(Photo: Courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company)

For most of her long career, maverick dance choreographer Trisha Brown's tastes leaned more toward John Cage than Franz Schubert. "Classical music is so fresh to me now as a result," she says. In fact, the postmodern pioneer who used to worry that text, narrative, and music were ties that bound has become taken with storytelling and big lush scores, such as Monteverdi's 1607 opera L'Orfeo with baritone Simon Keenlyside in 1998, and Salvatore Sciarrino's opera Luci Mie Traditrici at last year's Lincoln Center Festival. "I just reached one of those turning points in my life where I asked myself: Do you want to keep making these dances you know very well how to make, or do you want to try something new?" she says. "I have less time in front of me than I have behind me. It was one of those moments." Now she's working with Keenlyside again in Winterreise, a staged version of Schubert's epic song cycle.

Winterreise
John Jay College Theater
(Opens December 2) .

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Alicia Zuckerman