There seems to be no stopping the juggernaut of the Robert Rauschenberg Centenary, which, beginning last year, has already greatly elevated the artist’s profile and introduced him to a new generation. Next up is Set and Reset. It’s a homecoming for this postmodern masterpiece, a collaborative performance with Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson. It originally debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983 as part of the Next Wave Festival. Later this month, it touches down again in that very venue as part of the stellar Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels program.

Opening night performance of the current Set and Reset revival, courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company.

The performances run at BAM from February 26 through 28. Rauschenberg also created the scenography, including Elastic Carrier (Shiner), a sculptural structure containing four projectors that screen films he collaged from Library of Congress instructional footage, drawing on early environmental science and industrial imagery. He also designed the stage and the silkscreened costumes.

Rauschenberg wrote this about the trio’s upcoming project in 1982: “Working with both Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson will be one of the most unique theatrical challenges in my career. None of us are into extravagant spectacles. We all three are singularly used to our self-made one man shows, which always include space and economy as part of the aesthetics. I am well aware of the independence of each artist. The risk and expertise rely on what kind of room we make for each other. No one could be more curious about this than I am.”

View of dancers Trisha Brown and Stephen Petronio for a production of Brown’s ‘Set and Reset,’ New York, New York, 1984. (Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

A Homecoming

Set and Reset is based on improvisation, which was then recorded and choreographed to Anderson’s at-times pummeling, synth-driven soundtrack. The Trisha Brown Dance Company will pair the benchmark Set and Reset with another dance work for which Rauschenberg designed the set, 1977’s Travelogue, which hasn’t been performed by a professional company since 1979. That piece was a collaboration with Merce Cunningham, an intimate and Black Mountain College compatriot of Rauschenberg. It marked a reunion of sorts—their first collaboration since 1965, following a pause in their relationship.

The avant-garde composer John Cage’s Travelogue score, Telephones and Birds, employed recordings of actual bird songs. Both pieces are part of the program Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage. The program next travels to Beverly Hills, where the tour will wrap in April.

Opening night of the current revival of Travelogue, courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company.

Rauschenberg and Brown collaborated for five decades, but their acquaintance extended back even farther. “They met while Trisha was a student at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio,” said Jamie Scott, the troupe’s programming director who worked on the project. “She was answering the phones there and Rauschenberg would call and she’d chat with him. Then he and Trisha got involved directly through Judson Dance Theater. She asked him to design her first set, Glacial Decoy, in 1979, and that was the beginning of this beautiful artistic friendship.”

She continued, “Going back and looking at their letters to each other, the interviews they’ve done, and the amount of artistic admiration between them, there’s a palpable love and friendship infused in the building of these works. He collaborated on the lighting, scenery, and costume design for several of her pieces. Set and Reset was probably one of her most iconic works. The visual arts are really part of the fabric of the dance and how it operates.”

Opening night of the current revival of Travelogue, courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company.

Preserving a Masterpiece

In 2022, London’s Tate Museum acquired the original set, costumes, and centerpiece sculpture of Set and Reset. “It was very important to Trisha that these works were preserved,” Scott said. “Having them placed in such an important institution mattered. The idea was that they would be activated by a local dance company, but that has proved difficult, because maintaining a dance is quite different from maintaining objects.”

The company worked closely with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to recreate the sets and costumes. “It was extremely challenging,” said the foundation’s archives director, Francine Snyder. “I can’t underscore that enough. Rauschenberg very much created on the fly. We don’t have project files for his costumes or sets. We recreate them by looking at everything we can find in the archives, and we’re fortunate to have had a lot of evidence.”

Opening night performance of the current Set and Reset revival, courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company.

It was a painstaking and exacting process. Snyder and her team found the original silkscreens used to make the Set and Reset costumes. “We weren’t able to use them,” she explained, “but we could look at the images on them and go back to the negatives.” The photographs depicted the everyday urban landscape. “As far as we can tell, they were all taken in New York City in 1983—shower drains, iron fences, stone floors, windows and curtains, barbed wire, rope, fire hydrants, truck details, window cornices.”

Both Rauschenberg and Brown specialized in blurring the line between the art world and the real world. Their similarities didn’t end there.

“Rauschenberg choreographed 13 works himself between 1963 and 1970,” Snyder said. “His choreographic work was very short and very experimental—closer to Judson Dance Theater, where improvisation challenged norms of what performance could be.”

Set and Reset (1983), choreographed by Trisha Brown. Performers: Trisha Oesterling, Trisha Brown, and Wil Swanson. Photograph © Mark Hanauer, courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company.

If it’s one thing Rauschenberg’s centenary has taught us, it’s the artist’s extraordinary scope and his boundary-pushing across mediums. “He’s incredibly multifaceted,” Snyder said. “After working in his archives for over 10 years, I can say there is not much he didn’t try. He even made some music, which I would not recommend.”

Seen in this light, Rauschenberg’s centenary sharpens into focus what was always there. “Performance was integral to his art-making practice,” Snyder said. “Even the paintings and sculptures people consider traditional have a performative aspect. That performance element runs through everything he did.”