Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Farewell Tour: Proscenium Works 1979–2011

The 2014 annual Bard SummerScape festival opens at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on Friday, June 27 at 7:30 p.m., with the first of three performances of Proscenium Works: 1979–2011 by the Trisha Brown Dance Company. The company, now making its farewell tour, will offer some of the esteemed ensemble’s final performances in the New York region. The program features Trisha Brown’s final creation, alongside revivals of two of her most beloved large-scale stage works made in collaboration with Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg. Opening night, as well as the performances on Saturday, June 28, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., takes place in the Frank Gehry–designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s stunning Hudson River campus.

Trisha Brown is considered the most widely acclaimed choreographer to emerge from the postmodern era. The first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“genius” award), her extraordinary career has challenged and changed the definition of dance.

Proscenium Works 1979–2011 offers a retrospective of the Trisha Brown Dance Company through significant examples of Brown’s choreography for the proscenium stage: I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours (2011), the final work of her career; with Set and Reset (1983), and If you couldn’t see me (1994), both featuring designs by Robert Rauschenberg and respectively set to music by Laurie Anderson and Rauschenberg.

Set and Reset offers the combination of seductively fluid movement with geometric style that is the hallmark of Brown’s work. Set to a driving score—Laurie Anderson’s “Long Time, No See”—Brown’s relaxed, playful choreography is offset by Robert Rauschenberg’s translucent costumes and black-and-white-themed set design. The Cleveland Plain Dealer called the results “mesmerizing to behold,” and the New York Times observed: “Set and Reset is unmistakably Miss Brown at her most tantalizing. Her virtuosic dancers exhibit a quality of movement that is distinctly hers—dartingly quick but so fluid that the body seems a conduit for flowing energy.”

For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call 845-758-7900.