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.
This reconstruction matters because "Pelican" holds an almost mythic status in dance and art history, representing the freewheeling, interdisciplinary spirit of 1960s Greenwich Village where visual artists like Rauschenberg collaborated with postmodern dance pioneers. The piece exemplifies how visual art and dance have long influenced each other, from Picasso's Ballet Russes costumes to Warhol's sets for Cunningham. By reviving this rarely-seen work, the Trisha Brown Dance Company preserves a crucial piece of performance art history and demonstrates how archival research can breathe new life into ephemeral works.