In a 1982 letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, the artist Robert Rauschenberg recommended two soon-to-be collaborators for grants. “Working with both Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson will be one of the most unique theatrical challenges of my career,” he wrote in tidy block letters, taking some liberties with spelling.
The project before them—Set and Reset, a piece slated to premiere the following year, during the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave series—lived up to the anticipation. The cast of dancers donned loose-fitting costumes silkscreened with Rauschenberg’s cityscape photographs: chain-link fences, apartment windows, drain covers. Anderson played violin from the pit as part of her propulsive electronic score. And Brown showed off her “creamy new hard-to-grasp movement style,” as the New York Times put it, which solidified slippery improvisations into choreography that retained a sense of spontaneity. What does it mean to yoke together three singular minds? As Rauschenberg put it in his letter: “No one could be more curious about this than I am.”
This month, as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef Arpels, a three-week festival taking place across New York, Set and Reset returns to BAM to satisfy a new generation’s curiosity. It joins a feast of work drawn from various places and decades—all part of an expansive vision set forth by Serge Laurent, the jewelry house’s director of dance and culture programs.
“What is dance today?” he mused during a recent video call from his office in Paris, where he previously held curatorial roles at the Fondation Cartier and the Centre Pompidou. “We have a responsibility in supporting creation, but if we want contemporary [dance] to be better approached, I think it’s important to refer to existing works,” he says—especially in an embodied medium that defies easy documentation. “Everything is linked.”
This year’s festival hopscotches from Brooklyn, through Greenwich Village, and up to Museum Mile. (“It’s a nice parkour,” Laurent says.) At the northern end is a presentation in the Guggenheim’s rotunda of Lucinda Childs’s Early Works, including Pastime (1963) and Calico Mingling (1973). “These pieces really don’t belong in a proscenium space,” says the 85-year-old choreographer, who appreciates the building’s spiraling vantage points. She points to the influence of composer John Cage when she was starting out in the Judson Dance Theater scene. “He stepped out of the traditional music aesthetic to establish noise, for example, as part of what you listen to,” she says. In the dance context, that meant a turn toward unexpected venues and pedestrian movements.
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Today, what is more street-wise than a TikTok dance? Viral videos are among the contemporary references—along with stripper vernacular, self-driving cars, and Juicy Couture—in Age of Content, a 2023 work by the collective (La)Horde, which comprises the artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel. The trio of millennials has directed the Ballet National de Marseille since 2019. “We were really recreating an existential crisis through doomscrolling,” says Brutti of the dance’s disparate chapters. She sees the theater as a place to collectively question this perceived reality; the postmodern framework lets them bring what might be dismissed as “cheap movement” into highbrow conversation. (La)Horde, which is also screening four of their films at MoMA, has a long list of artistic forebears. Brutti cites Loie Fuller, whose Danse Serpentine became a pioneering cinematic marvel; Martha Graham; and Childs, who collaborated with the group during the pandemic. For Brutti, the multigenerational slate at the New York festival gives it this feeling of a “fantasy family.”
Group dynamics play out across Dance Reflections. On the opening program, Lyon Opera Ballet presents Merce Cunningham’s Biped (1999) on a double bill with the Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos’s Mycelium (2023): a trance-inducing work in which the company converges into an amorphous swell, the movement vocabulary reduced to the twitchy essentials. The Dog Days Are Over 2.0, by the Belgian choreographer Jan Martens, tests performers’ stamina in more overt ways, with a dance driven by jumping in unison. Robyn Orlin’s We Wear Our Wheels With Pride… (2022), performed by members of Johannesburg’s Moving Into Dance Mophatong, is a color-drenched ode to the Zulu rickshaw drivers of her childhood. More intimate in scale, Alessandro Sciarroni highlights an Italian folk dance on the verge of disappearance in Save the Last Dance for Me. It’s performed by two men, as is the custom for Polka Chinata, which Sciarroni studied in 2018 when there were just five remaining practitioners.
A single body contains multitudes as well. The Brussels-based artist Soa Ratsifandrihana brings her solo Gr oo ve (2021), an investigation into “all the things that compose me in terms of movement,” she says. There are evocations of her childhood in the South of France, absorbing the dances of the Malagasy diaspora; she borrows a favorite move from Steve McQueen’s film Lovers Rock and another from the French popping dancer Pepito. Ratsifandrihana, a former member of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s company Rosas (whose Exit Above, After the Tempest is also in this year’s festival lineup), sees Gr oo ve just as much in dialogue with New York’s jazz scene, with a title tied to 1930s swing. “The fact that I love dancing is because of the feeling I got listening to jazz music at home.”
As for the mood set by Merce Cunningham’s newly revived Travelogue (1977)—which Trisha Brown Dance Company will perform alongside Set and Reset as part of the program Dancing With Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown Cunningham—it’s “so whack, so vaudevillian, so fun,” says the company’s executive director Kirstin Kapustik. John Cage’s 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’s notes on the choreography were scant, says Andrea Weber, who oversees licensing and operations for the Merce Cunningham Trust, but “he kept talking about procession”—in literal terms, as with the arrival of a clothesline, but there’s also a sense that he and Rauschenberg were venturing into zany new territory.
“I just see these as moments of joy coming together,” says Francine Synder, director of archives for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is in the midst of a centennial celebration of the artist’s birth. Remounting these stage works has its practical challenges. The newly produced Set and Reset costumes alone involved a deep dive into various holdings—unearthing Rauschenberg’s now-unusable silkscreens, combing for photo negatives, analyzing earlier costume remnants—in order to refashion the fabric. But there’s value in reanimating historical dances. “Merce really embraced that,” 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’s a lesson, too, in the easygoing friendships facilitated by the lo-fi technology of their day. Brown used to answer the telephones at Cunningham’s studio. “That’s how she and Rauschenberg met,” says Kapustik. That’s right, Snyder replies: “To the sadness of our archives, he loved talking on the phone!”
Dance Reflections by Van Cleef Arpels continues through March 21.
