Trisha Brown has serious avant-garde and postmodern dance bona fides: she was a founding member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater before striking off on her own in the late 1960s to become a pioneering choreographer. Her work with Trisha Brown Dance Company distilled the form down to pure movement, often taking the work outside of concert halls entirely, with her performers suspended from ceilings and rooftops and dancing down walls. “Works by Brown don’t just challenge our perceptions; they expand our minds and untether our spirits,” wrote The Village Voice.
With Brown’s retirement, her company has launched an initiative to breathe new life into her existing masterpieces: In Plain Site, an ambitious project to present Brown’s dances in unconventional new spaces. For their performance at Duke, they will recombine and reshape each work specifically for two iconic locations, The Nasher Museum of Art and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. These familiar spaces are repurposed to close the distance between dancers and audience, invigorating Brown’s work anew.