Photo: Anne Van Aerschot
As for the mood set by Merce Cunningham’s newly revived Travelogue (1977)—which Trisha Brown Dance Company will perform alongside Set and Reset as part of the program Dancing With Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown & Cunningham—it’s “so whack, so vaudevillian, so fun,” says the company’s executive director Kirstin Kapustik. John Cage’s score weaves in bird calls, recorded telephone calls, and dial-a-thons; the Rauschenberg scenography includes a moveable train with chairs and bicycle wheels, billowing fabric backdrops, and costume elements that fan out like umbrella spokes. Cunningham’s notes on the choreography were scant, says Andrea Weber, who oversees licensing and operations for the Merce Cunningham Trust, but “he kept talking about procession”—in literal terms, as with the arrival of a clothesline, but there’s also a sense that he and Rauschenberg were venturing into zany new territory.
“I just see these as moments of joy coming together,” says Francine Synder, director of archives for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is in the midst of a centennial celebration of the artist’s birth. Remounting these stage works has its practical challenges. The newly produced Set and Reset costumes alone involved a deep-dive into various holdings—unearthing Rauschenberg’s now-unusable silkscreens, combing for photo negatives, analyzing earlier costume remnants—in order to refashion the fabric. But there’s value in reanimating historical dances. “Merce really embraced that,” Weber says, explaining that he would welcome in a new generation of interpreters and often tweak the choreography to fit. And in this age of doomscrolling, there’s a lesson, too, in the easygoing friendships facilitated by the lo-fi technology of their day. Brown used to answer the telephones at Cunningham’s studio. “That’s how she and Rauschenberg met,” says Kapustik. That’s right, Snyder replies: “To the sadness of our archives, he loved talking on the phone!”
Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels continues through March 21.