The first burst of movement in “Travelogue,” a 1977 dance by Merce Cunningham, doesn’t come from a performer, but from a piece of the set by Robert Rauschenberg. Against a vivid red background, a train of items, pulled onstage by a rope, glides in quickly and parks to reveal a long white platform featuring rows of wooden chairs, each divided by bicycle wheels; dancers, seated, are frozen in silhouette. It’s so odd, and so chic.
Rauschenberg’s “Tantric Geography” — the set of Cunningham’s “Travelogue” that, yes, deserves its own title — later includes diaphanous banners that drift like sails in a warm breeze.
“Travelogue,” featuring Cunningham’s choreography, a score by John Cage and reconstructions of its set and costumes by Rauschenberg, is normally a dance relegated to those lucky enough to have seen it live (the last professional performance was in 1979) or in photographs. In honor of Rauschenberg’s centennial, the Trisha Brown Dance Company has revived it on a wonderful double bill, “Dancing With Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage.”
Presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Dance Reflections festival by Van Cleef & Arpels, “Travelogue” — a vaudevillian, episodic romp — is paired with Brown’s shimmering “Set and Reset” (1983), also with designs by Rauschenberg, and music by Laurie Anderson.
Cage’s score for “Travelogue” is “Telephones and Birds,” which uses bird recordings and live messages — adapted for cellphones by Adam Tendler — to fill the space with chirps and spoken word via answering machine messages. Dancers dip in and out of scenes that have them maneuvering fabric to fantastical effect, partnering up for ballroom dance or creating playful sculptural formations, like carrying another performer as if she is sitting in a chair.
In one scene, Claude CJ Johnson performs with cans strapped to his orange unitard. His ability to balance on one leg under such conditions is heroic, but there he is, one leg stretched behind him as he slowly, painstakingly descends to the floor.
Staged by the former Cunningham dancers Marcie Munnerlyn and Andrea Weber, “Travelogue” rides along a whimsical, ever-evolving road as Rauschenberg’s pageantry of color and objects shift the space, giving the dancers a way of bounding or bouncing into the next section with deadpan glee.
Two men hold opposite ends of a rope affixed with scarves while Ashley Merker, in a long yellow top and wide-legged bottoms, unfurls her long legs in an expansive solo that also has her occasionally swiping the floor, her hand with an air of Cinderella by way of Cunningham.
Burr Johnson, in the role originally danced by Cunningham, is a gentle giant. After Merker exits her solo, she leaves behind a scarf. He scoops it up, curls onto the floor and rises to walk off, cradling it under his cheek.
The dancers, holding a long piece of white fabric, enter and move closer together as the material is folded into pleats. For a fleeting instant, they could be in Brown’s “Spanish Dance” (1973), in which dancers, one by one, press into the next until they slither as a fluid pack. In another scene, the dancers hold fabric between their legs; it opens and closes like a circular fan or a peacock showing off its plumes.
“Travelogue” can is nutty, which might seem at odds with Cunningham’s avant-garde aesthetics. But this dance was a part of him, too. He started out studying tap and ballroom under Maude Barrett, a retired vaudevillian and circus performer, who gave him the sense that “dance is most deeply concerned with each single instant as it comes along, and its life and vigor and attraction lie in just that singleness,” as Cunningham once said. “It is as accurate and impermanent as breathing.”
That’s also what you want from a performance of Brown’s “Set and Reset,” in many ways a visceral study of translucence: in bodies, in structures, in the way they flow together as one.
The opening couple of minutes are devoted to highlighting Rauschenberg’s set, in which a rectangle structure — this one is named “Elastic Carrier (Shiner)” — sits between two pyramid forms. Fragments of black-and-white films, as well as NASA footage, are projected over it, rendering the stage silvery and dreamlike.
What is visible? How does our perception change what we think we see? As Brown’s enduring choreography ripples along its path — another kind of travelogue — Anderson’s pointed voice narrates the scene with her piece “Long Time No See.”
The dancers, wearing Rauschenberg’s loose, flowing costumes, ripple alongside the silky material, their kicks and turns disguising momentum through soft shoulders and relaxed, rebounding arms. Even as the beat reverberates throughout the theater, driving the dancers to spread across the stage with seductive repetition, a ghostly calm takes over.
“Dancing With Bob” is more than a theme for a program. It’s a portal to see an artist’s imagination in all of its intelligent absurdity. When inside of it, a choreographer can carve out a dance adventure as Brown and Cunningham, six years apart, once did.
Trisha Brown Dance Company Through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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