Dances aren’t usually born from program errors. But in 1963, the artist Robert Rauschenberg was mistakenly included on a list of choreographers in a performance featuring members of Judson Dance Theater, the experimental New York collective. Oops.
While Rauschenberg hung around with dancers and made sets and costumes for them, he wasn’t a choreographer. Still, when he saw his name listed alongside theirs, he figured, what the hay?
“Since I didn’t know much about actually making a dance,” Rauschenberg said, “I used roller skates as a means of freedom from any kind of inhibitions that I would have.”
Armed with those skates, bicycle wheels held by an axle and altered parachutes, Rauschenberg choreographed and performed in “Pelican,” a dance lost but not forgotten. Photographs and some tantalizing video documentation have long lived in the imaginations of those in the art and performance worlds.
On Monday, a new version of the work will premiere as part of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s gala at Xanadu Roller Arts in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The reimagined “Pelican” features the former Merce Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener on skates alongside a New York City Ballet soloist, Ashley Hod, in pointe shoes.
Rauschenberg and Brown were friends and collaborators. In a joint interview with Brown in Ballet Review, he said: “I think I was lucky to pull something together like I do in a collage. I had so many extravagant ideas in my work to disguise the fact that I actually wasn’t a dancer.”
Carolyn Brown, who originated Hod’s role, wrote in her memoir that Rauschenberg conceived every part of “Pelican”: “Result? A work ungainly and lyrical, awkward and poetic, innovative and romantic.”
Though “Pelican” has been reimagined — new choreography was drawn from Peter Moore photographs, archival video footage and Rauschenberg’s notes — this new version still has bones. Tara Lorenzen, who choreographed the new version, said, “I felt like we were going into this by breathing life into these photographs that you see everywhere.”
Lorenzen started by assembling the cast. Mitchell and Riener, who met as dancers in Cunningham’s company and have spent their careers making multidisciplinary work, understand this world. “I know that they are physically ambitious,” Lorenzen said, “and that they could take on something like roller skating. With these like crazy sails attached to them.”
They have, for the record, been taking skating lessons. “We have been slowly getting more comfortable, but it is a really, really different beast,” Mitchell said. “It’s not like dancing at all. Your weight is completely different. Your knees have to be bent. Your foundation is moving around.”
Hod, straightforward and serene throughout, evokes Carolyn Brown. “There’s a kind of no-nonsense elegance to how she approaches movement,” Mitchell said. Hod sees it, too, she said, “in the way Brown carries herself and the way her posture and her gaze is.”
In the first section of “Pelican,” the dancers don’t touch. As Hod takes rapid, tiny steps en pointe, Mitchell and Riener crawl across the stage like giant insects.
With parachutes attached to their backs, they balance on one side of their bicycle wheels and twirl. It’s like watching disembodied tutus.
Eventually they come together. As Hod stands, her feet in a tight relevé, Mitchell and Riener hold hands as they spin around her like birds with prehistoric wings.
“Feeling them spin around me,” Hod said, is “like a whirlwind carousel.”
Trapped between Riener and Michell, she extends a leg in arabesque. As they circle her on wheels, Hod rotates her extension to the side and then to the front as she leans back. “I’m kind of looking up into the heavens,” she said.
It’s strangely stunning: a feat of balance and trust. After Mitchell skates off, Riener — still spinning — holds Hod’s wrists as she swirls her way to the floor. Rauschenberg knew how to create drama in stillness: Now seated and left alone, Hod is like a statue.
Before Hod’s exit, Mitchell and Riener lift her between them and spin. Here, for the first time, she also gets to fly like a bird.
They lower her gingerly onto Riener’s right skate, where she balances on demi-pointe. Two bodies become one. “It’s unpredictable and it’s such a beautiful moment — or it feels very beautiful to me,” Riener said. “But what’s going on under the surface is a really intense negotiation of weight. We’re doing our best to be serene above water.”
It’s Hod’s exit. “It’s very peaceful for me, because I feel like I can just decompress and let whatever happened out there resonate,” Hod said. “I don’t get that often. Dancing with City Ballet, you run or jump into the wings and that’s it.”
But the skates aren’t just for soaring through space. In the end, Mitchell and Riener kneel on the axle of the bicycle tires, their hands grazing the wheels as they take tiny steps. Finally those skates, responsible for generating so much power, stutter action into stillness. The reverberation they leave behind? Total tranquillity.
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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