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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on March 5, 2026
Trisha Brown Dance Company; Photo:Stephanie Berger*
Presented by the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival
header photo IDs:Trisha Brown Dance Company in Trisha Brown's "Set and Reset" Savannah Gailliard (being lifted) by (r to l) Patrick Needham, Burr Johnson, Spencer Weidie ; Photo: Stephanie Berger
“Set and Reset” (1983)
Choreography: Trisha Brown
Music: Laurie Anderson, “Long Time No See”
Original design and costumes: Robert Rauschenberg
Lighting design: Beverly Emmons
Choreography staged by Carolyn Lucas with Cecily Campbell, Marc Crousillat, Jamie Scott
Design & production reconstruction consultant: Jessie Ksanznak, Nick Kolin
Scenic reconstruction: Lawrence Voytek, ShowFab
Costume reconstruction: Amanda Kmett’Pendry, Dyenamix Inc., Zarah Green
Dancers: Savannah Gaillard, Burr Johnson, Catherine Kirk, Ashley Merker, Patrick Needham, Jennifer Payán, Spencer Weidie
“Travelogue” (1978)
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
Music: John Cage, “Telephones and Birds”
Original design and costumes Robert Rauschenberg
Choreography staged by Marcie Munnerlyn and Andrea Weber
Music director & realization of “Telephones and Birds” for mobile devices: Adam Tendler
Musicians (Feb. 26): Adam Tendler, John King, Patricia Lent
Design & production consultant: Davison Scandrett
Scenic reconstruction: Mrinali Thanwani, Bland Wade & Kris Julio from UNCSA School of Design & Production
Sail reconstruction: by Rose Brand
Costume reconstruction: Earlene Munnerlyn & Marissa McCullough
Lighting reconstruction: Davison Scandrett & Joe Levasseur
Dancers: Savannah Gaillard, Burr Johnson, Claude CJ Johnson, Catherine Kirk, Ashley Merker, Patrick Needham, Jennifer Payán, Spencer Weidie
February 26, 2026
The Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) continues its celebration of Robert Rauschenberg’s centennial with the stunning double bill “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham on Stage,” presented at BAM as part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival. The program, which has already toured extensively around the country and concludes with a stop in Los Angeles in May, features two extraordinary dances designed by the irrepressibly imaginative artist: Trisha Brown’s 1983 masterwork “Set and Reset” and Merce Cunningham’s oddball 1978 dance tapestry, “Travelogue.”
Trisha Brown Dance Company in Trisha Brown's "Set and Reset"; Photo: Steven Pisano
Danced with sincerity and verve by the TBDC artists, the works come to vibrant, revelatory life, as much in the layered dimensions of their structures, languages, tones, and colors as in the lineage that connects the individuals dancing before us with those who came before them.
Rauschenberg is best known for his raucous “combines” that merged painting and sculpture in a multimedia collage practice that, throughout his career, would extend to touch the stage. Indeed, approaching the stage as a three-dimensional canvas for living, dancing collage seems like a natural next step from the visual and textural mobilities at play in his combines. Over decades-long creative and personal relationships with Brown and Cunningham, the artist designed sets and costumes for dozens of their dances, with “Set and Reset” and “Travelogue” offering two very different manifestations of Rauschenberg’s artistic signature to refract the choreographic signatures of two dancemakers who are linked in lineage yet unequivocally individuated in the formal approaches and textural dynamics of their dance dialects.
“Set and Reset” opens with a solo of sorts, not for a dancer, but for Rauschenberg’s design. A triptych of screens—a large rectangle flanked by two pyramids—flashes with layers of black and white films and photographs of patterns, people, street scenes, and cityscapes as a collage of sounds, words, and music harmonizes with its tumultuous multiplicity. The screens ascend slowly to hover above the stage space, which is framed by a series of long, sheer white panels in lieu of traditional theatrical wings. With the scene set, dance and music fall into motion with an ever-shifting density of composition that converses with the photo projections that continue over the dancers’ heads throughout. While it’s difficult to tear my eyes from the dancing for even a moment, Rauschenberg’s ghostly images—restated on the dancers’ diaphanous costumes—animate an upper periphery as the engine of the dance, just as the iterative cascades of rhythmic grounding in Laurie Anderson’s “Long Time No See” serve as its timepiece.
And oh, such dancing. The slippery precision of Brown’s gravity-driven phrase work demands a mastery of momentum, with each bend, fold, reach, and swing impelled in a clear causal chain. Even collisions and interruptions carry an atomic certainty as dancers are redirected by passing contact or swooped into lifts; a unity of gravitational intent buoys lush unison duets and deft, intricate canons for the ensemble of seven. The dancers seem to live in a constant state of falling, their bodies suspended on keeling diagonals that propel their fluid locomotion and cantilevered encounters. Ashley Merker, dancing the role originated by Brown, shows a keen command of the work’s subtle swoop and sway; Patrick Needham imbues an extended solo (originated by Stephen Petronio) with a jangling, electric ease; Catherine Kirk slips seamlessly between ground and air in angularly etched jumps. The overall effect is juicy without being messy, and clean without becoming antiseptic, as Brown states and restates her grammars of geometry, physics, and anatomy, building recognition through accumulation toward a particular understanding of the world: one that blooms with the constancy of change.
Trisha Brown Dance Company in Trisha Brown's "Set and Reset" Dancer Patrick Needham (right); Photo: Stephanie Berger
Following “Set and Reset,” “Travelogue” is a study in contrast and consonance, both between the choreographers and the breadth of Rauschenberg’s multifarious sensibilities. Again, the design introduces the dance as a train of alternating chairs and bicycle wheels travels across the back of the stage, with seated dancers cast in silhouette against a bright red cyc. Three musicians play John Cage’s “Telephones and Birds,” a chance operations-based score composed of recorded bird calls and automated phone menus, which lends melody and absurdity to the dance’s atmosphere in equal measure. Reconstructions of Rauschenberg’s patchwork sails descend to tickle the stage action, and a parade of colorful props and costume pieces play over a rainbowed array of unitards for the eight dancers. The ambling, episodic work marshals Cunningham’s wry, vaudevillian wit to color his rigorous phrases and structured scenarios, and the TBDC dancers rise to it all with daring sensitivity and unaffected grace.
“Travelogue” is a dance that forges the heart of its group cohesion through its individual characters, who flock together in marching lockstep and break away into itinerant tangles, antics, and ditties in twos and threes. They’re rather like a traveling band (or circus, perhaps) who are led, but not lorded over, by Burr Johnson, in the role originated by Cunningham. His portrayal is breathtakingly his own—the odd, wiry intensity of Cunningham’s dancing being fundamentally inimitable—and Johnson is a revelation: a strange and noble creature of a different sort, one who delivers masterful shifts of tone with a continuity of spirit across expansively radiant geometries, pedestrian details, and impeccably tender comic timing.
Each dancer takes on distinctive moments of their own in turn: Merker is breeze made flesh in an equanimous solo, tracing figures in the air with elegant toes and fingers; Claude CJ Johnson commands stillness and explosive power with solidity and graceful determination in a solo accompanied by clattering tin-can chaps; Spencer Weidie’s articulate spine enunciates the lush tilts, curves, and twists of the Cunningham vocabulary with clarity and purpose; Jennifer Payán wrangles and weaves among a trio of partners with elastically sculptural poise. Traveling phrases and tableaus for the group are animated by fractured symmetries and smatterings of recalcitrant punctuation that show the choreographer at his most playful; “Travelogue” remains transcendent in the idiosyncratic beauty of its mosaic world. As the curtain descends, the dance continues unperturbed—a landscape still just dawning upon us, birdsong and all.
“Dancing with Bob” is a rare feat of programming and execution that brings these 20th century icons squarely back to the scale of the human. Through the generosity and honesty at work in the dancing bodies of this remarkable ensemble, the legacies of Rauschenberg, Brown, and Cunningham live on as a testament to their—and our—ephemeral and enduring humanity.
