In the Fall 2025 semester, Hancher Auditorium welcomed the Trisha Brown Dance Company to the University of Iowa campus for a transformative residency with our students. Throughout the semester, the company’s amazing artists instructed UI dance students in the groundbreaking choreography of Trisha Brown in partnership with Hancher and the dance faculty led by assistant professor Melinda Jean Myers (2012 MFA). 

In November 2025, the company spent a full week in Iowa City for master classes, rehearsals, and free, public, site-specific performances.

Tony Orrico (2003 MFA), who is an assistant professor in both the Department of Dance and the School of Art, Art History, and Design, worked with his students to install a sculptural steel frame holding up a web of ropes that were threaded with colorful used clothing. Brown’s Floor of the Forest was then performed by members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Grant Wood Interdisciplinary Art Fellow (and a former Trisha Brown dancer) Kyle Marshall, and UI students (including dance, art, and theatre majors). The installment lasted eight days, with 17 performances throughout the week. Two at a time, dancers climbed onto the apparatus, weaving their way simultaneously across the structure by putting on and then taking off the clothing, occasionally pausing to allow gravity to pull them toward the floor while the clothing acted as a cocoon or hammock holding the weight of their bodies.

The Stanley Museum of Art hosted a panel discussion featuring Carolyn Lucas (associate artistic director, Trisha Brown Dance Company), Andrea Weber (associate director of licensing, Merce Cunningham Trust), and UI dance faculty members Myers and Orrico — who previously danced for the Trisha Brown Dance Company and restaged Brown’s and Cunningham’s work to coincide with the company’s visit to Iowa City. The conversation, reflecting on the restaging of historic collaborations between visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and choreographers Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham, was moderated by UI Dance Assistant Professor Christopher-Rasheem McMillan.

The Trisha Brown Dance Company presented In Plain Site in two distinct campus locations: the lobby of Hancher Auditorium and the Lasansky Atrium in the UI Visual Arts Building. Selections from the Trisha Brown repertory were restaged in two programs in dynamic relationship with each setting, expanding and amplifying Brown’s affinity for naturalizing movement to the physical environment.

The expansive residency culminated with the Trisha Brown Dance Company concert, “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown & Cunningham Onstage,” at Hancher Auditorium, where the program included Iowa students performing Foray Forêt. Wherever Foray Forêt is performed, the Trisha Brown Dance Company engages a local marching band to circulate around the stage and theater, providing a rising and receding musical accompaniment to the dancers onstage. Here at the University of Iowa, the Hawkeye Marching Band—a program in the School of Music—joined in.

For University of Iowa dancers, the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Hancher residency was an unforgettable opportunity to learn directly from one of the most influential dance companies of our time. For the wider UI campus and Iowa City community, it was a remarkable chance to engage with the work of a modern master in a variety of accessible and interactive environments.