Trisha Brown Dance Company
In Plain Site
Dance / Visual Art
In Plain Site sees Trisha Brown Dance Company and PS21 working together for the first time to bring a bespoke collection from the company’s repertoire into Chatham’s newly restored Masonic Hall at dusk, amplifying Brown’s endless affinity for naturalizing movement to the physical environment.
For decades Brown’s work has fearlessly explored different relationships to space and site for dance. Never frozen, her work adapts profoundly to its environment, its time, and condition, allowing patterns of relationship, body, light, and space to play, repeat, and iterate.
“Brown felt sorry for spaces that weren’t centerstage – the ceiling, walls, corners, and wing space. Not to mention trees, lakes, and firehouses” Wendy Perron, Dance Magazine
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Trisha Brown 1936-2017
One of the most acclaimed and influential choreographers and dancers of her time, Trisha’s groundbreaking work forever changed the landscape of art. From her birthplace roots in rural Aberdeen, Washington, Brown – a 1958 graduate of Mills College Dance Department – arrived in New York in 1961. A student of Ann Halprin, Brown participated in the choreographic composition workshops taught by Robert Dunn – from which Judson Dance Theater was born – greatly contributing to the fervent of interdisciplinary creativity that defined 1960s New York. Expanding the physical behaviors that qualified as dance, she discovered the extraordinary in the everyday, and brought tasks, rulegames, natural movement, and improvisation into the making of choreography.
With the founding of the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, Brown set off on her own distinctive path of artistic investigation and ceaseless experimentation, which extended for forty years. The creator of over 100 choreographies and six operas, and a graphic artist, whose drawings have earned recognition in numerous museum exhibitions and collections, Brown’s earliest works took impetus from the cityscape of downtown SoHo, where she was a pioneering settler. In the 1970s, as Brown strove to invent an original abstract movement language – one of her singular achievements – it was art galleries, museums, and international exhibitions that provided her work its most important presentation context. Indeed, contemporary projects to introduce choreography to the museum setting are unthinkable apart from the exemplary model that Brown established.
Today, the Trisha Brown Dance Company continues to perpetuate Brown’s legacy through its “In Plain Site” initiative. Through it, the company draws on Brown’s model for reinvigorating her choreography through its re-siting in relation to new contexts that include outdoor sites and museum settings and collections. The company is also involved in an ongoing process of reconstructing and remounting major works that Brown created for the proscenium stage between 1979 and 2011.
In her lifetime, Trisha Brown was the recipient of nearly every award available to contemporary choreographers. The first woman to receive the coveted MacArthur ‘genius’ grant (in 1991), Brown was honored by five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, and Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Medal in Dance (1982). 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. Brown 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, she received the New York State Governor’s Arts Award and, in 2003, was honored with the National Medal of Arts. In 2011, Brown received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for making an “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”
Please note that this performance has an unconventional seating, limited seats or standing room only. We are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
