100 Years of Rauschenberg

The Trisha Brown Dance Company embarks on a national tour this June celebrating the centennial of avant-garde American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg was a frequent collaborator of Brown’s. His first introduction to postmodern dance, however, was through Merce Cunningham. For this tour, the Merce Cunningham Trust has restaged the monumental 1977 Cunningham/Rauschenberg collaboration, “Travelogue,” on the Trisha Brown Dance Company, which will appear alongside Brown’s classic Rauschenberg collaboration, the 1983 “Set and Reset.” “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage” will first appear at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina. (At ADF, the Trisha Brown Dance Company will be joined by Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, which will perform two of Taylor’s collaborations with Rauschenberg, “3 Epitaphs” and “Tracer.”)

Trisha Oesterling, Carolyn Lucas, David Thomson, Gregory Lara in “Set and Reset”by Trisha Brown. Photograph by Mark Hanauer

Fjord Review sat down with representatives of the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and the Merce Cunningham Trust in a joint interview to discuss “Dancing with Bob,” the relationship between these three great postmodern artists, and each artist’s enduring legacy. Present in the interview were Director of Archives & Digital at the Rauschenberg Foundation, Francine Snyder; Executive Director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Kirstin Kapustik; and Associate Director of Licensing for the Merce Cunningham Trust, Andrea Weber, who restaged “Travelogue” this year.

Rauschenberg collaborated with both Cunningham and Brown on numerous dances over multiple decades of the artists’ careers. Out of this vast oeuvre, why were “Set and Reset” and “Travelogue” selected for this centennial performance?

Francine Snyder: “Travelogue” is the first collaboration that Cunningham and Rauschenberg had after a hiatus. It’s really a celebration, with the color and the costumes. It hasn’t been performed in such a long time, so just bringing it back is exciting, too. “Set and Reset” was a very important collaboration for Brown and Rauschenberg. It marked a formalization of their collaboration and their work together. We see both of these pieces as moments of joy, and as we’re looking at the centennial, we want to highlight these moments and how these moments work into the future.

Cunningham and Brown have very distinctive—and different—movement styles, but these two pieces actually have some similar qualities. “Travelogue” seems to be in conversation with Brown’s work, with looser, flowing, qualities that are not always associated with Cunningham’s work. There is certainly a lineage from Cunningham to Brown—were there literal conversations between the two artists during their careers?

Kirstin Kapustik: Brown was a work study student in the Cunningham studio—she was answering telephones in order to take classes. That’s actually how Brown met Rauschenberg. She ended up having long conversations with him while she was working the phones there. And then you also have the Robert Ellis Dunn classes [in improvisation and choreography] that were taking place at the Cunningham Studio that Trisha was a part of, and Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and others who were a part of Judson Church. And I don’t really know, but I make the assumption that she was taking some Cunningham classes—Andrea, would you know?

Andrea Weber: It’s easier for me to speak towards the movement of “Travelogue” and where Merce’s inspiration came from. This work is one of his episodic works, made up of sections. In that, Merce took inspiration from a lot of different things like vaudeville, and [dance historian] David Vaughan described some of “Travelogue” as maybe even inspired by Balanchine. There is this element of play. I also think that Merce was very inspired by his dancers. For example, this was Meg Harper’s last piece, and he made this solo for her that she has told me was a reflection of the fact that she loved to dance, and she actually loved to clean. It was a bit of a love letter to her and her way of moving.

Kirstin: And so much of Trisha’s work came from experimentation. She would create a movement phrase through experimentation, she would teach that phrase to the dancers, and she would ask them to experiment within that phrase. So similarly, much of her movement was also coming from the dancers’ bodies that she was working with. Also, the pieces were not made that far apart —“Set and Reset” is from 1983 and “Travelogue” is from 1977.

Meg Harper in “Travelogue” by Merce Cunningham. Photograph by Charles Atlas, 1977. Courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.

What is the process of restaging Rauschenberg’s work for these dances?

Francine: It’s been a really interesting collaboration, a contemporary collaboration, too, because we understand that it’s impossible to redo the artwork exactly the same. The fabrics are different; the dancers are different. We often think about, “what is reinterpretation,” how has Rauschenberg done that in the past, and how have we seen those sets or costumes modified during his lifetime. We try to bring that into the future because the really important thing for us—and was for Rauschenberg—is that these performances continue to live. It would be tragic to not be able to see them or perform them because you didn’t have the original set. Of course, we always have an active dialogue around it to make sure that we are true to the original spirit.

Andrea: As a stager for Cunningham’s work, it’s so different. You normally just come in and teach phrases and steps and put them together. Figuring out how the set and costume pieces work out in the studio is just a different way for a Cunningham stager to operate—we’re usually dealing with a backdrop and unitards. For example, there are these “can-pants” that a dancer wears in “Travelogue” [pants made of actual hanging tin cans], and we realized that the person who puts them on has to go somewhere else in the space so that they’re not making noise backstage. Who knew? You just don’t even think of all these things.

Francine: Yeah, Rauschenberg wasn’t concerned about practicality! He created in “feels.” There’s also randomness, which is impossible to recreate. So, we are figuring out what that “feeling” is and then how to emulate that. Also, are those vintage cans or are they contemporary? Does it matter? The spirit of what the cans on the costume are is what is important, because they were contemporary cans at the time of the performance.

Andrea: Yeah, there’s a rope that the dancers bring in and shake and it has cans on it, and so to make a mock-up of it, my husband made chili the night before. We had chili for a week—those were definitely contemporary cans.

It sounds like the Rauschenberg reinterpretations and the choreographic stagings have been occurring simultaneously. Was this the way Rauschenberg worked with Brown and/or Cunningham—developing his sets and costumes while the dances were still being created?

Francine: Rauschenberg didn’t document a lot of this, though my understanding is that he collaborated with choreographers and used the methods that worked with their individual practices. So, for Merce Cunningham, who was very interested in chance and randomness, these things happened simultaneously and without a lot of discussion. I have a letter that Merce wrote to Bob about “Travelogue,” about making the set, and he gives a little tiny description of the dance, like, “a few people are coming on and off the space.” Then he says, “do you want more information than this? Or would you rather do what you do when you do it, and we all be delighted?” So, I feel like that was very much of a way that Bob and Merce worked together.

Trisha and Bob had a closer relationship in terms of collaborating and working together and for “Set and Reset,” while they still worked independently, I know that they had more dialogue around it.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company in “Travelogue” by Merce Cunningham. Photograph by Charles Atlas, 1977. Courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.

What were the personal relationships like between Rauschenberg and Cunningham and Rauschenberg and Brown?

Francine: Rauschenberg met Cunningham at Black Mountain College, where he attended on and off in the 1940s and 1950s. Cunningham and John Cage came in one summer and did, I believe, a seminar. That was when the first “happening” took place. It was Rauschenberg’s introduction to that type of working. And then he traveled with Cunningham in lighting and costumes, and they became involved in collaborating. In the 60s, Rauschenberg was recognized on his own as a visual artist and stopped working as much with Cunningham and Cage.

Brown and Rauschenberg were involved in Judson Church together. Rauschenberg actually choreographed 13 works in the 1960s, and Trisha participated in several of those. We have a lot of photographs of her in his loft, wearing wedding dresses, eating saltines, all the esoteric things that he had his dancers do. Those were very much collaborative dialogues. And we also have correspondences in the archives all throughout their lives, and it’s not all about dance: It’s about personal things. I think they had this friendship that went well beyond collaboration.

Kirstin: Rauschenberg has a lifetime membership to the Trisha Brown Dance Company Board. Our bylaws say, “Lifetime Appointee.”

Francine: Rauschenberg was also keenly aware that choreographers and dancers were in a different economic bracket than visual artists. He tried to support those relationships in the ways that he could, to try to bridge that gap.

That’s something that the Rauschenberg Foundation has continued to put forth—you offer Dancer Emergency Grants, which provide funds for dancers who face dire financial emergencies, in addition to other resources. The Foundation states that “it builds on the legacy of the artist, emphasizing his belief that artists can drive social change.” I don’t think of Cunningham or Brown as particularly political artists—could each of you comment on this idea of “driving social change,” and how that might be interpreted through each artist’s legacy?

Francine: When you think about performance and collaboration, you don’t immediately think about social change but, social change is a shift in the way that people interact and live together. So, looking at altering norms and values and believed behaviors: that is what a collaboration is. Particularly when Rauschenberg was working with both Brown and Cunningham, he was really collaborating in the true sense. Bob said once that his costumes and sets could get him into trouble with Merce, so they were constantly negotiating and challenging each other to rethink norms. They were thinking outside of their field and disciplines. Both Merce and Trisha pushed the boundaries about how dance is perceived and seen. Then, you have an audience that is getting their boundaries pushed, and ideally, that can be pushed into how they think about other things.

Andrea: I love what you said about challenging the norm, Francine, and I think that the way Merce and John worked with chance was to challenge their own norms, creating possibilities. That was just built into their process of making dance. Then part of our mission for the Cunningham Trust today is to make the work more accessible and to create ways to enter into the work for people who don’t know about it or would like to try it.

Kirstin: I think everything that Francine and Andrea have said about pushing the norms, changing the way we look at dance, changing the way we look at a body on stage: this was change that Trisha was maybe not overtly pushing, but was in her spirit and her experimentation. Also, Trisha was working in New York during the ‘60s and ‘70s. She was a student at Mills College in the ‘50s. In the ‘50s, a woman going to school was studying education or nursing—you had very few options. For her to come out of Mills and decide that she was going to be an artist, that alone was a real pushing for social change. Trisha was never really overtly political, but I think her work, in some regards, was a political act, whether she wanted it to be or not.

Francine: I think it’s really important to look at the time frame, as you mentioned, Kirstin. What a shift in social change is now is different than what it was. We’re looking at how we take these things now and continue to adapt them so that it does continue to push forward.

I think it’s really important as legacy organizations, for us all to think of that. You want to keep the work alive in a contemporary sense. You change interpretations, leaving it open, so you’re able to present the material to an audience. Then, you let people come up with their own ideas and thoughts and takeaways from them. That’s what’s really important.

Several weeks after this interview, the Trisha Brown Dance Company was notified that its National Endowment for the Arts grant supporting this very centennial tour was revoked. The Trisha Brown Dance Company is one of numerous arts organizations who have recently lost funding as part of an effort by the Trump administration to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts.

In regard to this, Executive Director Kirstin Kapustik has provided the following statement:

Even as federal arts funding vanishes, Trisha Brown Dance Company will keep forging ahead—doing more with less, focusing on only what’s essential, and trusting that this hard work and sacrifice will pay off in the long run. We are pouring everything we have into this project because we believe in its power, the power of dance—and in our community’s strength to help carry it through.

Cecilia Whalen

Cecilia Whalen is a New York City-based dancer, choreographer, and writer. She is a graduate of the Martha Graham School and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In addition to her work with Fjord, her writing can be found in various publications, including Dance Magazine and Commonweal Magazine.

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