Trisha Brown’s Rauschenberg Collaborations Return to the Stage for “Pelican Gala”
A pair of dances by American choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017) — one of Robert Rauschenberg’s closest artistic collaborators — are set to be performed as part of “Pelican Gala,” a program that revisits the fertile crosscurrents between postwar visual art and experimental dance.
The title itself carries a personal provenance: Brown gave “Pelican” its name. In a reciprocal gesture that speaks to the era’s porous boundaries between disciplines, Rauschenberg named Brown’s work “Skunk Cabbage, Salt Grass and Waders” (1967), a piece that has not been staged in nearly 60 years.
Rauschenberg’s presence in Brown’s early orbit was not merely conceptual. He appeared among the early cast of “Rulegame 5” (1964), a spare, rule-driven work in which five performers enact a group game structured by seven lines laid out on the ground. The choreography’s premise — everyday behavior translated into a public, legible system — captures a defining impulse of the period: to treat ordinary actions as material, and to test how meaning changes when those actions are framed for an audience.
The return of these works under the “Pelican Gala” banner arrives amid broader commemorations of Rauschenberg’s centennial year. While the gala foregrounds performance, it also points to a larger story about how artists and choreographers of the 1960s and beyond built new models of collaboration, often refusing the idea that art should remain sealed within a single medium.
That spirit of inquiry is part of what makes the program feel newly resonant. “It’s such a moment in time,” Kapustik said, reflecting on what the works preserve: “this exploratory, experimental way of working, this way of taking the everyday and putting it on the stage for people to examine, engage with, find joy in.”
The centennial programming continues beyond the gala. Several major exhibitions tied to the anniversary remain on view through spring, and the Trisha Brown Dance Company is scheduled to keep touring its “Dancing With Bob” program — honoring Brown, Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham — through 2027.
Taken together, the performances and exhibitions underscore a legacy that still feels contemporary: an insistence that art can be built from the ordinary, and that collaboration can be a method for reimagining how creative work meets the world outside the studio.
