Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham

ImpulsTanz [ENA] This double bill, Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown & Cunningham Onstage, is rich, generous celebration of the long, playful and conceptually daring dialogue between dance and visual art that defined a whole era of postmodern experimentation. It honours Robert Rauschenberg’s centenary not with solemn homage, but with living works that keep his appetite for risk, collage and everyday materials very much in motion.

The evening opens with Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983), a piece that still feels astonishingly fresh in its airy, swinging phrasing and complex spatial counterpoint. Brown’s choreography takes flight on an improvisational logic: dancers ride and redirect each other’s momentum, entering and leaving the stage as if following invisible currents. Their movement is fluid, off‑axis, full of subtle weight shifts, yet underpinned by a rigorous compositional intelligence. You sense a community of bodies negotiating shared pathways in real time, a kind of live geometry that never fixes into rigid pattern.

The translucent costumes and shifting light further enhance this sense of permeability, as if boundaries between bodies, space and time were constantly dissolving and re‑forming. Even when the stage seems busiest, there is a remarkable transparency: no single dancer dominates, instead the ensemble functions like a responsive organism, attuned to the tiniest cue. The result is an atmosphere of adventurous calm, where risk and ease coexist, and where the choreography invites you to experience structure not as a cage, but as a generous framework within which freedom can be continuously rediscovered.