stage left--breathes, but it can also bark. Leah Ives and Amanda Kmett'Pendry, gleaming in white, each stretch out, front and back, from one firmly-grounded standing leg, a picturesque image. But they end up clasping each other like jigsaw pieces with only as much individuality to be able to fit and lock together perfectly. No surprise that Groove and Countermove's dancers, in their Crayola array of costumes, seem like drawing implements in the hand of a smart, happy child. Brown's choreography invites us to focus, breathe, be flexible, be surprised, take pleasure in the unending doing and discovering.

Trisha Brown Dance Company runs through Sunday, December 17. Tonight's program includes a "curtain chat" moderated by Wendy Perron, dance writer, educator and former Trisha Brown dancer. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Trisha Brown: a loving community offers thanks

Leah Morrison

A bouquet of images from

Bird/Woman/Flower/Dare Devil: 

Trisha Brown

A Community Memorial

Saturday, October 28, 2017

at Danspace Project

organized by Iréne Hultman Monti and friends

All photos 

by Ian Douglas

Ralph Lemon (above)
Tere O'Connor (below)

Trisha Brown, Lemon said, was "our feral dancing goddess."
"...shifting from a fireball to a whisper in a second," said O'Connor.

"Be your most gracious self." -- Trisha Brown

Sam Miller

Stacy Spence

Yvonne Rainer

"In rehearsal, you want to be as correct as possible.

In performance, it's a whole other ballgame."

--Trisha Brown

Stephen Petronio

Iréne Hultman

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Gather this Saturday to remember Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown (1936-2017)
(photo: Marc Ginot, courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company)

A Community Memorial

Honoring the Life and Work of Trisha Brown

Saturday, October 28

Noon through 5pm

Danspace Project

Danspace Project and the dance community at large celebrate the legacy of choreographer Trisha Brown (1936-2017), who altered how we perceive, create, and understand dance since forming her company in 1970. Over five hours, Brown’s company alums, colleagues, and admirers will speak, dance, reminisce, and pay tribute to one of our history’s greatest influencers.

This event is free and open to the public and guests may come and go throughout the day. All are welcome to join in paying homage to Brown and her legacy in transforming our worldwide artistic community.

12pm-1pm:

Judy Hussie-Taylor

Iréne Hultman

Wendy Perron

Susan Rosenberg

1pm-2pm:

Denise Luccioni

Laurel Jenkins

Nancy Dalva

Liz Gerring

Stephen Petronio

Val Bourne

2pm-3pm:

Babette Mangolte

Liz Thompson

Sam Miller

Ralph Lemon

Tere O’Connor

3pm-4pm:

Hendel Teicher

Jennifer Tipton

Yvonne Rainer

Jon Kinzel

4pm-5pm:

Philip Bither

Bill T. Jones

Adam Brown

Dancing by Trisha Brown Dance Company Alums:

Kathleen Fisher, Lance Gries, Iréne Hultman, Laurel Jenkins, Eva Karczag, Tara Lorenzen, Mariah Maloney, Leah Morrison, Brandi Norton, Wendy Perron, Jaime Scott, Shelley Senter, Vicky Shick, Keith Thompson, Abby Yaeger

Excerpts of pieces:

Accumulation, Group Primary Accumulation, Glacial Decoy, Opal Loop, Son of Gone Fishing, Set and Reset, Foray Foret, Groove, If You Couldn’t See Me

Screenings of full pieces will be on view in the Parish Hall.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (off Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Stephen Petronio Company at The Joyce Theater

Emily Stone (r) and Cori Kresge of Stephen Petronio Company
in Trisha Brown's Glacial Decoy
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Trisha Brown can claim special place in Stephen Petronio's artistic DNA and now, as well, in his "Bloodlines" series, a platform for reviving masterworks by choreographers who have informed his practice. Last spring at The Joyce Theater, Stephen Petronio Company launched Bloodlines with performances of Merce Cunningham's RainForest (1968). For the current Joyce season, the troupe has mounted Glacial Decoy, the 1979 landmark collaboration between Brown and Robert Rauschenberg that features the artist's unforgettable costumes and visual design.

A line from Petronio's brand new ensemble piece--Big Daddy (Deluxe), second work on the bill--reminded me of the one concern I had about Glacial Decoy. Towards the end of Big Daddy (Deluxe), a danced/spoken homage to the choreographer's late father, Petronio says, "Death, like gravity, steals the show." Gravity, ultimately, does not steal Glacial Decoy, but Petronio's dancers keep us too aware of it, and what might be a silken transition for a Trisha Brown dancer looks like a split-second negotiation with gravity, a conscious, visible decision about making one's body disrupt its expected patterns to do the unusual. Brown's dancers never look heavy or hesitant, even for a nanosecond; they yield, elusive, incomprehensible. Only Petronio's pairing of Emily Stone and Cori Kresge restores Brown's sleight-of-hand, sleight-of-shoulders, torso, everything else. I loved these two sisterly clouds, so much pleasure in their billowing and playfulness.

"The anger forged into my language is utilized as a call to action," wrote the choreographer and ACT UP activist of his ensemble work, MiddleSexGorge, premiered in 1990 but new to me. The problem with MiddleSexGorge is that--aside from its grating, unrelenting music--the work doesn't read as angry. Saucy, at times, and outright orgiastic for the most part. But not angry. I really can't see what it's saying about AIDS, about community, about society. In any case, I longed to be released from it.

Stephen Petronio, at center, in Big Daddy (Deluxe)
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Big Daddy (Deluxe), then, seems the more radical of the two Petronio works on the program. Bear with me for a minute.

Based on Petronio's 2014 solo, Big Daddy, this loving, compassionate piece includes all the dancers in a visualization of the choreographer's memories of life with his Italian-American family and Thomas Petronio, its charismatic, "warm and luminous" patriarch. Bringing Tom, Sunny, Big Daddy--the man had numerous nicknames--to life for us, Petronio narrates throughout and does so imperfectly with stumbles, here and there, and the smallest hint of upwelling emotion. It's a transparent and bravely imperfect un-performance. And this is the reason I find it radical--at least for the Joyce where we expect polish even when polish might not end up meaning anything in particular.

Petronio's victory in Big Daddy (Deluxe) is to make me chuckle a lot more than once and wish that I could have met Tom Petronio and--although he'd probably not care for my politics--shake his hand. What could be more successful than that?

Stephen Petronio Company continues at the Joyce through Sunday, March 13 (various times). For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

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Fujiko Nakaya: Artist of fog

Q. and A. | Fujiko Nakaya on Making Sculptures Out of Fog

by Ken Miller, The New York Times, May 27, 2014

Dance chose me: choreographer Stephen Petronio writes his life

Above: choreographer and Aries, Stephen Petronio
Below: Stephen Petronio Company dances
I Drink the Air Before Me (2010)
(photos by Sarah Silver)

Confessions of A Motion Addict
by Stephen Petronio (self-published, 2014; 288 pp.)
ISBN-13: 9781492736547

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

I should not have been surprised to learn that Stephen Petronio self-published his memoir, Confessions of A Motion Addict. While the dramatic arc of this world-famous artist's life and career--not to mention the literally boldfaced names he can and does drop, sometimes scandalously--should make any publisher salivate, I can't imagine Petronio having much patience for any middleman or woman dictating how he should tell his own story. The book, all 288 pages of it, is Petronio, through and through. As Spike Lee would say, it's his joint.

The first sixty or so pages, dense and filling, plunge readers deep into childhood and teenage history: richly remembered Italian-American feasts, furtive sexual experiments, rollercoaster drug experiments, precocious insights into the personalities orbiting him, scary dreams, passion, restlessness and, always, a sense of outsider status. By page 67, his artistic fate is sealed when Contact Improvisation makes a serious pass at this newbie Hampshire College student. He subsequently forgets all about taking pre-med. "Inner motor" revved up, mind blown....

I look down my body, and I realize...it's there. I have a body and it is mine. I have a body and do not understand its power or potential or the invisible stories pressing at my skin. I desperately want to move.

Next up? Judson Dance Theater's Steve Paxton, a guest artist at Hampshire. "I am the bastard child of Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown," Petronio will tell us later on, citing his two greatest influences. Brown is, after all, the woman for whom he harnessed up and walked down the wall of a 14th Century French monastery (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building), a feat he repeated a few years ago at the Whitney Museum.

But there's still a lot of getting there until he's there. Petronio takes us along on an adventurous hitchhiking trip through Canada and the West Coast. The young man, exposed to the rigors of nature and the unpredictability of the human animal--enjoyed unexpected kindness of strangers along the way, the occasional minor bummer and one hugely, hugely major one. He's headstrong and lucky and an Aries, and maybe only an Aries would attempt this type of trip in this type of way--"Like all good Aries, I must try to try on every possible lifestyle as my next incarnation"--and get through intact.

Petronio made it through a lot of stuff intact--personal losses, the early years of the AIDS crisis, displacement, along with a lot of other artists, from a gentrifying SoHo, 9/11, a sex-and-drugs lifestyle that could make a rock star look like a rank amateur.

You see the dancer leap and bound, defy gravity and press the boundaries of human movement possibility, yet the mechanics and sensations of these efforts are for the most part concealed. In the mainstream forms of dance, artists often paint a smile over the top of Herculean efforts, but their soul is gritting and grimacing for dear life. The dancer has come to represent the ethereal, outside the law of physics, but we live on the earth and the pull of gravity is definitive. We work with it, attempt to defy it, and yes, we eat real food, pant, smoke, drink, eliminate, copulate, get married, divorced, addicted and healed. We are human. We sometimes break. And it all hurts at some point or another. And we all do something to deal with that pain. Some more than others.

He has chosen to reveal the pull of gravity and the mechanics of living, to conceal nothing, whether it be a personal lapse or a controversial opinion. And with it all, his story provides the kind of energetic rush one comes to expect from his work on the stage.

Learn more about Confessions of A Motion Addict here.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Trisha Brown's "Les Yeux et l'âme" at BAM

The Trisha Brown Dance Company marked the end of an era with its just-closed season at Brooklyn Academy of Music and the poignant announcement of Brown's retirement from dance-making and from directing her exemplary troupe. I'm heartened to learn that the company, replenished with a few new performers, will soldier on; there are no plans to disband. Moreover, new associate artistic directors Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas plan to introduce new ways to extend the company's reach, thereby extending the reach of dance and all its goodness. (If I could sit some dance newbies down in front of Brown's performers--the way some co-workers once sat me down in front of the Yankees in the 1970s--I know I could get some converts. Baseball is freaking fantastic, and so is the art of dance!) I'm glad to have made it to see, in particular, Les Yeux et l'âme (The eyes and the soul) at BAM, performed by Neal Beasley, Tara Lorenzen, Megan Madorin, Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, Jamie Scott, Stuart Shugg, Nicholas Strafaccia and Samuel Wentz. (Morrison addresses each job with breathtaking stylishness that signals awareness and ownership of every millimeter of placement and movement; Riewe moves with the force of joy.)  Developed from Brown's 2010 opera, Pygmalion, and set to the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Les Yeux demonstrates the possible coexistence of gentle cool and sensuality, of airy openness within a rigorous framework, of smart with heart. I find its separate and attached partnerings a kind of tango of visual and gender balance. Geometry, physics--all rendered sexy through the mind of Trisha Brown. My eyes and soul delight in the work of those eyes and soul.

News from the Trisha Brown Dance Company

Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #72503 -- photo (c) Babette Mangolte 1980

Health Troubles Cause Trisha Brown to Leave Her Dance Company
by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, January 31, 2013 

Official release on the Trisha Brown Dance Company's future plans

“Proscenium Works, 1979-2011” Tour Kicks off at BAM; TBDC will Pioneer New Model for Presenting Choreographic Works of Art

New York, NY, January 31, 2013— Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) today announced plans for the future course of the company and of Trisha Brown’s oeuvre.

TBDC’s plan offers a new vision for extending the life of a single-artist dance company.  It includes the Board’s plans for artistic succession; a farewell tour of works made for the stage, seen one last time in their original context; the company’s plans for the ongoing presentation of Brown’s masterworks in both site-specific and museum contexts; and the preservation of Brown’s papers, film and video archive, sets, and costumes.

“As we considered how to keep Trisha’s work alive in the world, we were compelled to ask, ‘How can we innovate in a way that is worthy of a revolutionary artist like Trisha?’” said Kirk Radke, President of the TBDC Board. “We had to find a new model: one that honors Trisha’s spirit, her playfulness, her continual rethinking of her work, her stature as a visual artist. This plan does that. It is a bold reimagining of how the public experiences the work of a great choreographer.”

As previously announced, Brown has choreographed her last two works for the company.  Effective February 1, 2013 she will take the title of Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer.   Brown has named Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas as Associate Artistic Directors.

“Diane and Carolyn have worked with Trisha since 1980 and 1984, respectively,” said Barbara Dufty, Executive Director of TBDC.  “They are the ideal people to reconstruct Trisha’s work for the tour and to repurpose her works for life beyond the stage.  As we move into our next phase, they provide continuity and impassioned leadership for the company.”

The company kicks off its three-year, international “Proscenium Works, 1979-2011” tour with its 2013 BAM season (January 30-February 2).  The tour will showcase Brown’s major stage works for one final time in the proscenium format, complete with the significant  components created by Brown’s collaborators including Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Laurie Anderson, Terry Winters, Elizabeth Murray, Nancy Graves and others.

In April 2013, as part of the tour, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA will present “Trisha Brown: The Retrospective Project,” engaging numerous platforms to explore Brown’s past and current work. The project includes site-specific works (Roof Piece at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Getty Center, Floor of the Forest at the Hammer Museum, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, location TBA); eight proscenium choreographies; the innovative use of archival materials; and dancer-to-dancer education programs. Collaborating with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Hammer Museum, local performers and several university entities, the CAP UCLA project exemplifies the potential for the dynamic interplay of Brown’s seminal works and methodology within public and museum settings.

In 2015, TBDC will shift toward a new model of presentation.  The artistic team will create a blueprint for institutions to present TBDC in a highly curated, interactive context. Non-proscenium-based performances, screenings, dance education, exhibitions, and dialogues will be programmed with the goal of engaging a broader audience than the theatrical dance audience alone.  Museums and institutions will extend Brown’s legacy as a choreographer and visual artist.  Institutional partners for TBDC’s next phase will be announced in late 2013.

“The visual art world has long had a model for sharing its master works with the public—and for re-engaging with those works, investigating them anew, so that they remain vital,” said Diane Madden. “We hope to forge a similar model for choreographic works. Given her profound connection to the visual arts, Trisha is at the very forefront of this approach, as well she should be.  Her work in particular can be curated in much the same way as a visual art exhibition, with the goal of engaging and educating the public on how to see the work’s contexts and influences.”

As the new artistic team, Madden and Lucas will program and reconstruct Brown’s works for the “Proscenium Works, 1979-2011” tour.   In dialogue with other artists and institutions, they will also re-imagine and re-position Brown’s choreographies in site-specific and non-proscenium spaces. They will undertake the necessary and exciting work of gradually transforming the company from a dance-creation and touring company to the integral source for carrying Brown’s legacy forward—as dancers, historians, interpreters, curators, and educators.

The artistic team will also oversee the preservation and utilization of TBDC’s vast archive. Since the early 1980s, Brown has documented every step in her creative process on video; this archive will provide an abundance of material for curators.  The archive includes sets, costumes, and scores by some of the pre-eminent artists of the era as well as Brown’s notebooks and sketchbooks.

In addition, TBDC will also channel select archival materials into an interactive online media library.  Significant funding has already been secured for this project.  To be curated in the style of a museum exhibition, the media archive’s express purpose is to engage users in creative dialogue with the work in yet another non-theatrical space.

“Throughout her career, Trisha has been very concerned about space,” said Carolyn Lucas.  “She has continually questioned the conventions she feels are ‘hanging all over a theater space.’ It’s going to be incredibly exciting to start taking these works outdoors and into galleries—and very true to Trisha.”

Trisha Brown Dance Company Web site

BAM season will be Trisha Brown's last as a choreographer

Trisha Brown to Retire From Making New Work
by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, December 6, 2012

Melnick: "the center of the stage"

Jodi Melnick is a dancer's dancer...and a critic's dancer, too. I didn't get to see her New York Live Arts show, but I enjoyed this review.

From the Everyday, the Extraordinary: Jodi Melnick at New York Live Arts
by Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, March 9, 2012

Liftetime Achievement Bessie for Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown to Receive 'Bessie' Lifetime Achievement Award
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, October 4, 2011

Gish Prize for Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown Wins Gish Prize
by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, September 7, 2011

Trisha Brown: The air is full of pictures

The air is full of pictures no matter where you reach in.

(Jack Gilbert, "The Difficult Beauty" from The Dance Most of All)

I was reading The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert's book of poems, during intermission at Dance Theater Workshop's presentation of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. I came across the line above and thought, "Wow, that's really true. That's exactly how I experience Brown's spacious world." And we reach in, again and again, because it is such a joy to do so.

Particularly true of Foray Forêt (1990) with the subtly Near East opulence of its Rauschenberg costumes, the tantalizing near/far wanderings of its offstage/outdoors marching band, and its generous abundance of movement. Particularly true of the easy-flowing yet precisely connected and rendered macro- and micro-movements danced by Brown's tribe with their yielding knees and wafting arms and the assured and articulate, if arcane, hieroglyphics of it all.

The invisible, peripatetic band--conductor Tom Goodkind's TriBattery Pops, a volunteer crew of Tribeca and Battery Park residents--plays a repertoire stretching from "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" to jazz. The strange effect of "following" them with our ears alone as they move outside our vision creates a sense of a wider space in which Brown and the dancers make their work. It's a distinctly American and diverse environment, one with complicated history encoded in the very things that are meant to entertain us or rally us. At first, Brown's serene dancers seem to inhabit a rarified enclave, but then you realize that they're co-existing with the world implied by the music, not contradicting it, and maybe it is gently informing what they're doing. After all, Brown is an American shaped, as we all are, by popular culture and circumstances. Although nothing is crudely underscored, you begin to see places where music and movement fondly caress each other.

In the midst of all of this heady material, please be sure to keep an eye on Elena Demyanenko. The way she places her feet, cocks her head, draws and expels her breath are all of a piece, a deep, connected way of dancing the incredibly complex coordinates that looks like a way of addressing the incredibly complex demands of life--burning within, alert, intuitive and wise.

More power to Neal Beasley for taking on a legendary, iconic Brown solo--Watermotor (1978). Perhaps it's a matter of physical difference--he is compact--but his explosive attack turns Watermotor into a very different dance (which might be just fine with Brown). I found it hard to see the movement slip through his body the way it slipped through hers. I saw the periphery of the rapid movement instead of the play of the rapids. I saw the end result of the force, a virtuosic, if considerably less interesting, performance.

For M.G.: The Movie (1991)--with its audacious stillness, even more audacious repetition (check out that nearly endless opening sequence), cheesy theatrical special effects and stilted movement aesthetics--seems to be anything but a dance critic favorite. However, the key to it, I think, might be Time--both literally giving it time to work on you and, after you've seen how it shapes up, thinking back over how Brown fractures and distorts time throughout. I can't claim that I feel drawn to this work, but I do think Brown's doing something here around time that's intriguing.

Hard to believe that this season marks this company's debut at Dance Theater Workshop. Trisha Brown Dance Company. Dance Theater Workshop. All I'm sayin'.

See Trisha Brown Dance Company tonight through Saturday at 7:30pm (program and ticket information)

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Wendy Perron gets "The Big Picture"

Here's a wonderful reflection on the occasion of Trisha Brown's 40th Anniversary performances at MOMA by Dance Magazine's editor-in-chief and blogger, Wendy Perron.

The Big Picture of Trisha Brown
by Wendy Perron, Dance Magazine, January 19, 2011

Tobias on the allure of Trisha Brown

Mining the Past

by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, January 14, 2011

Trisha Brown at The Whitney

Trisha Brown Dance Company
reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, DanceMagazine.com, October 8, 2010

Trisha Brown: back to the future

Who can take a couple of dance works from 1994 and 1980 and present a show that looks springtime fresh in 2010?

Better still, who can present a concert where the audience leaves the theater to find the dance continuing in a breathtaking, pre-dusk sky?

Trisha Brown. That's who.

Even the sky cooperates with this woman--salutes her--with glowing, wispy layers of winglike clouds stretched across its perfect blue.

You know how guys used to yell out stuff like "Eric Clapton is GOD!!!"?

Trisha Brown is GODDESS!!!

If you can get in, see her company now at Baryshnikov Arts Center (through Sunday evening), with two alternating casts in performances of If you couldn't see me (1994) and Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (1980).

I saw Dai Jian's elegant performance of If you couldn't see me--a poem to the articulate expressiveness of the back, in which the dancer reaches, scoops, swings, undulates, twists and swerves, never once turning to fully face the audience. But, from previous performances, I can also recommend Leah Morrison's sensuous, authoritative reading of this marvelous solo.

In the rarely-seen Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, dancers emerge like a serene flock of gulls from billowing clouds of mist. Beverly Emmons's lighting adds a soft, celestial glow, and the only sound is the shushing and gasping of Fujiko Nakaya's cloud machine. BAC's Howard Gilman Performance Space offers audiences the good fortune to be fairly close to the dancers--I saw the good-looking quartet of Jian, Elena Demyanenko, Tamara Riewe and Nicholas Strafaccia; the alternate cast is Morrison, Straffacia, Laurel Tentindo and Samuel von Wentz.

Happy 40th Anniversary to the superb Trisha Brown Dance Company!

Madden's ladder to success

Still thinking about the divine Diane Madden turning a ladder into a necklace and then a hat last night at DTW's Trisha Brown panel (moderated by former TBDC dancer and current Dance Magazine Editor-in-Chief Wendy Perron). Best argument ever--ever!--for movement being far more persuasive than words.

BTW, it was nice to hear Carla Peterson saying that she'd make up for DTW's decades-long oversight in never having the Trisha Brown Dance Company perform on its stage: "We're going to fix this!"  Oh, you'd better.

For information on more TBDC 40th Anniversary special events at DTW this spring, click here.

Trisha Brown Co.'s anniversary lecture series

Trisha Brown Dance Company
40th Anniversary Lecture Series

in association with Dance Theater Workshop

January 13 at 7:30pm
February 16 at 7:30pm
March 22 at 7:30pm
April 11 at 3pm
May 23 at 3pm

at the Bessie Schönberg Theater, Dance Theater Workshop


Launching on January 13, the series kicks off with a lively discussion moderated by Wendy Perron with veteran dancers Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas. The conversation will offer a rare behind-the-scenes look into the company’s creative process and a chance to listen to stories from all around the world.

Upcoming events

February 16, 7:30pm: Diane Madden, Julie Martin and Trisha Brown discuss the premiere of Opal Loop in 1980 and the process of reconstructing the work in 2009-2010.

March 22, 7:30pm: tba

April 11, 3pm: Art Historian, Susan Rosenberg; Curator, Peter Eleey; and Dramaturge, Guillaume Bernardi, discuss the work from their perspective.

May 23, 3pm: Former TBDC dancers Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus, Stacy Spence, Keith Thompson, Stephen Petronio, and Vicky Shick. Having all pursued their own choreographic careers, they will gather to discuss how their time with TBDC influenced their own choreography.

Admission: Free (Suggested donation: $10)
Reservations not required but can be made through the DTW box office at 212-924-0077. 

Dance Theater Workshop's Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th Street (between 7th & 8th Avenues), Manhattan

Trisha Brown remembers Merce Cunningham

A message received from Trisha Brown:

I am filled with great sorrow upon the loss of dear Merce. We all adored him. Merce and I were transports from the West Coast and shared a connection through our roots in the Pacific Northwest. Our houses were accustomed to speaking old Chinook jargon, a dialect of the Indian sea traders in Washington. It’s based largely on Nootka which is used as a lingua franca from Alaska to Oregon. For me, Merce will always be a Tillicum, which translates as "old friend."