Article #39542

Artist Robert Rauschenberg was known for his painting-sculpture hybrids – and a 1963 dance piece called Pelican that was almost lost to time

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.