DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — This week’s performances by the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on Feb. 26–28 are a Brooklyn homecoming.
The companyhas been touring the country with their new show, “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage,” since June 2025. The show, which is now in Brooklyn, honors Robert Rauschenberg’s centenary. The artist would have been 100 years old last October.
“Dancing with Bob” is a remarkable union of postmodern powerhouses. Rauschenberg designed the set and costumes for “Set and Reset” and “Travelogue,” the show’s two dances.
Postmodern dance legend Trisha Brown choreographed the former, set to music by musician Laurie Anderson. The lesser-known 1977 work, “Travelogue,” choreographed by dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham in collaboration with composer John Cage, is being performed by TBDC for the first time.
For “Dancing with Bob,” the Trisha Brown Dance Company is performing Cunningham’s “Travelogue” — the first time the dance has been performed since 1979. Photo: Ben McKeown/American Dance Festival.
TBDC developed “Dancing with Bob” in collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Trust.
Brown and Cunningham, both major figures in postmodern dance, each shared long artistic relationships with Rauschenberg, working across dance and visual art. Brown was awork-study student in Cunningham’s studio when she met Rauschenberg. The performances mark a homecoming for all three.
BAM Artistic Director Amy Cassello said they have a long history with Brown, Cunningham and Rauschenberg.
Trisha Brown. Photo: Mark Ginot.
“Set and Reset” holds a special significance for BAM. The premiere of the dance was acentral piece of BAM’s first Next Wave Festival in 1983.
In BAM’sannual report from that year, “Set and Reset” was cited as one of the most “eagerly anticipated” events of the inaugural Next Wave Festival. That performance, which the Wall Street Journal at the time called “high-powered theater,” made “Set and Reset” an instant classic.
“Arguably, ‘Set and Reset’ is one of the five greatest dances ever made,” said Cassello.
“‘Set and Reset’ is probably Trisha’s most iconic work,” agreed TBDC Executive Director Kirstin Kapustik. “What you see looks very spontaneous. It looks very much like it’s happening in the moment, but it is all very set and built from an improvisational model. For the dancers, it’s such a joy. This piece is a dream to perform.”
This show brings “Set and Reset” back into TBDC’s repertoire for the first time in four years. It will be the first time in a decade that TBDC will dance the program at BAM and the first time the “Set and Reset” has been performed since Brown’s passing in 2017.
“It’s an honor to be presented at BAM once again with this work,” said Kapustik. “The community, the leadership there — there’s a real love for artists, New York artists, and a desire to keep this perpetuating forward. That’s the goal for all of us: to keep doing it even with the funding challenges that we all face right now.”
“Dancing with Bob” comes to BAM this week in part through the sponsorship of French jewelerVan Cleef & Arpels as part of their annual New YorkDance Reflections festival.
BAM was a longtime home for Trisha Brown, who came up artistically in the avant-garde downtown Manhattan scene around theJudson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Brown made herBAM debut in 1968 as part of “Intermedia,” an event showcasing the work of interdisciplinary artists from the downtown scene.
The Trisha Brown Dance Company performs “Travelogue” in Rauschenberg’s brightly-colored costumes. Photo: Ben McKeown/American Dance Festival.
“It was such an incredibly fertile ground. These little happenings and events were the precursor to Next Wave,” said Cassello. “It’s inextricably linked, the Trisha Brown Dance Company history and BAM’s history.”
After she founded the TBDC in 1970, the company performed several times at BAM, beginning in 1976.
A major company show in 1981 included the premiere of “Son of Gone Fishin’” and a performance of “Glacial Decoy,” Brown’s first formalcollaboration with Rauschenberg.
“Set and Reset” was repeatedly performed at BAM, sometimes inmajor retrospectives of Brown’s work, cementing its status as a postmodern masterpiece.
The last time the TBDC performed the iconic dance at BAM in 2016, it seemed as if it might be the piece’slast staging in Brooklyn. At the time, the company said it didn’t expect to perform Brown’s choreographed works for the proscenium stage (traditional stage) again.
“We all thought this was goodbye for the Trisha Brown Dance Company,” said Cassello. “She was not well at the time, but she did come out and take a bow. It was amazing because she actually did a movement, a gesture, her signature. It was like, wow, this is history before us.”
Luckily, it was not to be the final goodbye. Now, a decade later, “Set and Reset” is presented once more at the Howard Gilman Opera House, BAM’s largest stage, which seats over 2,000.
The importance of BAM to the TBDC over the years has been in part due to the practical requirements of these proscenium works.
The Howard Gilman Opera House is one of the few dance spaces in New York that can accommodate Rauschenberg’s hanging,three-dimensional set, which he named “Elastic Carrier (Shiner).”
“There are numerous dance theaters in New York City, but the majority of them don’t have a large fly house,” said Kapustik, referring to the rigging system above a stage.
Nor could Cunningham’s little-performed “Travelogue,” with its kinetic, object-filled Rauschenberg set “Tantric Geography,” fit in a smaller theater without so much backstage space.
In 1983, when “Set and Reset” first took the stage, the Howard Gilman Opera House was BAM’s only space. As the institution has expanded into a campus over the past 50 years, BAM now weighs both the requirements of a piece and audience interest when deciding what to stage at the Gilman.
“The Ballet Marseille was just here, and you couldn’t put that set on the Harvey [Theater] stage,” said Cassello. “They had 16 dancers. Also, there are 2000 people eager to come see it.”
These set pieces were one of the reasons why bringing “Set and Reset” back into TBDC’s repertoire was a complicated proposition.
In 2022, the entirety of the Rauschenberg scenic design and costuming for “Set and Reset” was donated to theTate Modern museum in London, and they had to be reconstructed fromarchival evidence to re-stage the piece.
Dancers from the Trisha Brown Dance Company sit on the set piece, entitled “Tantric Geography,” that Rauschenberg built for Merce Cunningham’s “Travelogue.” Photo: Ben McKeown/American Dance Festival.
Another challenge was reconstructing a dance so uniquely Brown’s that the late choreographerdanced it herself more often than not.
Original company member Eva Karczag once saidin an interview, “I think the most profound way she taught me was through osmosis — watching her, sensing her … dancing with her.”
It wasn’t until 2022, when Tate Modern exhibited Rauschenberg’s set, that dancers from another companywere allowed to stage the piece at all.
“The body-to-body transmission of this art form in particular is really important,” said Kapustik. “It has to be taught person to person.”
“Set and Reset” has been passed down by dancers, like TBDC Associate Artistic Director Carolyn Lucas, who performed the work alongside Brown.
These dancers “take the time to deepen [the company’s] understanding of how Trisha created these works and for it to start to become a part of their body, their practice and how they engage with it,” explained Kapustik.
“In 1983, I’m sure it was thrilling,” said Cassello. “And we’ll have that, too, but it’s very different, because now we know what it is. Now, it’s an iconic piece.”
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