Roller skates! Pointe shoes! Parachutes! A mythic dance takes flight again at a Brooklyn rink

Artist Robert Rauschenberg was known for his painting-sculpture hybrids – and a 1963 dance piece called Pelican that was almost lost to time Visual artists and dancers have long taken cues from each other. Pablo Picasso constructed sets and designed costumes for the Ballet Russes in Paris. The Bauhaus painter Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett – first staged in 1920s Stuttgart, Germany – is considered a prototype of performance art. Andy Warhol pumped helium into mylar pillows for the backdrop of Merce Cunningham’s RainForest dance, a piece depicting Cunningham’s childhood home of the Pacific north-west. But only one artist danced on roller skates. Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008 at age 82, is best known for what he called his “combines” – painting-sculpture hybrids made up of found and repurposed trash picked up on New York streets. He also orbited the dance world, palling around with Cunningham and Trisha Brown, two giants in the downtown New York postmodern scene. Rauschenberg’s 1963 piece Pelican – named for the 8ft parachute the dancers’ wear on their backs like wings – holds an almost mythic space in some imaginations. Only a short video clip and few black-and-white

May 31, 2026 → May 31, 2026