Bard College Dance Program Partners with Legendary Trisha Brown Dance Company to Collaborate on Curriculum and Performance

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Beginning in fall 2015, the Dance Program at Bard College will partner with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) to offer undergraduate dance classes, as well as college-wide forums, workshops, and performances. Allowing for deep integration in Bard’s dance program curriculum as well as the campus community as a whole, the partnership with TBDC will include undergraduate courses in dance technique (for advanced dancers as well as beginning and non-dancers); the licensing of select Trisha Brown works on dance students to be performed annually; master classes; campus-wide events; and the full company in residence for one to three weeks each year. Bard’s collaboration with TBDC will reach across disciplines and programs to involve artists in other College programs and initiatives.

“My interest in TBDC revolved around not only the historical impact of Trisha’s work but also how well suited her philosophical approach to movement and dance-making is to the liberal arts mission at Bard,” says Maria Simpson, Professor of Dance and Director of Bard’s Dance Program. “She represents (literally embodies) the liberal arts ideal; intellectual engagement; non-hierarchical, interdisciplinary involvement. In addition, the Dance Program has strong roots to the Post Modern Dance Movement, and this partnership honors those roots. I am excited to see what new ideas and initiatives TBDC will bring to the program as the partnership develops.”

"We are thrilled to work with Bard College, an institution that both recognizes and exemplifies the interdisciplinary nature of Trisha Brown’s work,” says Carolyn Lucas, Associate Artistic Director of Trisha Brown Dance Company. “Collaborating with the Bard faculty, staff, and students to develop a curriculum that encompasses the breadth of her work is an incredibly exciting opportunity to ensure Brown’s contribution to contemporary art.”

The first performance by the TBDC Company as part of its new partnership with Bard College is a new iteration of Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, a site-specific performance on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, campus on Friday, September 18.

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ABOUT THE BARD COLLEGE DANCE PROGRAM

The Bard Dance Program sees the pursuit of artistry and intellect as a single endeavor. We believe that the study of the body is a cognitive act demanding both physical practice and academic exploration. We focus on dance and choreography as a performing art with an interdisciplinary scope. Students are exposed to areas of inquiry that represent the broader contexts in which the art form exists, in and outside of the arts. We expect students to take risks—risks that call on their participation as citizens of the world and cultivate their perceptive sensibilities. We foster the discovery of a dance vocabulary that is meaningful to the dancer/choreographer and essential to her or his creative ambitions. This discovery leads to the cultivation of original choices—choices informed by a full exploration of a student’s surroundings, choices that find expression in new and dynamic ways. We prepare dancers for the versatility and integration necessary to face the questions: Where will dance go next? What will the next dance revolution look like and where will it come from? We believe that serious inquiry in all areas of the liberal arts is critical to the development of the whole person and to the success of our future artists.

For more information, please visit http://inside.bard.edu/dance or contact director Maria Simpson at 845-758-7996 or [email protected].

ABOUT THE TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY

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. Founded 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.

When Brown retired as head of her Company in 2013, the Board appointed longtime Company members Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas as Associate Artistic Directors with the mandate that they present her dances in a variety of spaces, indoors and out, proscenium and alternative; develop, deepen and expand the Company’s educational initiatives; 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 its last year of its three-year Proscenium Works, 1979-2011 tour, which has toured to over 50 major national and international locations, with performances throughout Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Israel, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and within the United States to California, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin, Washington as well as New York.

In addition, TBDC has devised a new way to experience Brown’s vast repertory by placing it into unconventional sites. “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site” is currently touring alongside the “Proscenium Works, 1979-2011” tour, and will continue to tour nationally and internationally in 2016 and beyond. Working closely with the presenter, the Company creates a specific program for the venues or sites they select, adapting Brown’s broad range of works into a site-specific performance experience. Special focus is put on the audience engagement at each venue, breaking down access barriers, and providing a more intimate experience to an audience that includes families and people less familiar with modern dance.

For more information, visit www.trishabrowncompany.org. 

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Fall 2016 Instructor: Cori Olinghouse

Cori Olinghouse (Instructor) is a choreographer, teacher, and Archive Director for the Trisha Brown Dance Company. She danced for TBDC from 2002–06, during which she originated a role in how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . (2005), performed in twelve other pieces of repertory, and was featured as a soloist at the Bolshoi Theater as part of the Benois de la Danse award festival. For her own choreography, she was selected to participate in The Award, a mentorship program conceived by Dean Moss. Olinghouse is a 2013 fellow in Choreography from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been produced by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, BRIC Arts Media, The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, among other venues. Additionally, she has performed in the works of Bill Irwin. Alongside her own artistic practices, Olinghouse has worked and apprenticed with esteemed archivist, Jon Gartenberg, since 2001. Since 2009, Olinghouse has served as the Archive Director for the Trisha Brown Dance Company leading a cataloguing and preservation initiative to archive the choreographies in Trisha Brown’s oeuvre.

Trisha Brown Biography

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. Instantly immersed in what was to become the post-modern phenomena of Judson Dance Theater, her movement investigations found the extraordinary in the everyday and challenged existing perceptions of performance. 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 many collaboration 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 Robert Rauschenberg, completed Brown’s first fully developed cycle of work, Unstable Molecular Structure. 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). Since then, Brown has gone 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 long-time 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 last 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.

Trisha 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 de l’Ordre des Arts et des 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 honored with the BOMB Magazine Award in 2013, and the Honors Award given by Dance/USA in 2015.

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This event was last updated on 09-09-2015

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