Let's Dance

Famed choreographer Trisha Brown to receive Dickinson Arts Award

October 23, 2007

Choreographer Trisha Brown will receive the Dickinson Arts Award Nov. 8

Trisha Brown is coming to town.

Brown, the acclaimed dancer and choreographer whose career spans 50 years, will visit Dickinson College next month to receive the 2007 Dickinson Arts Award, an event that will mark the culmination of three days of master classes, performances and presentations to celebrate her legacy.

Previous Dickinson Arts Award recipients include Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, John Cage and Twyla Tharp.

Brown, the first woman choreographer to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, became one of the leaders of New York's experimental Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. After forming the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, she began working with such artists as Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Laurie Anderson, Nancy Graves and Fujiko Nakaya. Brown explored the terrain of her adoptive SoHo, creating her early dances for alternative spaces including roof tops and walls, and flirting with gravity—alternately using it and defying it. Her "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" foreshadowed not only her own innovative use of flying in her 1998 production of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo," but also much of the work of choreographers and theatrical directors who still seek unusual and startling contexts for the human body.

Three days of events

• Tuesday, Nov. 6, 5-7 p.m. – Trisha Brown Dance Company master class taught by dancer Vicky Shick, winner of two New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" awards. The class will be held at The Depot. Participants should be dancers age 16 or older with intermediate-level dance skills or some prior exposure to modern dance.
• Wednesday, Nov. 7, 8 p.m. – "Brownian Motion: The Aesthetic Legacy of Postmodern Choreographer Trisha Brown." A student performance of Brown's landmark work "Glacial Decoy" serves as the jumping off point for a panel discussion of Brown's impact in both the dance world and beyond. Mathers Theatre, Holland Union Building (HUB). Panelists are Shick, choreographer Tiffany Mills, director of the New York-based Tiffany Mills Dance Company; Ohio State University dance scholar Candace Feck; art curator and art historian Susan Rosenberg, who is working on a book about Brown's visual art; and Emily Lawrence, a former assistant professor of theatre & dance at Dickinson College who now teaches at Kenyon College.
• Thursday, Nov. 8, 8 p.m. – "Dickinson Arts Award Performance and Celebration." The arts award presentation will include a career retrospective both live and on video, featuring professional performance by Trisha Brown Dance Company members Vicky Shick and Diane Madden. The duo will perform a collage of Brown's landmark works, including "Son of Gone Fishing," "Line Up," "Foray Foret," "Glacial Decoy" and "For MG." Mathers Theatre, Holland Union Building (HUB).

A unique technique

Brown has been awarded many other honors, including two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and the National Medal of Arts in 2003. In 2005 she received Benois de la Danse Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a significant honor generally reserved for ballet artists. This past December in Monte Carlo, Brown received a Nijinsky Award for achievement. She was a 1994 recipient of the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, has been named a Veuve Clicquot Grand Dame and, at the invitation of President Clinton, served on the National Council on the Arts from 1994-97. In 1999, Brown received the New York State Governor's Arts Award. She has received numerous honorary doctorates and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"Trisha Brown herself doesn't have a particular codified 'technique,'" said Emily Lawrence, visiting assistant professor of dance at Kenyon College. "Instead, Brown's dancers train to help them connect their movement to their breath, and find stability in some parts of the body and simultaneous ease or freedom in other parts of the body," a technique that is "much harder than it sounds."

Brown's classes often take place without music, so the dancers have to experience their own anatomy and connect to felt timing—the time it takes their bodies to execute a movement or phrase of movements rapidly, Lawrence said.