Rare Rauschenberg Experimental Dance Revived at Brooklyn Roller Rink

The New York-based Trisha Brown Dance Company is reanimating the first-ever dance that Robert Rauschenberg choreographed for the first time in 60 years. Next month, the late legendary choreographer’s company will take over the vintage Xanadu roller rink in Brooklyn to stage Rauschenberg’s Pelican (1963) for one night alongside more two dances by Brown. The event, “Pelican Gala,” coincides with the centennial of Rauschenberg’s birth.

Pelican arose from a fluke. Program materials for 1963’s Pop Festival in Washington, D.C., incorrectly said that Rauschenberg would present a dance. But, the artist had already started intertwining his practice with dance a decade prior, joining forces with his creative compatriot Merce Cunningham at Asheville’s Black Mountain College. Rauschenberg, never one to turn down a cross-genre adventure, rose to the occasion in 1963 by choreographing Pelican.

The dance debuted on May 9, 1963 at the America on Wheels roller rink in Washington, D.C., as part of a showcase presented by the Greenwich Village-based Judson Dance Theater—which Brown helped found. Rauschenberg staged Pelican again at the First New York Theatre Rally in 1965. The production has lain dormant since. Two years and 13 dances later, Rauschenberg stopped choreographing.

“There’s only two minutes of material that exists,” the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s executive director Kirstin Kapustik told me of over the phone. Notes, testimony, and more, though, say Pelican featured three performers in gray sweatsuits. Rauschenberg re-learned how to skate to partake, opposite Swiss artist Per Olof Ultvedt. Both men bore parachutes evoking Rauschenberg’s interest in flight. As they glided throughout the rink on skates and bikes, Cunningham company dancer Carolyn Brown performed en pointe. A collage of found sounds like ringing telephones and honking horns provided the score.

The Trisha Brown Dance Company has tasked its former dancer Tara Lorenzen with reimagining Pelican, after visiting with the Rauschenberg Foundation‘s archivist Francine Snyder. Former Merce Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener will don their rollerskates for her revived rendition, and New York City Ballet soloist Ashley Hod, her pointe shoes.

Two dances by Brown, one of Rauschenberg’s closest collaborators, will appear at “Pelican Gala.” Brown gave Pelican its title, in fact. In turn, Rauschenberg named her work, Skunk Cabbage, Salt Grass and Waders (1967), which hasn’t hit the stage in nearly 60 years. Rauschenberg also appeared amidst the early cast for Brown’s Rulegame 5 (1964), wherein five performers play a group game dictated by seven lines laid out on the ground.

All these years later, provides a poignant reminder that artists of every generation have forged new ways to relate their practices with the world beyond the studio. “It’s such a moment in time,” Kapustik reflected, “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.”

There’s still more in store surrounding Rauschenberg’s 100th year. Several of the celebration’s landmark exhibitions remain on view through spring, and the Trisha Brown Dance company will keep performing its “Dancing With Bob” program honoring Brown, Rauschenberg, and Cunningham through 2027.