Skip to content Skip to footer links

Trisha Brown Dance Company in Residence at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries

First performances will be held on November 14-15, 2009 at 1pm and 3pm

New York, NY- Dia Art Foundation is pleased to announce a new collaboration with Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC). Dia has invited TBDC to participate in a residency at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries over the coming year. During three weekends in 2009 and 2010, the Company, consisting of eight dancers, will perform Early Works as well as recent repertoire at the museum. Selected and restaged by TBDC within the museum’s vast galleries, the program will present Trisha Brown’s groundbreaking choreography, highlighting innovative work from her 40-year career. Each weekend of performances will be bracketed by a month-long presentation of archival material from TBDC’s collection, including screenings of vintage performance footage, and will be accompanied by an educational program for college dance students. The first performances will be held on Saturday, November 14 and Sunday, November 15, 2009, at 1pm and 3pm. Additional performances will take place in February and May 2010.

For the November performances, TBDC will perform Early Works, a selection of pieces choreographed by Trisha Brown between 1968 and 1975, prior to her work on the proscenium stage. These performances will range from three to fifteen minutes each and will include Falling Duet (1968), Leaning Duets (1970), Group Primary Accumulation (1970), Accumulation (1971), Spanish Dance (1973), and Locus (1975). These works will be performed within select galleries at Dia:Beacon, including those dedicated to the work of John Chamberlain, Imi Knoebel, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The audience will be invited to move through the museum as the program progresses.

Brown has a long history of friendship and collaboration with visual artists, beginning with her participation in the Judson Dance Theater and Happenings in New York City in the 1960s, and continuing through her choreography for proscenium stage. She has worked with La Monte Young, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, and Robert Whitman, artists whose work Dia has supported and collected, and the Dia:Beacon residency, staged in the galleries, will provide an opportunity to consider the affinities and parallel interests between Brown’s dances and artworks from the late 1960s to the present.

TBDC’s residency continues Dia’s commitment to commissioning significant new performances and restaging of seminal historic works for Dia:Beacon. Previous presentations include Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Beacon Events from 2007 to 2009; Joan Jonas’s The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2005) in 2005 and 2006; and Robert Whitman’s Prune Flat (1965) and Light Touch (1976) in 2003.

The Dia-TBDC collaboration also reflects Dia’s longstanding support for innovative choreographers. From 1985 to 1996, Dia hosted a dance program in its former Soho building that focused on providing free and low-cost rehearsal and performance space for dance companies and individuals. The program included “The Salon Project,” an annual event at which twelve choreographers working in the building were selected to present their work publicly. Dia also commissioned performances at its former Chelsea building, including several projects with Yves Musard, one of which, La Promenade (1992), was performed within Dan Graham’s Rooftop Urban Park Project (1981–91). Additionally, TBDC’s residency reunites the Company and Dia, which first supported Brown’s work in a performance she gave at the Public Theater in New York City in1978.

EDUCATION AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Dia and TBDC will present an education program for dance students at nearby colleges that will offer unique exposure to the Company and the museum. In advance of each performance weekend, students will be invited to Dia:Beacon to watch TBDC rehearse and to tour the galleries with a member of Dia’s education team. Following these visits, a Company dancer and a Dia educator will return to each college for a workshop that introduces students to concepts and movements featured during the works they saw rehearsed.

During the month surrounding each performance weekend, an exhibition of ephemera from TBDC’s extensive archive, including posters, invitations, performance programs, and photographs, will be on view in the Dia:Beacon bookshop. Additionally, throughout November, a video compilation of historical footage of Brown’s earliest works, created between 1966 and 1979, will be shown at the museum. Screenings will include performances captured by noted filmmakers Babette Mangolte, Carlotta Schoolman and Jonathan Demme, among others. This program is designed to illuminate both the staged performances and the artwork on view, and is offered free with museum admission.

TICKET INFORMATION
$35 general admission
$20 admission for Dia members, students, and seniors
Member price applicable to current members only. Members may purchase additional tickets for guests at the general ticket price. Includes museum admission.

TRISHA BROWN
Trisha Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington. She studied dance at Mills College and attended summer sessions at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College and workshops on improvisation with Anna Halprin in Marin County, California. In 1961, at the urging of fellow choreographers, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, she moved to New York to study composition with Robert Dunn, who taught a class at Merce Cunningham’s studio based on John Cage’s theories of chance.

The assignments in Dunn’s class eventually became programs that were presented at Judson Church in 1962. Here Brown met and worked with other choreographers such as Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, and Lucinda Childs, all of whom would become major figures in contemporary dance. While participating in several Happenings, Brown met visual artists from the New York art world with whom she would later collaborate, including Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg.

In the late 1960s Brown created her own works which attempted to defy gravity, using equipment such as ropes and harnesses, to allow dancers to walk on or down walls or to experiment with the dynamics of stability. These “equipment pieces” were the first dances to comprise a distinct series in what would become a working method for Brown as she went on to create various “cycles” of dances throughout her career. In 1970 she founded the Trisha Brown Dance Company and accepted an invitation to join the experimental group Grand Union, which included choreographers Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, and David Gordon, as well as Rainer and Paxton. Throughout the 1970s Brown worked with her company on developing and expanding her choreography most often in alternative spaces and venues. In 1979 she began to create works for the proscenium stage.

Since then she has collaborated with major visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Donald Judd, and Terry Winters, as well as composers and musicians such as Laurie Anderson, Peter Zummo, and Dave Douglas. More recently, as part of her “Music Cycle,” Brown has directed and choreographed operas including Bizet’s Carmen, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici and Da Gelo a Gelo, as well as the Schubert song cycle Winterreise.

DIA:BEACON
Dia Art Foundation celebrates its sixth anniversary of Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries in 2009. Dia:Beacon presents Dia Art Foundation’s distinguished collection of art from the 1960s to the present, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Imi Knoebel, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner. .

Situated on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York, and easily accessible by train or car, the museum occupies a former Nabisco box-printing facility which was renovated by Dia with artist Robert Irwin and architect OpenOffice. Dia:Beacon’s expansive galleries comprise 240,000 square feet of exhibition space illuminated by natural light. The museum houses works by a focused group of some of the most significant artists of the last half century. The museum also presents temporary exhibitions, as well as diverse public programs designed to complement the collection and exhibitions.

Get Dia News

Receive Dia News and be the first to hear about events and exhibitions happening at our locations and sites.