Curator, Leah Dickerman: In 1970, Tricia Brown set up her own dance company. Glacial Decoy was one of the first works that she made for the proscenium stage after years of making works in places where dances were not normally performed. She asked Rauschenberg to create sets and costumes for the work, and that was the beginning of a 16-year, incredibly productive and fertile collaboration.
Here's Tricia Brown:
Tricia Brown: Bob wants to play. He has a great envy of dance because it’s alive, the people make it, and it’s fragile in the fact that it disappears as soon as the dancer leaves the space.
Leah Dickerman: Rauschenberg created a slideshow of 620 photographs that he had taken around Captiva that were changing combinations, and the image would seem to migrate from one screen to the next, left to right, echoing the passage of the dancers in a kind of montage machine.
Artist, Robert Rauschenberg: I do pay a lot of attention to the attitude of the choreography. The movement as it would pass into the wings, then someone else would replace the person that had just disappeared, and continue the movement, and it would slide across. And so, I didn’t want to do a fixed image stage, and so I did that with the photographs. And as one would come up, then it would be passed on, and then, you know, on and on, and—and just continuous.