« Dancing with Bob : Rauschenberg, Brown et Cunningham Onstage » de Trisha Brown Dance Company

Two cult pieces, two radical idioms, one same breath of invention: between the free impulse of Set & Reset and the surreal vaudeville of Travelogue, Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage brings together two masterpieces of the American avant-garde. Shifting images, offbeat humour, delightful virtuosity: an evening that flings wide the doors of the imagination and celebrates an avant-garde that is still vibrant.

Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham Onstage brings together two works in which dance measures itself against the imagination of visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and emerges multiplied.

With Set & Reset (1983), Trisha Brown pushes her choreographic writing to a rare degree of freedom: a movement that glides, unfolds and veers off course, as if the bodies were improvising within an invisible structure.

The dancers brush against one another, lose their way, find each other again, carried by a continuous flow that makes the reference points waver and gives flesh to a perpetual motion of infinite beauty.. This piece completes the cycle she called "Unstable Molecular Structures".

The transparencies, the shifting images and the costumes designed by Rauschenberg, along with the music of Laurie Anderson, amplify this sense of permanent momentum, emblematic of a post-modern dance that makes freedom a method of composition.

By contrast, Travelogue (1977) emerges as a wildly offbeat object within the work of Merce Cunningham: a piece running through with the spirit of vaudeville and musical comedy, where improbable props, absurd situations and surreal humour disrupt the rigour of his writing.

John Cage composes a fragmented soundscape, while Rauschenberg fills the stage with objects and colours that tip the dance towards burlesque theatre.

Brought together to celebrate the centenary of "Bob" Rauschenberg, these two pieces reveal a stage become a laboratory, where dance is invented in contact with the visual arts and music, where daring remains the driving force of everything, and the stage turns into a joyfully experimental playground.

Agnès Izrine Duration: 1h15 with interval Category: Dance