In collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Hancher Auditorium will host a weeklong series of events this fall celebrating the centennial of iconoclastic American artist Robert Rauschenberg. The festivities will culminate on November 7, 2025, with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) performing Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown & Cunningham Onstage—a performance that honors the groundbreaking collaborations among Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham.
The University of Iowa’s Department of Dance will play a key role in this celebration. Several faculty members are former TBDC dancers, including Melinda Jean Myers, Tony Orrico (Grant Wood Fellow 2019–2020), and Kyle Marshall (Grant Wood Fellow 2025–2026). Together, they will help bring to life a series of performances and discussions exploring the intersections of dance, visual art, and performance.
Beginning November 1–7 at noon daily, Orrico will stage Floor of the Forest in the Visual Arts Building—an iconic early work by Trisha Brown that blurs the boundaries between dance, performance art, and installation. In this durational piece, performers navigate a suspended web of ropes threaded with colorful clothing, slipping in and out of garments as they traverse the structure. The work highlights Brown’s inventive approach to movement, gravity, and the everyday gestures of life. Orrico will lead the project, both performing and managing the installation.
On November 4 and 5, the Trisha Brown Dance Company will present In Plain Site, an intimate series of site-specific performances that reimagine Brown’s choreography in relation to architectural and natural environments. The first performance will take place in the Hancher Lobby, followed by a second in the Lasansky Atrium of the Visual Arts Building. Following the November 5 performance, Kyle Marshall will lead a special activation of Floor of the Forest.
The Grant Wood Art Colony currently hosts Kyle Marshall as its Grant Wood Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance. As the founder of Kyle Marshall Choreography (KMC), Marshall is known for creating works that both celebrate community and confront issues of social justice and reform. His choreographic approach reflects Trisha Brown’s spirit of experimentation—valuing curiosity, play, and movement as ways to spark dialogue and invite new perspectives.
On November 6, Christopher-Rasheem McMillan will moderate a panel discussion titled Restaging Trisha Brown & Merce Cunningham in Collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg. Panelists include Carolyn Lucas (Associate Artistic Director, TBDC), Andrea Weber (Associate Director of Licensing, Merce Cunningham Trust), Tony Orrico, and Melinda Jean Myers.
McMillan, a former Grant Wood Fellow (2016–2017) and current faculty member in Dance and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, has deep ties to Brown’s legacy. His 2017 work Black Lokes reinterpreted Brown’s Locus (1975) through the lens of racial and social justice, marking the first time TBDC authorized an artist outside the company to reconstruct one of Brown’s early works. Like Brown, McMillan used structure, space, and concept to reveal human stories—transforming the abstract cube of Locus into a meditation on people of African descent who have been affected by police violence. His interdisciplinary approach was shaped during his Grant Wood Fellowship, where collaboration with visual artists encouraged him to reimagine dance within the intimacy of a gallery setting.
Together, these performances, panels, and installations embody the collaborative spirit that defined the work of Rauschenberg, Brown, and Cunningham. The University of Iowa community invites audiences to experience this rare convergence of movement, visual art, and imagination—a living dialogue between past innovation and present creativity.
Learn more by visiting the Hancher Auditorium website.
