OZ ARTS NASHVILLE PRESENTS THE ICONIC TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY MAY 14 – 16
NASHVILLE, TENN. – April 2015 – Seminal Contemporary Dance Company Will Offer Three Distinct Evenings of Choreography Spanning Five Decades, Including One of the Company’s Final Performances of Brown’s Proscenium Works
Performances to Take Place on Interior and Exterior of OZ Arts’ Warehouse Venue, and at Zeitgeist Gallery
Thursday, May 14, 8pm
OZ Arts Nashville
6172 Cockrill Bend Circle
Nashville, TN 37209
Program 1 – Repertory (Proscenium)
Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #72503 (1980)
Newark (Niweweorce) (1987)
Rogues (2011)
PRESENT TENSE (2003)
Friday, May 15, 7:30pm
Zeitgeist Gallery
516 Hagan Street, #100
Nashville, TN 37203
Planes (1968)
Saturday, May 16, 7:30pm
OZ Arts Nashville
6172 Cockrill Bend Circle
Nashville, TN 37209
Program 2 – Trisha Brown: In Plain Site (Indoor/Outdoor)
In Plain Site, featuring 11 different works and excerpts from repertory
You Can See Us (1995)
Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981) (Early Version)
“[Ms. Brown’s work] is unexpected, virtuosic, funny, arbitrary, subtle, detailed, poetic.”
—The New York Times
“Works by Brown don’t just challenge our perceptions; they expand our minds and untether our spirits.”
—The Village Voice
Over the course of fifty years, Trisha Brown’s movement investigations found the extraordinary in the everyday and challenged existing perceptions of what constitutes performance. She pushed the limits of choreography and altered modern dance forever. OZ Arts Nashville is honored to welcome the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) for a retrospective of her works from 1968 through 2011.
In addition to presenting six proscenium dances, the Company will introduce its new performance model, Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, which combines the choreographer’s early site-specific work with selections from her proscenium dances. In Plain Site allows Brown’s work to be adapted to the unique needs of venues including museum spaces, warehouses, outdoor areas and public parks.
On May 14 at 8pm at OZ Arts (Program 1), the Company will offer a series of classic Brown proscenium works including Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #72503 (1980), Newark (Niweweorce) (1987), Rogues (2011) and PRESENT TENSE (2003). On May 16 at 7:30pm (Program 2) at OZ Arts, TBDC will perform Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, which will take audiences both outside and inside of OZ Arts Nashville’s elegant warehouse venue, where they will experience a new look at the span of Brown’s choreographic career. In addition to these two evenings at OZ Arts, TBDC and Nashville-based New Dialect will give a collaborative performance of Planes (1968) at Nashville’s Zeitgeist Gallery on May 15.
Tickets, $40 – $52, can be purchased at www.ozartsnashville.org.
Program 1, on Thursday, May 14, at OZ Arts, is part of TBDC’s three-year Proscenium Works, 1979-2011 tour, and features multiple, iconic works Brown created for the proscenium. These will include Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #72503, Brown’s “breathtaking” (The New York Times) collaboration with Japanese fog artist Fujiko Nakaya, which was first performed in a SoHo loft in 1980, ten years after Brown founded TBDC. The performance flirts with perception and illusion, featuring four dancers moving through Nakaya’s fog “cloud sculpture,” which creates sound as water passes through high-pressure nozzles. The movement reflects the delicate balance of the air surrounding the dancers, constantly changing form and drifting off. The landmark Newark (Niweweorce) (1987), from Brown’s famously athletic Valiant Series, pushes the Company’s dancers to their physical limits and explores gender-specific movement. Rogues (2011), a duet for two men, explores unison movement and aberration. With original music by Alvin Curran, costumes by Kay Voyce and lights by John Torres, Rogues “enthrallingly display[s] how an impulse that begins in a shift of the torso or a lift of the arm can create a momentum that the body, effortlessly it seems, converts into a phrase of shape and texture” (The New York Times). The May 14 program concludes with PRESENT TENSE (2003), which is set to music by John Cage and combines Brown’s abstract aesthetic with her interest in emotional narrative. The work features aerial choreography and raucous, cantilevering partnering, with dancers riding and tumbling, suspended across the performance space. The earth-bound phrase work is distinctly Brown, but unexpected in its logic.
On May 15, OZ Arts will add an off-site venue to their Nashville presentation of TBDC. Planes, Brown’s 1968 vertical dance and film collaboration with Jud Yalkut, will take place at Zeitgeist Gallery. The performance will feature five-year TBDC member Tara Lorenzen in collaboration with two dancers chosen from Nashville-based contemporary dance collective New Dialect, and will take place at 7:30pm, followed by a short Q&A with New Dialect Artistic Director Banning Bouldin, Trisha Brown Dance Company Co-Artistic Director Carolyn Lucas and Zeitgeist Gallery Director Lain York, facilitated by OZ Arts Nashville Artistic Director Lauren Snelling. In addition to the special May 15 performance, Zeitgeist Gallery will host the Planes multimedia installation May 2 – 30, with weekly performances by New Dialect on Saturdays at 11am and 6pm (not May 16).
Program 2, presented at OZ Arts on Saturday, May 16, will begin with In Plain Site, a series of Brown’s early works in combination with phrase material Brown used in her creative process, performed by the Company outdoors on OZ Arts’ manicured grounds. These site-specific works and excerpts will include Sticks I & IV (1973), Soft phrase from Foray Forêt, Leaning Duets I (1970), Figure Eight (1974), Corners, Curl Curve Backup (CCB) from I’m going to toss my arms – if you catch them they’re yours (2012) and Accumulation (1971). The dancers and audience will then move indoors to the venue’s Grand Salon, which will have been transformed from the proscenium set up into a performance space with seating on two sides of the stage, for three more early works—Spanish Dance (1973), Scallops (1973) and Group Primary Accumulation with movers (1973)—followed by You Can See Us (1995) and Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981) (Early Version). You Can See Us (1995) is the duet version of If you couldn’t see me (1994), the last of Brown’s multiple collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. Brown originally performed You Can See Us (1995) with Bill T. Jones at Montpellier Danse 95, then with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1996. Like If you couldn’t see me, You Can See Us creates incredible visual impact; aside from the set, “the two dancers never touch or look at each other and yet the tension between them is hot” (The New York Times). Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981), according to Brown, represents the pinnacle of complexity in her body of work. The dance’s diabolically complex choreographic structure is belied by the constant ebb and flow of six performers, and is accompanied by orchestral music from three operas in Robert Ashley’s Atalanta. These works were specifically chosen because the choreographic movement can be appreciated from multiple vantage points. In this May 16 performance, the seating banks for audiences will face one another, with the stage in the center, providing a view rarely experienced with dance.
Funding Credits
Trisha Brown Dance Company gratefully acknowledges the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, the Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation/USArtists International, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, National Film Preservation Foundation, The New York Community Trust, the Princess Grace Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. We wanted to extend our sincere thanks to the Trisha Brown Company Board and all of the Company’s Individual Donors.
About Trisha Brown Dance Company
Now in its 45th Anniversary Season, TBDC is a post-modern dance company dedicated to the creation, performance, and preservation of the work of its Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer, Trisha Brown. TBDC has toured throughout the world, presenting the work, teaching and building relationships with audiences and artists alike.
TBDC’s repertory has grown from solos and small group pieces to include major evening-length works. Brown has 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.
When Brown retired as head of the Company in, the choreographer, now 78, appointed longtime Company members Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas as Associate Artistic Directors with the mandate that they develop, deepen and expand the Company’s educational initiatives; present her dances in a variety of spaces, indoors and out, proscenium and alternative; and treat the Company’s archive as a living organism to be used to better understand her work, in particular, and dance in general.
The Company is currently in the final year of its three-year Proscenium Works, 1979-2011 tour, which comprises over 45 major national and international dates through December 2015, including performances throughout Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom, as well as U.S. engagements in California, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin as well as New York.
In addition to workshops, master classes, lecture demonstrations and archival exhibitions, the Company’s Education and Outreach program licenses and restages work on dance students and professional companies. Recent education and restaging projects include Lyon Opera Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Candoco Dance Company (London), Belgium’s professional training program P.A.R.T.S., London Contemporary Dance School, Mills College, The Live Legacy Project (Dusseldorf) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rutgers University, Yale University, Theatre Academy Helsinki (Finland) and Centre National de Danse Contemporaine Angers (France).
TBDC recently announced a relationship with Gibney Dance Center—as a Founding Partner for Gibney’s new space at 280 Broadway—to provide a platform for more Company educational opportunities in NYC. The Company now holds its Summer Intensive, Winter Intensive, Master Class Series and Weekly Class Series at the facility.
In 2016, TBDC will offer a bold reimagining of how the public experiences the work of a great choreographer through a new vision for extending the life of a single-artist dance company with the ongoing presentation of Brown’s masterworks in a highly curated, interactive context at both site-specific and museum locations. 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.
The Company will continue to fulfill archive and legacy goals through new education initiatives, restoration of original rehearsal and performance footage, and website expansion, allowing global access to Brown’s commentary, video, and source materials. The archive includes performance and rehearsal footage, sets, costumes, and scores by some of the pre-eminent artists of the era as well as Brown’s notebooks. TBDC will also channel select archival materials into an interactive online media library. To be programmed 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.
Trisha Brown (Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer) was born and raised in Aberdeen, Washington. She graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California in 1958; studied with Anna Halprin; and taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon before moving to New York City in 1961. She was instantly immersed in what was to become the post-modern phenomenon of Judson Dance Theater. In this hotbed of dance revolution, Brown, along with like-minded artists, pushed the limits of choreography and changed modern dance forever.
In 1970, Brown formed her company and explored the terrain of her adoptive SoHo, making Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) and Roof Piece (1971). Her first work for the proscenium stage, Glacial Decoy (1979), was also the first of her many collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (1980), created with fog designer Fujiko Nakaya, was followed by Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981), which featured sets by Donald Judd. The now iconic Set and Reset (1983), with original music by Laurie Anderson and visual design by Rauschenberg, completed Brown’s first fully developed cycle of work, Unstable Molecular Structures. This cycle epitomized the fluid yet unpredictably geometric style that remains a hallmark of her work. Brown then began her relentlessly athletic Valiant Series, best exemplified by the powerful Newark (1987) and Astral Convertible (1989)—pushing her dancers to their physical limits and exploring gender-specific movement. Next came the elegant and mysterious Back to Zero Cycle, in which Brown pulled back from external virtuosity to investigate unconscious movement. This cycle includes Foray Forêt (1990) and For M.G.: The Movie (1991). Brown collaborated for the final time with Rauschenberg to create If you couldn’t see me (1994), in which she danced entirely with her back to the audience.
Brown turned her attention to classical music and opera production, initiating what is known as her Music Cycle. Choreographed to J.S. Bach’s monumental Musical Offering, M.O. (1995) was hailed as a “masterpiece” by Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times. Brown continued to work with new collaborators, including visual artist Terry Winters and composer Dave Douglas, with whom she created El Trilogy (2000). She then worked with long-time friend and artist, Elizabeth Murray to create PRESENT TENSE (2003), set to music by John Cage.
Brown stepped into the world of opera to choreograph Carmen (1986) and again to direct Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1998). She went on to direct four more operas, including, Luci Mie Traditrici (2001), Winterreise (2002), and Da Gelo a Gelo (2006) and, most recently, Pygmalion (2010).
Continuing to venture into new terrain, Brown created O zlozony/O composite (2004) for three étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet, working with longtime collaborators Laurie Anderson and Jennifer Tipton. Forays into new technology created the witty and sophisticated I love my robots (2007), with Japanese artist and robotics designer Kenjiro Okazaki. Her work with Pygmalion produced two dance pieces L’Amour au théâtre (2009) and Les Yeux et l’âme (2011). Brown’s latest work, I’m going to toss my arms- if you catch them they’re yours (2011), is a collaboration with visual artist Burt Barr, whose striking set is dominated by industrial fans. The original music is by Alvin Curran.
As well as being a prolific choreographer, Brown is an accomplished visual artist, as experienced in It’s a Draw (2002). Her drawings have been seen in exhibitions, galleries and museums throughout the world including the Venice Biennale, The Drawing Center in Philadelphia, The New Museum, White Cube, Documenta XII, Walker Art Center, Centre Georges Pompidou, Mills College, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, and Museum of Modern Art. Brown is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in NYC.
Brown has created over 100 dance works since 1961, and was the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award.” She has been awarded many other honors, including five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Medal in Dance, and she has been named a Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame. In 1988, Brown was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the government of France. In January 2000, she was promoted to Officier and in 2004, she was again elevated, this time to the level of Commandeur. She was a 1994 recipient of the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award and, at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, served on the National Council on the Arts from 1994 to 1997. In 1999, Brown received the New York State Governor’s Arts Award and, in 2003, was honored with the National Medal of Arts. She had the prestigious honor to serve as a Rolex Arts Initiative Mentor for 2010- 11 as well as receiving the S.L.A.M. Action Maverick Award presented by Elizabeth Streb, and the Capezio Ballet Makers Dance Foundation Award in 2010. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was awarded the 2011 New York Dance and Performance ‘Bessie’ Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011, Brown was honored with the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for making an “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” In 2012, Brown became a United States Artists Simon Fellow and received the first Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. She was recently honored with the BOMB Magazine Award.
Local Media Contact for OZ Arts Nashville
Amy Atkinson at Amy Atkinson Communications, phone: 615-305-8118, email: amy@amyacommunications.com or Twitter at www.twitter.com/AmyAComm