Trisha Brown Dancers Honor Rauschenberg on a Lowry Hill Stage

The Trisha Brown Dance Company arrives in town on November 11 for a single evening that the Walker Art Center is co-presenting with the University of Minnesota's Northrop. The program, built around the centennial of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, sets Brown's "Set and Reset" beside Merce Cunningham's rarely staged "Travelogue" - a pairing that maps a whole era of American dance in one night.

For a region that does not often get the canon of postmodern dance performed live, a bill like this is an unusual gift - and a tightly themed one.

A circle of collaborators, reassembled

"Set and Reset" carries a score by Laurie Anderson; "Travelogue" is set to music by John Cage. Together the two pieces trace the circle of midcentury collaborators who turned American dance inside out - Brown, Cunningham, Cage, Anderson and Rauschenberg among them - with Rauschenberg's designs threading through both works. To see them on the same stage is to watch a network of friendships and influences made visible, decades after the fact.

That is the quiet ambition of the program. Rather than present one company in isolation, it stages a conversation between artists who actually knew and worked with one another - and uses the centennial of one of them as the occasion to bring the whole circle back into a single room.

“Access to something the rest of the country has to travel for, a short walk from Lowry Hill.”

Study by day, watch by night

The evening dovetails with the museum's gallery display of materials from Rauschenberg's "Glacial Decoy," so audiences can study the costumes and designs by day and then watch the lineage move on stage at night. That pairing - the static artifact in the gallery, the living performance in the theater - is exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary programming the Walker is built to do, treating dance, design and visual art as parts of one story rather than separate departments.

It is the kind of programming that makes the short walk from Lowry Hill feel like access to something the rest of the country has to travel for. A night that fuses a touring company, a local co-presenter and the museum's own collection does not happen everywhere, and it does not happen often.

A marquee night that will move

Tickets move quickly for the Walker's marquee dance evenings, and a co-presentation on this scale tends to sell faster than the museum's experimental midweek shows. A single performance, a famous company and a built-in audience from two institutions add up to a night that is likely to fill - so neighbors who want to be there are best served deciding early rather than waiting for the week of.