For a short time, Rauschenberg made dances. He used roller skates, pointe shoes and parachute wings for “Pelican” (1963), now reimagined by Trisha Brown’s company.
The New York-based Trisha Brown Dance Company is reanimating the first-ever dance that Robert Rauschenberg choreographed for the first time in 60 years. Next month, the late legendary choreographer’s company will take over the vintage Xanadu roller rink in Brooklyn to stage Rauschenberg’s Pelican (1963) for one night alongside more two dances by Brown. The event, “Pelican Gala,” coincides with the centennial of Rauschenberg’s birth.
The Trisha Brown Dance Company is presenting a stellar double bill of Rauschenberg-designed works by Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown.
Watch the Trisha Brown Dance Company stage a snippet of the choreographer’s 1983 piece “Set and Reset.”
The 2026 edition of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels returns to New York with a program celebrating the profound legacy of Robert Rauschenberg. The festival highlights the artist’s enduring ties to the dance world and marks the Robert Rauschenberg Centenary, reaffirming his influence across visual and performing arts.
Dance
9. See Trisha Brown Dance Company
Long time no see.
BAM, February 26 through 28.
In the 1970s, this choreographer’s dancers walked on walls, stepping down the sides of Soho buildings and galleries strapped to ropes and harnesses. In the ’80s, she decided the BAM stage would be interesting enough, and it became the birthplace of her idiosyncratic masterpiece Set and Reset. The piece, with a score by Laurie Anderson and stage design by Robert Rauschenberg, will surely feel as new in late February as it did in 1983. —Rachel Stone
The New York downtown scene of the sixties and seventies was a place of overlapping friendships and studio space, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg was at the center of it. Rauschenberg’s designs brought a witty, even Surrealist edge to the works of the choreographer Merce Cunningham; later, Rauschenberg worked with the younger Trisha Brown. Almost nine years after her death, Brown’s Trisha Brown Dance Company performs her silvery, fluid “Set and Reset” (1983), to a memorable score by Laurie Anderson, paired with Cunningham’s “Travelogue” (1977), for which Rauschenberg created a performance arena that included bicycle wheels, flags, and tin cans—everything but the kitchen sink.—Marina Harss (BAM; Feb. 26-28.)
The iconic collaboration with Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson comes home, reaffirming Rauschenberg’s deep ties to the dance world.
