THE GREATHEARTED, public-spirited, fantastically prolific artist Robert Rauschenberg famously said he wanted to “act in the gap” between art and life. If there is any activity that actually happens in that gap, it is dancing, and he was drawn to it.
Even for a time as a performance artist of sorts, he donned roller skates and careened around with a parachute ballooning behind him like a cape. But it was with the choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown that he emerged as a superlative man of the theater, using Cunningham’s stage as a laboratory for his three-dimensional art making, and Brown’s as a kind of fluid canvas, ever shifting and changing and moving.
In celebration of the centennial of Rauschenberg’s birth, the Trisha Brown Dance Company is touring a double bill titled Dancing with Bob, presenting Cunningham’s rarely seen 1977 Travelogue (with a John Cage score) and Brown’s iconic 1983 Set and Reset (music by Laurie Anderson).
The works are as idiosyncratic as their respective friendships. Bob made things for Merce. When asked how he collaborated with Cunningham, Rauschenberg declared, “I don’t collaborate.” Told this, Cunningham threw his head back and laughed. So how did they work? “We just did it,” he said. This independence was well suited to Cunningham’s celebrated separation of dance, decor, and music, with all meeting onstage after their invention. Theirs was an “antic meet,” as Cunningham called one early collision of their respective arts.
The decor for Travelogue includes giant pinwheels of pieced fabric, a pair of chaps made from aluminum cans (an item both Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns deployed before Andy Warhol elevated Campbell’s soup), draperies that recall Rauschenberg’s contemporaneous Jammers series, and a set of boxcars on wheels in which the dancers first appear, pulled onto the scene like travelers in a novel landscape. The cast engages with all of this in an even-minded manner yet, in glancing moments, heart-catching. And full of surprise.
Set and Reset is a shimmering marvel, with costumes and side curtains of gleaming transparency; silk screens come to life. They allow for a play of light and shadow and physics, perfectly matching the lilting, slippery movement that was Brown’s own. Rauschenberg’s work with her was closely collaborative, their friendship a constant in her life, his support both practical and moral. For one curtain call in New York, he had a coat made for her entirely out of roses.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” she said after his death in 2008. We might think the same thing about her. And about Merce Cunningham.
If you could time travel to the opening night of his Travelogue in 1977 at the Minskoff Theatre in New York City, you would find John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and James Taylor and Carly Simon, in the audience. It was the coolest game in town, that dance game. And now it’s back. No time machine needed.
Trisha Brown Dance Company will tour Dancing with Bob across the U.S. through May 2026. Photograph by Ben McKeown courtesy of the American Dance Festival. trishabrowncompany.org