Dancing With Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown & Cunningham<\/a>\u2014it\u2019s \u201cso whack, so vaudevillian, so fun,\u201d says the company\u2019s executive director Kirstin Kapustik. John Cage\u2019s score weaves in bird calls, recorded telephone calls, and dial-a-thons; the Rauschenberg scenography includes a moveable train with chairs and bicycle wheels, billowing fabric backdrops, and costume elements that fan out like umbrella spokes. Cunningham\u2019s notes on the choreography were scant, says Andrea Weber, who oversees licensing and operations for the Merce Cunningham Trust, but \u201che kept talking about procession\u201d\u2014in literal terms, as with the arrival of a clothesline, but there\u2019s also a sense that he and Rauschenberg were venturing into zany new territory.<\/p>\n\u201cI just see these as moments of joy coming together,\u201d says Francine Synder, director of archives for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is in the midst of a centennial celebration of the artist\u2019s birth. Remounting these stage works has its practical challenges. The newly produced Set and Reset costumes alone involved a deep-dive into various holdings\u2014unearthing Rauschenberg\u2019s now-unusable silkscreens, combing for photo negatives, analyzing earlier costume remnants\u2014in order to refashion the fabric. But there\u2019s value in reanimating historical dances. \u201cMerce really embraced that,\u201d Weber says, explaining that he would welcome in a new generation of interpreters and often tweak the choreography to fit. And in this age of doomscrolling, there\u2019s a lesson, too, in the easygoing friendships facilitated by the lo-fi technology of their day. Brown used to answer the telephones at Cunningham\u2019s studio. \u201cThat\u2019s how she and Rauschenberg met,\u201d says Kapustik. That\u2019s right, Snyder replies: \u201cTo the sadness of our archives, he loved talking on the phone!\u201d<\/p>\n
Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels continues through March 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Anne Van Aerschot As for the mood set by Merce Cunningham\u2019s newly revived Travelogue (1977)\u2014which Trisha Brown…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4982,9,11,10,60727,19769,990],"class_list":{"0":"post-144871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-storytypereporting-story","13":"tag-textabovecenterfullbleed","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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