Five College Dance is pleased to announce the fall 26 Five College Dance Lecturer: Wendy Perron, dance artist, author, editor, and historian. Perron will discuss this year’s repertory project artists Merce Cunningham, Garth Fagan, and Trisha Brown. The lecture takes place on Friday, November 6, 2026, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at Theater 14, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, Smith College.
First, Perron will trace Merce Cunningham’s radical departure from the work of Martha Graham, which, through experimentation with chance methods and curiosity about new technology, sparked the transformation of modern dance into postmodern dance. Later choreographers took this freedom in different directions: Garth Fagan adopted Cunningham’s clarity of the articulate body and infused it with a sense of his own Jamaican heritage. Trisha Brown took Cunningham’s process as permission to invent new forms in new spaces and use improvisation extensively. Using photo and video, the lecture demonstrates the highly individual movement, rhythms, and approaches to performance space of these unique choreographers.
Wendy Perron, a member of the Trisha Brown Company from 1975 to 1978, has choreographed over forty works for her company and taught at Bennington College, Princeton University, New York University, and currently, dance history at the Juilliard School. She was editor-in-chief for Dance Magazine from 2004 to 2013 and has written for the New York Times, the Village Voice, and others. Her book, The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1975, chronicles and explores the legendary improvisation group that emerged from Judson Dance Theater. She currently performs with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks and leads online courses in dance history for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
All three works—Cunningham’s “TV Rerun” (1972), Fagan’s “From Before” (1978) and Brown’s “Groove and Countermove” (2000)—will be performed at the Smith College Faculty Dance Concert in Theater 14, Mendenhall Center for Performing Arts, Smith College on November 19–21 at 8 p.m. Garth Fagan’s “From Before” (1978) will also be performed at the Amherst College/UMass Amherst Faculty Dance Concert at Kirby Theater, Amherst College, on December 3–5 at 7:30 p.m. Purchase tickets at SmithArts.ludus.com and amherst.edu/go/performance.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Please register in advance. For inquiries about the accessibility of this event or to request any accommodations, please contact Melinda Buckwalter, mbuckwalter@fivecolleges.edu, 413-542-4054, no later than October 30. In all situations, a good faith effort will be made to provide accommodations until the time of the event.
