Trisha Brown Dance Company Announces Plan for the Future of Brown's Company and Her Works

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In 2015, TBDC will shift toward a new model of presentation. The artistic team will create a blueprint for institutions to present TBDC in a highly curated, interactive context. Non-proscenium-based performances, screenings, dance education, exhibitions, and dialogues will be programmed with the goal of engaging a broader audience than the theatrical dance audience alone. Museums and institutions will extend Brown's legacy as a choreographer and visual artist. Institutional partners for TBDC's next phase will be announced in late 2013.

"The visual art world has long had a model for sharing its master works with the public-and for re-engaging with those works, investigating them anew, so that they remain vital," said Diane Madden. "We hope to forge a similar model for choreographic works. Given her profound connection to the visual arts, Trisha is at the very forefront of this approach, as well she should be. Her work in particular can be curated in much the same way as a visual art exhibition, with the goal of engaging and educating the public on how to see the work's contexts and influences."

As the new artistic team, Madden and Lucas will program and reconstruct Brown's works for the "Proscenium Works, 1979-2011" tour. In dialogue with other artists and institutions, they will also re-imagine and re-position Brown's choreographies in site-specific and non-proscenium spaces. They will undertake the necessary and exciting work of gradually transforming the company from a dance-creation and touring company to the integral source for carrying Brown's legacy forward-as dancers, historians, interpreters, curators, and educators.

The artistic team will also oversee the preservation and utilization of TBDC's vast archive. Since the early 1980s, Brown has documented every step in her creative process on video; this archive will provide an abundance of material for curators. The archive includes sets, costumes, and scores by some of the pre-eminent artists of the era as well as Brown's notebooks and sketchbooks.

In addition, TBDC will also channel select archival materials into an interactive online media library. Significant funding has already been secured for this project. To be curated in the style of a museum exhibition, the media archive's express purpose is to engage users in creative dialogue with the work in yet another non-theatrical space.

"Throughout her career, Trisha has been very concerned about space," said Carolyn Lucas. "She has continually questioned the conventions she feels are 'hanging all over a theater space.' It's going to be incredibly exciting to start taking these works outdoors and into galleries-and very true to Trisha."

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