TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY
PRESENT TENSE

Catskill Art Space (CAS), in collaboration with the Elizabeth Murray Estate, Trisha Brown Dance Company, and Works & Process, will present a special residency devoted to PRESENT TENSE (2003), the landmark collaboration between choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Elizabeth Murray. This Works & Process residency at Catskill Art Space, will take place October 6–10, culminating in a free public sharing on Saturday, October 10 at 4PM at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY.

The residency will offer audiences an intimate opportunity to witness the Trisha Brown Dance Company at work as the dancers rehearse and reconstruct PRESENT TENSE, a work that brings together Brown’s radically fluid choreography, Murray’s exuberant visual language, and music by John Cage. Public rehearsals will be open at Catskill Art Space on October 9 and 10, providing an inside view into the process of preserving and activating Brown’s choreography.

First presented in 2003, PRESENT TENSE is one of Brown’s late collaborations with Murray, a longtime friend and fellow pioneering artist. The work combines Brown’s abstract movement vocabulary with an unusual interest in emotional narrative. Its dancers move between intricate, earthbound phrase work and adventurous aerial partnering, creating the impression of bodies riding, tumbling, and suspending themselves across space. As dancers multiply and regroup, Brown’s choreography produces unexpected relationships between individual bodies, space, and gravity. The result is at once precise and unruly, playful and deeply physical.

The visual world of PRESENT TENSE was created by Elizabeth Murray, whose bold, animated forms transformed the performance environment into an extension of the choreography. Murray also designed the original costumes, later reimagined by Elizabeth Cannon. The work is set to selections from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton. PRESENT TENSE premiered at the Festival International de Danse de Cannes in December 2003.

Major underwriting support is provided by Works & Process, with additional support from Margie and Charlie Van Dercook and Alessandra Gouldner and Boyd Johnson.

Coinciding with the residency, Catskill Art Space will present a selection of Elizabeth Murray’s works on paper that served as studies for the backdrop she created for PRESENT TENSE. The exhibition will be on view in the second-floor River Gallery, October 3 through December 27, 2026, offering audiences a rare opportunity to encounter Murray’s visual thinking alongside the choreography it helped shape.