Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether or Not I Have Stopped Dancing

Trisha Brown is an artist of and for our time, and has been for over 30 years. She began walking on walls and dancing on New York City rooftops in the hectic post-modern era of the 1960s. Since then she has made excursions into opera, visual art, even robotics. Her movement suggests the fluid architecture of, say, a liquefied Weisman museum: flowing in eccentric and unpredictable ways while maintaining a clarity of design that dazzles both the mind and the eye. This week, the Walker Art Center inaugurates "The Year of Trisha" with a show of her drawings that opens with a live performance by Brown in which she synthesizes dance and drawing by improvising movement across a large piece of paper with charcoal and pastel. Next week her company of superbly articulate dancers performs new and classic Brown works at Northrop Auditorium, including the splendid "Foray Forêt" to the eerie strains of a marching band playing from the lobby; "I Love My Robots" with, yes, honest-to-goodness robots (and one live dancer); and "Present Tense," a new work to music by that iconic innovator John Cage. One of the most articulate artists around, Brown will talk about her career in dance and the visual arts at a "Talking Art and Dance" event on April 22. Then she'll be back in July to remount several site-based works from the 1970s, including a work in which the dancers float on rafts in Loring Pond. Kudos to the Walker and Northrop for bringing us so many aspects of Brown, a major 20th-century artist who is still rocking and invigorating the 21st. Opening reception with dance/drawing performance by Brown is free at 7 p.m. (tickets available at 6 p.m. in the Bazinet Lobby) Thursday, April 17; free artist's talk 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 22; dance performance is $25-$42 at 8 p.m. Friday, April 25 at Northrop Auditorium (84 Church St. SE, Minneapolis; call 612.375.7600 for tickets).
April 17-July 20, 2008