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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Alaina Demopoulos

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

A man dances on roller skates with a parachute on his back
The Trisha Brown Dance Company presents Pelican (1963) by artist Robert Rauschenberg at Xanadu in Brooklyn, New York, on 18 May. Photograph: Maria Baranova

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.

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