Alverno Presents & Lynden Sculpture Garden present Trisha Brown Dance Company The Early Works/Conversations with Sculptures

Summer dance returns to Lynden Sculpture Garden. Alverno Presents and Lynden Sculpture Garden welcome the great post-modern choreographer Trisha Brown and her acclaimed company performing her seminal Early Works. Only a few times in a generation does an artist make something so genuinely new that it forever changes the rules of the game. From the late 1960s on, Trisha Brown smashed the molds to forge a new language for dance — spherical, snaking, elusive, more subtle than any before it. The dance world’s shift into postmodernism was accompanied by a similar revolution in visual art. The Lynden Sculpture Garden is one of the outstanding collections of sculpture from this transformative period. Alverno Presents and Lynden present this once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the Trisha Brown Dance Company perform these great early works next to masterpieces of epic modern and post-modern sculpture.

Single tickets are $35. Season subscriptions are still available at a discount off single ticket prices when purchasing four (or more) events. Tickets may be purchased through the Alverno Presents Box Office at 414-382-6044 or on-line at http://alvernopresents.alverno.edu

Trisha Brown reached massive public acclaim through the site specific works she made in Lower Manhattan from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. Works such as Accumulation (1971), Spanish Dance (1973), Leaning Duets (1970), Sticks (1973) and Spiral (1974) are each short in duration (as long as 7 minutes, as short as a minute-and-a-half) but carry major impact. Several of these early works will be performed at specific locations at Lynden, in “conversation” with the sculptures made in the same period: Mark di Suvero‘s Lover (1971-73), Forrest Myers‘s Quartet (1967/2013), Linda Howard‘s Sky Fence (1976), and Tony Smith‘s The Wandering Rocks (1967-69). By leading the audience across the grounds, the Company will bring the permanent (though not unchanged) sculpture and ephemeral dance back into dialogue–dance by dance, sculpture by sculpture–nearly half a century after they were created. The entire performance will last approximately 70 minutes and will be limited to 120 people per showing (the first at 12:30 p.m., the second at 3:30 p.m.).

Trisha Brown, the most widely acclaimed choreographer to emerge from the postmodern era, first came to public notice when she began showing her work with the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Along with like-minded artists including Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Simone Forte, she pushed the limits of what could be considered appropriate movement for choreography thereby changing modern dance forever. This “hot-bed of dance revolution,” was imbued with a maverick spirit and blessed with total disrespect for assumption, qualities that Ms. Brown still exhibits even as she brings her work to the great opera houses of the world today.

Founding her own company in 1970, Ms. 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 (1970) foreshadowed not only her own innovative use of flying in her 1998 production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, but also much of the work of choreographers and theatrical directors who still seek unusual and startling contexts for the human body. In 1983 she added the Robert Rauschenberg/Laurie Anderson collaboration, Set and Reset to her first fully developed cycle of work, Unstable Molecular Structures, establishing the fluid yet unpredictably geometric style that remains a hallmark of her work. Her relentlessly athletic Valiant Series followed, epitomized by the powerful Newark (1987) in which she pushed her dancers to their physical limits and began exploring gender-specific movement. Next came the elegant and mysterious Back to Zero cycle, which includes For M.G.: The Movie (1991), in which Ms. Brown pulled back from external virtuosity to investigate unconscious movement.

Trisha Brown is the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and has been awarded many other honors including five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1988 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et 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. Ms. Brown was honored in 2003 with the National Medal of Arts. She has received numerous honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Artist bios are available at http://www.trishabrowncompany.org/. Video clip and artist jpegs are available at http://alvernopresents.alverno.edu.

Additional Conversations with Sculptures events at Lynden are available at: http://lyndensculpturegarden.org/calendar/conversations-sculptures-trisha-brown-dance-company

Sponsors: Wisconsin Arts Board, Meyer & Norma Ragir Foundation, Greater Milwaukee Foundation/Joseph Pabst, Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of

Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts with additional contributions from the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Alverno Presents, the performing arts series of Alverno College, is celebrating its 55th year. The series has innovated beyond our history as the longest running, continuous arts presenter in the city, to our niche of presenting contemporary dance, world music and jazz and an array of performance events. Alverno Presents shares the school’s mission by ensuring broad access to and participation in learning, experiencing and developing the arts for the learning community of Alverno, and our community as a whole. For more information on Alverno Presents, special projects, media reviews and more, visit alvernopresents.alverno.edu, contact Alverno Presents Assistant Director at 414-382-6151, or e-mail rory.trainor@alverno.edu.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.

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