Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, Jupiter Artland Edinburgh International Festival 2019
Trisha Brown Dance Company, Astral Converted (1991) and In Plain Site (2021 staging)
- This virtual showcase includes footage with comments by company dancers Amanda Kmett’Pendry and Marc Crousillat
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Tue - Sun, May 2 - 7, 2023 |
The Joyce Theatre Trisha Brown: In Plain Site |
New York, NY |
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Press
“It was like a conversation you might have in a fever dream: The seagulls twirled around the dancers, and the dancers, perched majestically on a jetty for ‘Figure 8’ .”
Gia Kourlas, The New York Times
full article (PDF)
“The ‘In Plain Site’ series … revealed the adaptable nature of [Brown’s] choreography, its capacity to slip into unforced conversation with a new environment. Wherever it goes, it has a way of fitting in … an extension of its surroundings.”
Siobhan Burke, The New York Times
“Roof Piece” is both simple and radical. Brainstorming about how to reproduce it virtually, the dancers immediately ran into a snag: Not everyone had access to a roof. So they decided that a roof wasn’t essential to the piece; communication across distances was. … a virtual “Roof Piece” seems right for the moment.” (April 2020)
Brian Seibert, The New York Times
full article (PDF)
Repertory
Trisha Brown: In Plain Site pairs indoor and outdoor sites with select pieces from Brown’s repertory. Each work is restaged in a dynamic relationship to the setting, amplifying Brown’s effortless affinity for naturalizing movement to the physical environment.
Ever a resourceful and dexterous innovator, Brown “…said she felt sorry for spaces that weren’t center stage—the ceiling, walls, corners, and wing space. Not to mention trees, lakes, and firehouses,” Wendy Perron recently wrote in Dance Magazine. “She caused a revolution by… turning to the spaces that other dance-makers don’t.” In parks, museums, and public squares, among other sites, audiences revel in the intimate, up-close experience of Brown’s Early Works, Equipment Pieces, and specially chosen excerpts from the repertory.
Read The New York Times Review from the Edinburgh Int’l Festival 2019 (PDF)
For the 2021-22 season, with the thought of outdoor spaces, the Trisha Brown Dance Company reconstructed works relating to Trisha’s history with outdoor tours and festivals. Foray Foret (1990), accompanied with sound from local marching bands, is marked by simplicity within complexity, setting off aired-down athleticism against enigmatic, miniaturized physical gesture. A hallmark of Brown’s work, Set and Reset (1983) is an exploration of visibility and invisibility, reflected in the translucent costumes and set design by Robert Raushenberg, with a score by Laurie Anderson. The final piece in Brown’s jazz trilogy, Groove and Countermove (2000) reveals and intricate world of counterpoint between one dancer and the Company and the frenetic energy of the movement. The dancers create a captivating environment, at once easy-going and vitally expressive set to Dave Douglas’s jazz score. Trisha Brown’s first collaboration with Robert Raushenberg, Glacial Decoy (1979) is also the first choreography that Brown created for the proscenium stage. The dance’s “idiosyncratic maneuvers” are performed to the mechanical click of projectors as they cast an astonishing sequence slides across the back wall of the performance space.
Bios
Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) is a post-modern dance company dedicated to the performance, and preservation of the work of Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer, Trisha Brown. Established in 1970, TBDC has toured throughout the world presenting the work, teaching and building relationships with audiences and artists alike.
Brown engaged collaborators who are themselves leaders in music, theater, and the visual arts, including visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Elizabeth Murray, and musicians Laurie Anderson, John Cage, and Alvin Curran, to name a few. With these partners, Brown has created an exceptionally varied body of work, with premieres and performances for NYC audiences and international counterparts.
“…One of the most acclaimed and influential choreographers and dancers of her time, Trisha Brown’s groundbreaking work forever changed the landscape of art. From her roots in rural Aberdeen, Washington, her birthplace, Brown arrived in New York in 1961. A student of Ann Halprin, Brown participated in the choreographic composition workshops taught by Robert Dunn – from which Judson Dance Theater was born – greatly contributing to the fervent of interdisciplinary creativity that defined 1960s New York. Expanding the physical behaviors that qualified as dance, she discovered the extraordinary in the everyday, and brought tasks, rulegames, natural movement and improvisation into the making of choreography.
With the founding of the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, Brown set off on her own distinctive path of artistic investigation and ceaseless experimentation, which extended for forty years. The creator of over 100 choreographies, six operas, and a graphic artist, whose drawings have earned recognition in numerous museum exhibitions and collections, Brown’s earliest works took impetus from the cityscape of downtown SoHo, where she was a pioneering settler. In the 1970s, as Brown strove to invent an original abstract movement language – one of her singular achievements – it was art galleries, museums and international exhibitions that provided her work its most important presentation context. Indeed contemporary projects to introduce choreography to the museum setting are unthinkable apart from the exemplary model that Brown established.
Brown’s movement vocabulary, and the new methods that she and her dancers adopted to train their bodies, remain one of her most pervasively impactful legacies within international dance practice…Brown became a master orchestrator of collaboration; she used her own body, language and images to elicit and catalyze her dancers’ improvisations, which she edited and structured as choreographies. A major turning point in Brown’s career occurred in 1979, when she transitioned from working in non-traditional and art world settings to assume the role of a choreographer working within the institutional framework associated with dancing – the proscenium stage.
…Today the Trisha Brown Dance Company continues to perpetuate Brown’s legacy through its “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site” initiative. Through it, the company draws on Brown’s model for reinvigorating her choreography through its re-siting in relation to new contexts that include outdoor sites, and museum settings and collections. The company is also involved in an ongoing process of reconstructing and remounting major works that Brown created for the proscenium stage between 1979 and 2011. In addition, the company continues its work to consolidate Trisha Brown’s artistic legacy through their management of her vast archives of notebooks; correspondence; critical reviews; and an unprecedented moving image catalogue raisonné, which records her meticulous creative process over many decades…” Susan Rosenberg
