Trisha Brown Company Honors Rauschenberg with "Dancing with Bob" at Harris Theater

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Review: DANCING WITH BOB: RAUSCHENBERG, BROWN AND CUNNINGHAM ONSTAGE at Harris Theater

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Thursday evening offered up an embarrassment of artistic riches as the Harris Theater welcomed the Trisha Brown Company in their evening program, Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage.

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Bob is Robert Rauschenberg, the famed multimedia artist who worked extensively with foundational post-modernist chorographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Rauschenberg contributed stage design, costumes, and sculptural elements to many performance works, and was deeply connected to the world of dance. His art provided the through line for the evening, which proved a testament to great collaborations across artistic mediums.

The program opened with Brown’s Set and Reset, originally performed in 1983. For the first few moments, Rauschenberg’s sculpture with video Elastic Carrier (Shiner) is the only visible item onstage, a 3D cube flanked by two pyramids, each covered in a light fabric. Projected onto these shapes is archival black and white news footage. As the sculpture raises off the floor of the stage and into the air, where it remains for the rest of the performance, the wave of dancing beings. In contrast to Elastic Carrier’s crisp geometry, Rauschenberg’s costumes are all liquid: soft, semi-sheer, and loose, they ripple out from the dancers’ limbs, floating for a split second of hang time, creating almost an echo or motion blur that lingered even as the dancers, in near constant motion, were already moving on.

This is the trick of Set and Reset: there is no set and no reset. Once the dance begins, the dancers are in near-constant motion. Brown’s choreography is characterized by pedestrian movement and a near-mechanical breakdown of simple gestures, like a bent elbow flexing and extending as it rebounds from the side of the body. And yet this description makes it sound too simple, too. The juxtaposition of the rigid geometry hanging above the stage with the soft translucence of the costumes and the sheer curtains that flank the sides and back of the stage (rending portions of “offstage” as visible as center-center), the crisp angles of Brown’s choreographed limbs and walking patterns against the constant liquid motion and morphing of bodies, the crystalline moments of a duet or trio in perfect synchronization and the delicious slippage of the moments of near synchronization, the intricate and specific patterns across the floor bumped up against the nonchalance of the dancers, all excellent: all of these oppositional pairs made for an abundance of viewing choice. And that’s without even mentioning vanguard artist and musician Laurie Anderson ’s pulsating, looping score for the piece, titled Long Time No See. Both mechanical and evocative of the human heartbeat, Anderson’s marriage of the human voice with electronic rhythms underscored everything organic and inorganic happening visually. Let your eye wander to the sculpture hanging over the proceedings or follow one dancer across the stage and through the wings, into one moment and out onto the next, colliding with and separating from fellow dancers along the way. Or perhaps just let it all wash over you like a wave, ebbing and flowing in that continuous liquid pulsing.

The evening offered yet another juxtaposition (I’ve lost count) in the second work on the bill, Merce Cunningham’s Travelogue. Choreographed in 1977, the piece had not been performed since 1979 until Brown’s company revived it for this program in 2025. Travelogue carries a sly sense of Cunningham’s deadpan humor, alongside his signature clean lines and strong, articulated torso movements. Watching on Thursday, I wondered if perhaps Travelogue hadn’t been revived in decades simply because of how silly the piece is; the episodic, vaudevillian antics of the very game ensemble were at times striking, beautifully executed, and also just really goofy. The score, titled Telephones and Birds by avant garde composer and frequent Cunningham collaborator John Cage , sets the scene by providing an ever-shifting soundscape of live voicemail message boxes interspersed with recordings of bird calls. My favorite moment was when dancer Claude CJ Johnson appeared onstage for a solo, jumping high into the air and holding sustained attitude arabesques, all with a harness of at least a dozen metal cans strapped to his waist and legs. Johnson continued to reverberate, quite literally, when he exited the stage, the soft clanging of the cans audible as he presumably removed them before his next entrance, another echo alongside all the reverberating phone and bird calls.

Beyond the bright unitards and various accoutrements (a scarf, monochrome legwarmers, rainbow colored fanning skirts that looked like the extended frill of a lizard) that the dancers acquired and discarded throughout the dance, Rauschenberg also furnished beautiful, billowing fabric panels that hung from the rafters, and a sort of conveyer sculpture, titled Tantric Geography, with alternating chairs and solo bicycle wheels. The sculpture, on a long platform almost the width of the stage, was wheeled out at the very top of the piece with the company sitting in the chairs, and it remained visible for the remainder of the performance.

One more return to juxtaposition: Cunningham and Cage, famously, collaborated closely but worked independently. Cunningham’s great legacy is a commitment to randomness and chance in his dancemaking. Cage and Rauschenberg and Cunningham all developed their contributions to the work separately, creating the space for happy accidents and strange dissonances when the stage design elements, score, and choreography all finally came together. Brown and Rauschenberg, however, collaborated very closely through all stages of artistic development, sharing ideas for all aspects of the work and building the artistic whole together.

This is what the great post-modernists have to offer us now: the reminder that collaboration does not follow a single pathway, that artistic cohesion can emerge from many different means. Both dances exhibited a deep trust of the audience: follow what you wish to follow, choose what you want to hear or see, make sense of what you want to make sense of, or not. Dancing with Bob served as a wonderful reminder of what can happen when great artists of many disciplines allow themselves to bump up against one another and create. My only regret is that the run at Harris was so brief – this thought-provoking and expertly staged program deserves more time with a wider audience.

Photos by Michelle Reid.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/article/Review-DANCING-WITH-BOB-RAUSCHENBERG-BROWN-AND-CUNNINGHAM-ONSTAGE-at-Harris-Theater-20260919)._