Roller skates! Pointe shoes! Parachutes! A mythic dance takes flight again at a Brooklyn rink
The Trisha Brown Dance Company has reimagined Robert Rauschenberg's 1963 dance piece "Pelican" for the first time, staging it at the Xanadu roller skating rink in Brooklyn. The original work, born from a typo in a festival program, featured two men on roller skates and a ballerina on pointe, wearing parachutes like wings. The reconstruction, led by choreographer Tara Lorenzen and dancers Ashley Hod, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener, used archival photos and notes from Rauschenberg and Trisha Brown's archives to fill in gaps left by the scant surviving documentation.