A stuffed goat on a platform, with a tire tutuing its waist; paneled Combines that could double as changing screens—Robert Rauschenberg seemed always to be creating for the stage, and he often was. For a decade beginning in the 1950s—their striving Black Mountain days—he served as Merce Cunningham’s set, costume, and lighting designer in what he called “the most excruciating collaboration, but the most exciting, because nobody knew what anybody else was doing.” His collaborations with Trisha Brown—“as if he lived inside of me, or me inside of him,” the choreographer remembered—extended for decades. Hence, for the artist’s centennial this year, there is Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage, a touring show that inaugurates this summer’s American Dance Festival, with special guest Paul Taylor’s works also in attendance. The Cunningham contribution demonstrates a shared love of the unlikely conjunction. Travelogue (1977) features mounted bicycle wheels (big wink to Duchamp) and tin cans accessorizing a dancer’s legs like jangly chaps. For Brown, Rauschenberg emphasized the ephemeral. The scrim overhead for Set and Reset (1983) broadcasts scraps of what is by now very old news as the dancers perform a disappearing act below. —Apollinaire Scherr