Trisha Brown Dance Company to Offer Two Free Concerts at Skidmore College
Evening Performance Dedicated to Yaddo

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — The internationally acclaimed Trisha Brown Dance Company will cap its three-week summer dance residency at Skidmore College with two free dance concerts on Saturday, June 24, beginning at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. in the college's Bernhard Theater. The 7  p.m. performance will be presented in honor of the 100th anniversary of Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs artists' community.

The programs for both concerts will include two sections from Brown's newest work, a jazz-inspired dance trilogy created in collaboration with jazz composer Dave Douglas, artist and set designer Terry Winters, and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton. With live musical accompaniment provided by Douglas's sextet, the Brown Company dancers will perform Rapture for Leon James, the trilogy's second section. Featuring Winters' set (stacked golden disks evoking cymbals or vinyl records) and choreography that echoes the jitterbug, Charleston, and Lindy Hop, Rapture has been described by The New York Times as "an ode to jazz as music, dance, and social activity...a beauty, a perfect blend of the vernacular and the abstract."

Completing both programs will be a preview of the trilogy's final section, Groove and Countermove, the close-to-complete work in progress whose world premiere will take place the following week at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Complete with lighting, costumes, and set, the Skidmore preview of Groove is expected to be "a tech rehearsal that will knock your socks off," as Brown described it in her remarks at the college's May 20 commencement ceremony, where she received an honorary degree. The June 24 concerts will also introduce the trilogy's three newly crafted interludes, designed to be performed by a solo dancer and musician while sets are being changed between sections. Brown, Douglas, Winters, and Tipton are expected to be present for both performances and for conversational sessions with their audiences after each concert.

Brown's inspiration for the jazz/dance trilogy came while watching a film featuring Leon James, a star dancer at the Savoy Hilton in the 1930s. Awed by James's virtuosic brilliance and the delight in took in dance, Brown told The New York Times, "He was the picture of ecstasy. How he looked as he danced is why I dance." The trilogy James inspired began with Brown's Five Part Weather Invention (1990), a tribute to jazz improvisation followed by Rapture for Leon James, which premiered in February. The music for Rapture was co-commissioned by Skidmore's Office of the Dean of Special Programs, which sponsors summer programs in jazz, art, music, and theater as well as dance.

Other public events of the Brown Company dance residency, which will continue through June 24, include:

• Free lecture-demonstration beginning at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 21, in the college's Dance Theater;
• Free family-dance workshops in the Skidmore Dance Center, 1- 3 p.m. on Saturday, June 17, with classes in improvisation and partnering for adults, and movement for children ages 10-12.

In a related event, artist and set designer Terry Winters will discuss his work in a free lecture at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, June 23, in the college's Schick Art Gallery.

The Brown Company's residency at Skidmore, which has also included a three-week intensive dance workshop for pre-registered advanced dancers, follows the Company's highly successful 30th anniversary season in New York City. Brown's professional life in dance began there, at the innovative Judson Church Dance Theater in the 1960s. Frequently working in collaboration with artists like Robert Rauschenberg and composers like Laurie Anderson and John Cage, Brown has created strikingly original cycles of dances that over the years eschewed various dance conventions in favor of the unusual and the unheard of - dancing not on proscenium stages, for instance, but up the sides of city buildings or museum walls. Brown also experimented with using everyday movement, putting her dancers into street clothes for costumes, and dancing in pure silence or to synthesized sound scores. A decade ago, the ever-evolving choreographer startled her audiences with rich new work set to classical music and opera. Her company has toured the nation and the world and Brown herself has garnered numerous awards and honors, including several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the first MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant to b given to a woman choreographer. This summer, Brown will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance, on South Broadway in Saratoga Springs.

Supported by Skidmore's Office of the Dean of Special Programs and the Dance Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, the Trisha Brown residency continues a Skidmore tradition that has brought to the Saratoga Springs campus such prestigious choreographers as Twyla Tharp, Bill T. Jones, Lar Lubovitch, Garth Fagan, and Mark Morris.

For more information on the programs or performances, call the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, Skidmore College, at 518/580-5590.

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Contact:

Lesley Leduc

Public Affairs Coordinator

Telephone: (518) 584-0746 Fax: (518) 584-1312 E-mail: lleduc@yaddo.org