Changing Times

In Trisha Brown's 1983 “Set and Reset,” dancers float in and out of the wings like bubbles. Their swinging arms and bobbing heads bounce playfully in and out of the floor and in and out of each other, with groups forming then dissipating like clouds of mist. They seem to walk on air and literally on walls (see the dance's opening scene, where a woman is carried sideways, her feet gliding across the upstage scrim). Laurie Anderson's iconic score, “Long Time No See,” casts its titular words like a spell, and the audience is transported into a shining, delicate, ephemeral universe where movement ripples across the stage as water does beneath a skipping stone.

Performance

Trisha Brown Dance Company: “Set and Reset” / “Travelogue” by Trisha Brown

Place

Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, February 26-28, 2026

Words

Cecilia Whalen

Savannah Gaillard and Patrick Needham in “Set and Reset” by Trisha Brown. Photograph by Nir Arieli

A lot of “Set and Reset's” sparkle comes from Brown's distinctive movement vocabulary that uses gravity to create effects of falling, recovering, appearing, and disappearing. A good portion of that sparkle, though, is literal: “Set and Reset” features glittering sets and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, the American artist who celebrated his posthumous centennial last year. For a special centennial celebration, the Trisha Brown Dance Company has been touring “Set and Reset” with Rauschenberg's original pieces, paired with a restaging of Merce Cunningham's 1977 “Travelogue,” another major Rauschenberg collaboration which hasn't been performed since 1979. The program, “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown, & Cunningham Onstage” made its way back home to New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, February 26-28 as part of the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections Festival.

Rauschenberg's sets and costumes for “Set and Reset” are made out of sheer, translucent blue/gray fabric that is printed with various designs. Flowing tops and pants hang over the dancers' bodies; the set redefines the wings as an in-between space rather than a place to hide, with long, thin pieces of the fabric that shade the dancers while allowing them to remain visible.

“Set and Reset” is Brown and Rauschenberg's most famous collaboration, but it wasn't their first. By 1983, Brown and Rauschenberg were longtime friends. They met as young artists in the downtown New York dance and art scene and went on to collaborate in numerous performance works.

Trisha Brown Dance Company in “Travelogue” by Trisha Brown. Photograph by Stephanie Berger

Before meeting Brown in the 1960s, Rauschenberg had attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina where Cunningham and John Cage were instructors. Rauschenberg participated in the development of the first “happenings” and soon became a frequent collaborator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for several years afterward.

Rauschenberg eventually separated from the Cunningham Company, embarking on what would become his monumental solo career. “Travelogue,” which was restaged for this event by former Cunningham dancers Andrea Weber and Marcie Munnerlyn, was the first collaboration that Rauschenberg did with Cunningham after about a ten-year hiatus.

It must have been a happy reunion: “Travelogue” is a party.

The stage is first lit by a glowing red. Projected onto a backdrop, the color reflects onto the stage, creating what looks like an enormous red carpet. The guests arrive as silhouettes, seated in chairs on a train-like Rauschenberg piece, a bicycle wheel placed between each dancer.

When the lights go up, the dancers hop out of their chairs, scooping and swaying their arms and tapping their feet. In colorful unitards, they perform to Cage's “Telephones and Birds,” which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of telephone and bird sounds. The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s tall, long-legged Burr Johnson—who dances with wit and spontaneity—led the company in what was a role originally danced by Cunningham. In a pale pink unitard, Johnson transformed himself into a rooster, with quick flapping arm movements and abrupt rib isolations. He thrusted his hips in an exaggerated tango and led the group in quick prancing.

Claude CJ Johnson in “Travelogue” by Trisha Brown. Photograph by Nir Arieli

Rauschenberg went all out for “Travelogue.” The opening chair train is followed by large, multicolored quilt-like flags, which descend from the ceiling, sometimes accentuating and sometimes concealing the dancers. Circular patterned skirts are hidden between the dancers' legs and flashed open and closed like peacock feathers. Dancer Claude CJ Johnson radiated on the stage in Rauschenberg's can pants, a costume piece made of whole tin cans which clang brilliantly with every step and leap.

Brown and Cunningham have incredibly different—and distinctive—movement styles, which makes “Dancing with Bob” all the more fascinating. Cunningham's technique is based on clear lines, curves, and arches, each achieved muscularly and with immediacy, while Brown's movements rarely arrive in any shape, preferring to allow the weight of gravity to thread movements together. Brown—who was almost two decades younger than Cunningham— certainly was influenced by the elder postmodern master's work (in fact, she used to work the phones at his studio). There's no evidence, however, that they ever had much dialogue.

In “Dancing with Bob,” it is exciting—and surprising—to find links between the two works. For example, when groups of dancers assemble and reconfigure, changing levels or positions to create a singular transforming image in “Set and Reset,” we are reminded of similar patterns in “Travelogue,” where tableaux are created and recreated.

And in “Travelogue,” when the company of dancers wearing a long, connected sheet in an extended line compress together like a slinky, we are reminded of Brown's “Spanish Dance” from the early 1970s, in which dancers in a straight line slowly accumulate together.

Brown and Cunningham, and Rauschenberg, too, were similarly connected by a commitment to exploring the present, the fleeting nature of life and of time. “Set and Reset,” like much of Brown's work, came out of improvisations, Cunningham's work with chance procedures accentuated an ever-changing reality, and Rauschenberg, whose pieces often incorporated objects from everyday life, said that he viewed his art as a way of “reporting the present state of things.”

What does it mean, then, to restage works that are inherently connected to the present, now that their presents are past? Especially given our tumultuous “present state of things” here in the US, I began to wonder what the artists would have thought about their own work being performed in 2026.

There is plenty that is enduring about “Set and Reset” and “Travelogue,” notably clarity of style, a complexity of relationship both to the space and between the dancers, and sheer ingenuity. These elements are lacking in much of contemporary choreography today.

And yet, I wonder what Brown, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg might think about performing these works in this particular moment—a moment defined by violence, volatility, and a United States government that practices an obsessive and perverted nostalgia?

Undoubtedly, if any of the three artists were still living, they would change some things around.

How can the integrity of the artists' original works be upheld, while furthering the artists' unwavering commitment to change? This is the lasting question for any legacy organization, and one that the three artists' foundations have certainly considered. Given today's unprecedented times in the US, it is a question that begs renewal.

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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Changing Times

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