Skip to Content

Arts Intel Report

Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage

Charles Atlas photograph of Merce Cunningham’s Travelogue, 1977.

May 7–9, 2026
9390 N Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90210

For a decade beginning in their early, striving, Black Mountain days, Robert Rauschenberg 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 extended for decades. So, for the artist’s centennial this year, there is Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage, a national touring show with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. The Cunningham contribution, Travelogue (1977), demonstrates a shared love of the unlikely conjunction. It features Rauschenberg’s 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

Photograph by Charles Atlas, 1977. Courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.