Highlighting an artistic collaboration that happened decades ago and still resonates with a large audience, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts welcomes a touring ensemble of dancers to the Bram Goldsmith Theater for “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage.” The four shows run this Thursday through Saturday, May 7-9, at 7:30 p.m. (and Saturday, May 9, at 2:30 p.m. as well).
Two of the three titular artists are groundbreaking choreographers who have collaborated with the celebrated visual master over several 20th century decades. Their legacy organizations, the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the Merce Cunningham Trust, maintain their namesake artist’s active presence across the globe since their deaths. Brown left us in 2017, Cunningham in 2009 and Rauschenberg in 2008.
The evening includes a pair of works created by the revolutionary movement directors in league with the visual artist and wardrobe and set designer Bob Rauschenberg. The Cunningham collective will enact Merce Cunningham’s 1977’s “Travelogue.” Not seen since 1979, this 33-minute adventure for eight movers is described in promotional materials as a comedic vaudevillian showcase in which dancers absurdly play within a stage set that takes on new shapes with fans, tin cans, banners, flags and chiffon scarves. Accompanied by co-creator and longtime sound and music partner John Cage’s “Telephone and Bird,” this improvised and always unique adventure takes place in an aural landscape filled with avian sounds, dialing telephones and automated voice messages. In true Cage-ian fashion, the noise level, duration and a randomized number-generating musical(?) instrument parallel what promotional materials describe as “deadpan, but brilliantly expressive” activity on the stage.
The Trisha Brown Dance Company will then perform Brown’s “Set and Reset” (1983) to music by the highly acclaimed new music composer/performer Laurie Anderson. Occurring below and within Rauschenberg’s creative sculptures, costumes and designs, this one-of-a-kind movement explosion “ripples with hypnotic, fluid energy to a bewitching electronic score.”
—Benn Widdey, Culture Spot LA
LOCATION:
9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills 90210
TICKETS:
$43 – $120
https://tickets.thewallis.org/20746/21113
INFO:
https://trishabrowncompany.org
https://thewallis.org/show-details/dancing-with-bob-rauschenberg-brown-cunnin-onstage
Photo by Ben McKeown courtesy of the American Dance Festival