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Rauschenberg was becoming a performer. He already had made a painting on stage in 1961, in Homage to David Tudor, a collaboration with Tudor, Jasper Johns, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle. He was attending Robert Dunne's workshops at the Judson Church with some of the younger members of the Cunningham Company, such as Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay and other dancers who were to become major post-modern choreographers: Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti and Trisha Brown. Influenced by the San Francisco choreographer Anna Halprin, they were interested in exploring non-dance movement and often used non-professional dancers in their work. Rauschenberg worked as a stage manager, did their lighting, and sometimes performed in their dances.

Rauschenberg seems to have been launched as a choreographer by pure chance. He was listed in 1963 as a choreographer instead of as stage manager for the performance of Pelican in the program of the "Pop Festival" organized by Alice Denney in conjunction with an exhibition at The Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C. The performances were to take place in a roller skating rink called America On Wheels. Like so many of the objects in his combines, the roller skates appear to have focused a vision, allowing him, he has said , to "use the limitation of materials as a freedom that would eventually establish form." On the floor of the rink, Rauschenberg and Per Olof Ultvedt (in later performances, Alex Hay) skated with open parachutes attached to their backs, while Carolyn Brown, the Cunningham Company's most lyrical and elegant dancer, dressed in a sweat suit and toe shoes, danced on point, the soaring motion of her classic ballet vocabulary juxtaposed with and amplified by the rapid birdlike swooping of the men on skates. The dance, dedicated to the Wright Brothers, was performed to a sound-collage taped by Rauschenberg from radio, movies and television. Pelican is a dance about risk and experiment, technique and technology, magical transmutation, and the nature of art. The story of Pelican's accidental origins conceals the reality of a logical development. Chance provided the occasion to do what he was ready for.

Photographs of Rauschenberg's theater pieces reveal the same kind of mysterious and powerful images that he was able to create with similarly ill-assorted objects in his combines. The raw material is often identical: objects which embody a sense of the past and the erosion of wear; others, mass-produced and banal, which are the stuff of our everyday experience; jerry-built contrivances of unidentifiable utility; animals; and the human body in motion. Pictures of living things usually are replaced by the things themselves; actions are juxtaposed not only in space but in time. As in his combines, subliminal visual and metaphoric associations bind the most unlikely conjunctions of disparate matter. The works were performed to a combination of ambient sound, often the electronically amplified noise made by manipulating one of the props, and scores composed of a collage of taped music and sound tracks from film or video. But the most characteristic and original element in these works is the use of light. Projected images, either slides, as in Spring Training, or film, as in Map Room II and Linoleum, function in much the same way as frottage or silk-screened media images in the visual works.