“Dancing with Bob,” Dancing in Time

By Garth Grimball

The Trisha Brown Dance Company has accomplished a heroic feat in producing “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham” with special guest Paul Taylor Dance Company. The project is in honor of Rauschenberg’s centennial and will tour nationally into 2026. Bringing together two dance companies to stage four works from three deceased choreographers with the original (and reconstructed) sets and costumes by one of the most famous visual artists of the twentieth century deserves applause on an administrative basis alone. Fortunately, the dancing deserved equal applause.

Opening the 2025 American Dance Festival season at Reynolds Theater, the program began with Brown’s Set and Reset (1983). Rauschenberg’s set was a UFO-ziggurat of semi-transparent white. Black and white television and media clips projected onto the structure. The side curtains were transparent black fabric with white lining. The set rose into the air and the seven dancers took the empty space like a spark to a fuse.

Describing the action and details of Brown’s dances can be challenging without metaphors. Her signature release technique and choreographic craft of overlapping motion provokes sensations as much as images. Rippling spines, folding joints, thrown limbs coalesce into energy evolving through space. Set and Reset is set to “Long Time No See” by Laurie Anderson, and her grooves and hooks perfectly match the propulsion of Brown’s choreography.

The dance and the dancing were so exciting that the set seemed inconsequential; if it were gone I don’t think it would be missed in terms of the experience of the dance. But seeing Brown’s work under televisual images did make me draw a comparison between her and film directors, specifically Robert Altman. Altman filmed large group scenes with overlapping conversations that blurred and obfuscated the meaning of each speaker, just as we would hear it in real life. In the absence of individual meaning, a sense of group dynamic, of world building emerged. There are solos and duets and trios within Set and Reset, but Brown’s deft sense of timing is Altmanesque: you don’t see everything, everything to see is there.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company shared two early works, 3 Epitaphs (1956) and Tracer (1962). 3 Epitaphs is a delightfully oddball haiku of a dance. Rauschenberg costumed the piece in black full-body unitards. The head coverings had reflective mirrors on the skulls, so the five dancers had no distinguishing features but can reflect like a disco ball. The music was early New Orleans Jazz recordings performed by the Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band. Taylor’s choreography used the sliding sounds of horns to punctuate moments of physical comedy. The dancers plodded forward with the spines curved far over their centers and their arms hanging low, or, skittered sideways with hips cocked back and arms bent like a praying mantis to the side. The dance evoked early American cartoons in its vocabulary and timing. 3 Epitaphs felt like something that wouldn’t be made today. Its oddness was refreshing.

Tracer is classic Taylor. There were parallel side assemblé, sternums lifted, high kicks with tilted torsos and attitude turns. James Tenney’s music was sparse, heightening the scrutiny of the dancers’ technical chops. Central to the dance is a solo Taylor made for himself that demanded a level of strength and technique that I imagine Taylor wanted to show off. Lee Duveneck met the demands well, as did Kristin Draucker, Jessica Ferretti and Payton Primer in choreography that takes the time to make sure you see all the choreography. Rauschenberg’s contribution was a set of one bicycle wheel. I’m not convinced of its impact.

The Brown company closed the program with Merce Cunningham’s Travelogue (1977). It was the dance that most realized the title “Dancing with Bob.” Rauschenberg’s set, Tantric Geography, is “an odd sort of trolley with a row of wooden chairs for seats. These are fixed between upturned bicycle wheels that don’t touch the ground. The dancers ride it as it rolls on hidden wheels, pulled by a rope” (NYT). And that’s just the opening. Two massive, colorful tapestries were dropped into the space. The dancers’ unitards were adjusted and added onto throughout the dance.

Travelogue is from the earlier part of Cunningham’s repertory in which most of the movement comes from the legs with arms that are mostly stationary. It is one of the dances infused with his and John Cage’s wry sense of humor. At one point the dancers enter with fabric hanging from the front and back of their pelvises. They hit a lunge and pulled the fabric wide like a peacock seduction and walked off. Cage’s Telephones and Birds was a score followed by three people who took turns calling customer service phone numbers and amplifying or muting their recorded messages.

The dancers were committed and adept performing Cunningham’s choreography, but as is often the case when companies stage his works, there was not enough time to embody the risk and depth available in his vocabulary. Spencer Weidie stood out in bringing a sense of boundlessness to a style that can feel very bound. Claude Johnson brought a cool calm to the iconic and loud solo in which the dancer has many empty aluminum cans strapped to their legs. The ensemble excelled in Cunningham’s unique style of partnering that is less a showcase of airtime or distance and more a play of limbs and touch.

“Dancing with Bob” is a thrilling time capsule of interdisciplinary collaboration. Time is the ultimate collaborator. In each dance time was changed by the skill of the choreographer. In every step time dissolved between all the dancers who keep these dances alive.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dancer based in Oakland. He is a regular contributor to Dance Media and SF Examiner/Nob Hill Gazette. He is the editor of ODC Dance Stories.