Dance

A Lifetime of Dance

Trisha Brown Dance Company in retrospective at BAM

by Mary Staub   |   Mar 25, 2009

A Lifetime of Dance

Trisha Brown Dance Company

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Trisha Brown Dance Company in Performance

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Trisha Brown has gone through myriad phases as a choreographer. A founding member of the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater, Brown was a strong proponent of experimental dance throughout the 1960s. She formed her own company in 1970 and created a range of site-specific works that incorporated pedestrian movement and defied the then-accepted classical approach to modern dance. In the 80s she began focusing on works for the stage and started playing with the interaction of visual art and movement in numerous collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. In the 1990s Brown choreographed to classical music and worked in opera for the first time.

This artistic evolution is not only significant for what it says about Brown as an individual artist, but for what it says about the evolution of “modern dance” itself. Many of these junctures are being revisited by the Trisha Brown Dance Company this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, April 29–May 2.

To begin with, Brown’s first Rauschenberg collaboration, Glacial Decoy (1979), will come to life again at BAM. Then, her first venture into choreographing for classical ballet dancers, O złożony/O composite (2004), created for the Paris Opera Ballet, will have its US premiere. Planes (1968), a site-specific work, will allow dancers to ascend a projected version of New York City within BAM’s own walls. And the beginnings of Brown’s future vision will come to life in a Baroque-flavored piece which, by 2010, she will further develop into her staging of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Baroque opera Hippolyte et Aricie for its world premiere in France.