Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown (25 November 1936, Aberdeen, Washington, U.S.) is a postmodernist American choreographer and dancer.

Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A. degree in dance from Mills College in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst at the American Dance Festival, then held at Connecticut College. After moving to New York in 1961, Brown trained with dancer Anna Halprin and became a founding member of the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater in 1962. There she worked with experimental dancers Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. In 1970 she cofounded the Grand Union, an experimental dance collective, and formed the Trisha Brown Company. Her company soon became one of the leading contemporary dance ensembles. Brown received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1991.

Brown’s early works Walking on the Wall (1971) and Roof Piece (1973) were designed to be performed at specific sites. Walking on the Wall involved dancers in harnesses moving along a wall, while Roof Piece took place on 12 different rooftops over a ten-block area in New York City, with each dancer transmitting the movements to a dancer on the nearest roof. During the 1980s Brown produced large-scale works intended for the stage, beginning with Glacial Decoy (1979), which had sets and costumes by artist Robert Rauschenberg. The two later collaborated on Set and Reset (1983), with a score by performance artist Laurie Anderson, and Astral Convertible (1989).

Brown has continued to explore the nature of motion and to choreograph dances based on everyday movements. Her style has developed from carefully built-up, repetitive gestures to its current fluid virtuosity. In the 1990s she turned to choreographing classical music, creating M.O. (1995) based on the Musical Offering by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and her first opera production, Orfeo (1998) by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. Brown found inspiration in jazz for El Trilogy (1998-2000), completed her second opera, Luci mie traditrici (composed by Salvatore Sciarrino) in 2001, and in 2002 choreographed the song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) by Austrian composer Franz Schubert for English baritone Simon Keenlyside.

Works of her (choreographies and drawings) are included in documenta 12.

Works

Her works include:

• Accumulation (1971)
• Walking on the Wall (1971) and Roof Piece (1973)
• Glacial Decoy (1979)
• Set and Reset (1983)
• Astral Convertible (1989)
• M.O. (1995)
• Orfeo (1998)
• Winterreise (2002)

External link

• http://www.gradewinner.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_n4_v69/ai_16985498?pi=gdw#continue