It’s not common for the set of a dance to have its own title. But “Tantric Geography,” the set for Merce Cunningham’s 1977 “Travelogue,” isn’t ordinary.
For one thing, it moves. It’s an odd sort of trolley with a row of wooden chairs for seats. These are fixed between upturned bicycle wheels that don’t touch the ground. The dancers ride it as it rolls on hidden wheels, pulled by a rope.
What’s most significant about this set, though, is that it was designed by Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008).
“Travelogue” was a reunion, the resumption of a collaboration with Cunningham and his company that had been intensely close and extraordinarily creative in the 1950s and ’60s. Two years later, in 1979, Rauschenberg started designing for a younger friend, the choreographer Trisha Brown, contributing to another string of masterpieces.
These two artistic relationships — Rauschenberg and Cunningham (1919-2009), Rauschenberg and Brown (1936-2017) — are the focus of “Dancing With Bob,” a program that the Trisha Brown Dance Company is taking on a national tour in honor of Rauschenberg’s centennial.
The program offers a keyhole view into a time, long gone, when concert dance was near the starry center of some of the most exciting developments in American art. In the years when Rauschenberg was breaking out as one of the most influential artists in the world, that influence extended into American dance. And it flowed in the opposite direction, too, as he folded his theatrical work back into his solo practice.
The tour, which opens on June 12 at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., and arrives in New York City next year, is a reminder of all that. “Travelogue,” which hasn’t been performed by a professional troupe since 1979, is paired with Brown’s most beloved work, “Set and Reset.”
Rauschenberg often expressed envy of dancers and choreographers — their in-the-moment, unfixed liveness; their participation in what he called “a group soul” — and he did some choreography and performing himself. In other words, he was a member of their milieu, their tribe, even as the vastly greater possibilities of fame and wealth afforded by his medium set him apart.
The connection started in 1952 at Black Mountain College, a progressive North Carolina school whose summer sessions attracted a cross-pollinating collection of independent-thinking, destined-to-be-famous artists. That’s where Rauschenberg started working with Cunningham and the philosopher-musician John Cage, who was Cunningham’s artistic and romantic partner. They all participated in “Theater Piece No. 1,” now considered the first Happening. Cage (who organized it) lectured, Cunningham danced and Rauschenberg played a phonograph. Some of his self-explanatory “White Paintings” hung from the rafters.
The “White Paintings,” Cage would later say, were an inspiration for his paradigmatic composition “4’33”,” which invites an audience to listen to the music of silence and incidental sounds for four minutes and 33 seconds. Rauschenberg, in turn, would credit Cage with giving him permission to follow his impulses.
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, founded at Black Mountain in 1953, developed a practice of keeping music and dance independent, sharing the same section of time and space. They usually were not combined until performance. Adding set and costumes (and eventually lighting) in a similarly independent way became Rauschenberg’s job.
For Rauschenberg’s first collaboration with the company, “Minutiae,” Cunningham asked him to make something free-standing. (His instructions were rarely more specific.) Rauschenberg built one of his first combines, the conflations of painting and sculpture for which he would become known. It wasn’t just that he used commonplace objects, Cunningham once said of his friend, but that “he places them in such a way that you can really see them.”
Seeing, hearing and thinking freshly: That’s where the aesthetics of Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg met. “A thing is just that thing,” Cunningham wrote in 1955. “When I dance, it means: This is what I am doing.” Thwarting artistic convention, these artists offered people new eyes and ears without telling them what to see or hear. Like most paradigm shifters, they began as mocked or ignored by the many, revered by the few.
For the absurdist “Antic Meet,” Rauschenberg made a door with wheels for midstage entrances and exits. For the pastoral “Summerspace,” Rauschenberg’s pointillist costumes blended in with his pointillist backdrop. He illuminated “Winterbranch” as if by the headlights of passing cars and formed junk into a movable monster.
Rauschenberg didn’t just contribute designs. He toured with the company, traveling from gig to gig and playing Scrabble in the Volkswagen bus that became part of Cage-Cunningham lore. Even as Rauschenberg’s reputation and remuneration rocketed past the company’s, he stayed faithful. He would leave the tour, attend a glamorous gallery opening of his work in New York and then fly in to sweep the stage and set the lights for the next show.
The foundational Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown wrote that “Rauschenberg’s greatness in the theater lay in his delight and fascination with on-the-spot problem solving.” For “Story” (1963), he created a new set for each performance, using just-found materials. “It was something we looked forward to, a handmade gift,” Brown wrote in the photographer James Klosty’s book on Cunningham. (Financial loans from Rauschenberg also helped keep the company going.)
But on a world tour in 1964, tensions rose. During “Story” one night, Rauschenberg and his assistant did their ironing onstage, drawing focus away from the dancers. (Cunningham wasn’t pleased.) Around the time that Rauschenberg won the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale — a Cunningham company performance helped garner votes — a newspaper quoted him calling the company his “biggest canvas.” (Cage wasn’t pleased.) Perceived slights followed perceived slights, and Rauschenberg resigned.
Jasper Johns — Rauschenberg’s former lover, who had assisted him on designs for Cunningham all along — took over as artistic adviser. Johns didn’t like touring. He designed costumes but generally suggested other top-tier artists (Andy Warhol, Frank Stella) for the sets.
Rauschenberg had already found a new dance crew: the question-everything rebels of Judson Dance Theater, most of whom had studied with Cunningham. Starting in 1962, Rauschenberg designed their lighting, and performed in their works and in his own: spinning on roller skates with a parachute on his back, dancing in the dark with a flashlight attached to a foot. “I had so many extravagant ideas to disguise the fact that I actually wasn’t a dancer,” he once said.
Trisha Brown was a member of this crew. And when, after years of experimenting in nontraditional spaces, she decided to make her first work for the proscenium stage, she asked Rauschenberg for help. For that 1979 work, “Glacial Decoy” (his title), he projected black-and-white photographs, serially, across four screens, matching the choreography’s suggestion of extending beyond the wings.
For the first two minutes of “Set and Reset” (1983), all we see is Rauschenberg’s set: two pyramids flanking a rectangle, reflective surfaces for prismatic projections of newsreel footage and NASA films. Then all that rises to float over Brown and her dancers, who walk on a wall, ripple in complexly looping currents and embody ideas of visibility and invisibility in Rauschenberg’s translucent silk-screened costumes.
Brown described herself as “the lightning rod for Bob’s theatrical projections.” Rauschenberg said that she thought like a painter. (She made her own visual art.) Unlike Cunningham and his collaborators, Brown and Rauschenberg worked closely together all through the creative process. Beyond designing and composing music for some of her works, he was the president of her board, a funder, and an older-brother source of security and confidence. They talked all the time.
That’s the history behind “Dancing With Bob,” but for the American Dance Festival dates, both the program and the back story are being filled out with one more dance giant: Paul Taylor (1930-2018).
During the years that Rauschenberg was starting to design for Cunningham, he was just as integral to the early aesthetic of Taylor (who was briefly in Cunningham’s troupe). Rauschenberg was part of the choreographer’s notorious “7 New Dances” concert of 1957 and its experiments with Cagean sounds, everyday gestures in everyday clothing, and standing still. In “Dancing With Bob,” the Paul Taylor Dance Company is performing “Three Epitaphs,” for which Rauschenberg shrouded the slouching dancers in face-covering black body suits dotted with tiny mirrors. This caused Martha Graham, in whose company Taylor was still dancing, to call Taylor a naughty boy.
The Taylor company is also presenting “Tracer,” a recently reconstructed 1962 work. Rauschenberg’s costumes feature tire-track prints, a signature motif. His set is an upturned bicycle wheel, another signature, this one adopted from one of his heroes, Marcel Duchamp. Attached to a motor, the wheel spins continuously as the dancers alternate between Cunningham-like action and stillness.
“Tracer” was the last Rauschenberg-Taylor collaboration. Soon after, Taylor premiered “Aureole,” a more balletic work set to easy-on-the-ears Handel. What some saw as sellout conservatism was its own form of iconoclasm, and avant-garde ideas continued to permeate Taylor’s work as he collaborated with other artists, like Alex Katz. But Taylor established a dance mainstream that was separate from the Judson Dance Theater line that Rauschenberg followed. “Dancing With Bob” reconnects them.
The wheel in “Tracer” isn’t the original. Taylor sold that in 2014 to help fund an expansion of his company. The sets and costumes for “Travelogue” and “Set and Reset” are also reconstructions. Original Rauschenbergs, the property of private collections and museums, are generally worth too much to use onstage.
The Merce Cunningham Trust and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation have supported the reconstruction of both the designs and choreography in “Travelogue.” The dance is a series of vaudeville-like episodes in the eccentric mode of “Antic Meet.” Gorgeous silk sails fly in. The dancers put on color-wheel skirts that fan out around their bodies like the flared skin of lizards. One man sports empty metal cans as chaps — he’s a dancing combine.
At a recent rehearsal, Andrea Weber — who, with Marcie Munnerlyn, a fellow former Cunningham dancer, reconstructed and is staging “Travelogue” — huddled with the Brown dancers over original video footage, trying to work out tiny details of the choreography and make it live again.
All the current Brown dancers, Weber said, have had some experience with Cunningham repertory. (Cunningham decided that his company would disband after his death.) But this is the first time that the Brown company has performed a Cunningham work.
The whole endeavor recently hit a snag, when the Brown company discovered it was losing its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Kirstin Kapustik, the company’s executive director, said the tour was moving forward regardless and hoped it might reassociate dance with Rauschenberg.
“Part of the goal,” she said, “is to say that contemporary dance is a great American art form and people should support it.”
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