Trisha Brown Dance Company Honors the Centennial of Robert Rauschenberg
Company:
Trisha Brown Dance Company
Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) returns to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House with Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage, a historic double bill honoring the centennial of one of its most influential collaborators: visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. This landmark program brings together two groundbreaking works that showcase Rauschenberg’s iconic designs—Set and Reset (1983) by Trisha Brown and Travelogue (1977) by Merce Cunningham—offering audiences a rare opportunity to experience one of the most dynamic intersections of dance, music, and visual art.
Brown’s Set and Reset stands as a testament to her decades-long creative partnership with Rauschenberg. Performed to Laurie Anderson’s propulsive score, the work merges Brown’s signature fluid, geometric movement with Rauschenberg’s translucent, silk-screened costumes and sculptural set, animated by projections of archival newsreel footage. The result is a vibrant kinetic landscape that explores themes of visibility, invisibility, and collective memory.
In Travelogue, Cunningham reunites with Rauschenberg and composer John Cage more than a decade after their initial collaborations. The work—last performed by a professional company in 1979—features Rauschenberg’s scenic elements titled Tantric Geography, which the dancers engage with through ballroom phrases, antic gestures, and deadpan physicality. Cage’s score, Telephones and Birds, blends recordings of bird calls with dialed live messages, creating an unpredictable sonic terrain that plays with time, technology, and chance.
Produced in partnership with the Merce Cunningham Trust
