Trisha Brown Dance Company: Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown, and Cunningham Onstage

Tue Nov 11, 2025

A dancer with light skin jumps, looking downward, in front of three other dancers. — Trisha Brown Dance Company, *Set and Reset*. Photo by Mark Hanauer. Courtesy of the artist.

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When Tue Nov 11, 2025

“Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenberg’s talent … prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage.” —New York Times

Few visual artists have shaped contemporary dance as profoundly as Robert Rauschenberg. Celebrating his centennial year, the Trisha Brown Dance Company pays tribute to the visionary artist through his collaborations with American dance vanguards Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham. Audiences will experience two landmark works featuring Rauschenberg’s signature stage designs: Brown’s Set and Reset explores themes of visibility and invisibility, while Cunningham’s rarely performed Travelogue brims with humor and curiosity. Together, these works re-create a defining era in dance history.

Concurrently, the Walker spotlights its decades-long relationships with Brown and Rauschenberg in an exhibition featuring original costumes, set designs, and historical footage of Glacial Decoy (1979).

Copresented with Northrop

Tickets

Purchase tickets through the Northrop box office. For more information or to purchase tickets by phone, please call Northrop at 612-624-2345 or email umntix@umn.edu.

Trisha Brown Set and Reset Workshop

Sunday, November 9, 2 pm
Free
McGuire Theater, Walker Art Center

Since her early years of creating dances with the Judson Dance Theater, Trisha Brown has been captivated by the infinite ways movements can be manipulated, and the possibilities for developing structure and form. Join us on Walker’s McGuire stage for this unique opportunity to explore her process firsthand in this Set and Reset workshop for intermediate/advanced dancers led by company dancer Burr Johnson.

Class will begin with a warmup that emphasizes moving with clarity and ease by exploring anatomical awareness, articulation of the joints, and supporting weight through the skeleton. From this base, students will learn phrase work from Brown’s Set and Reset. To facilitate a deeper understanding of the piece, they will then be guided through the original prompts that Brown used to build the work in 1983, centered around five instructions: “Keep it simple, Act on instinct, Stay on the edge, Work with visibility and invisibility, Get in line.” Enjoy this rare opportunity to engage intimately with an iconic choreographic masterpiece.

Reserve your spot here.

Accessibility

For more information about accessibility, content and sensory notes, or to request additional accommodations for this program, please call the Northrop Box Office at 612-624-2345, or email umntix@umn.edu.

Program support provided by Knox Foundation: Susanne Lilly Hutcheson, Zenas Hutcheson IV, Henry Hutcheson, and Perrin Hutcheson; and the David and Leni Moore Family Foundation.