Skip to main content
Back to search
  • Add to playlist

Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score

Open Score is the performance by Robert Rauschenberg given on October 14th and 23rd 1966. It opens with a tennis match between a man and a woman, where the sound of the balls hitting the rackets is amplified. Little by little the couple is plunged into darkness, leaving a ghostly crowd projected on three screens suspended above the public. 

 Out of the ten performances given as part of 9 Evenings, that by Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most refined. Like Kisses Sweeter than Wine by Öyvind Falhström, it does not emphasise the technological paraphernalia placed at the artists’ disposal by the engineers from Bell but rather proposes a stage set-up in which technique disappears behind the composition of enigmatic tableaux. Nothing suggests the transmitters tucked away in the rackets’ handles, or the infra-red camera, the first of its kind, that reconstructs the image of a crowd hidden in darkness while enveloping it in a strange pale light. The fact that the technique is invisible bestows on Open Score, an open metaphor left to the interpretation of the public, a magical and even a fantasy or mystical dimension. On the second evening Rauschenberg was to add a coda to it: the wrapped body of a woman (Simone Forti) singing an Italian lament, whom the artist moves in his arms to various places on the stage. 


Source : Sylvain Maestreggi

Rauschenberg, Robert

Open Score

Artistic direction / Conception : Robert Rauschenberg

9 Evenings : Theatre & Engineering

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 


Source : Sylvain Maestreggi

Our videos suggestions
08:46

My lunch with Anna

Halprin, Anna (United States)

  • Add to playlist
02:53

Roof and Fire Piece

Brown, Trisha (United States)

  • Add to playlist
07:56

My lunch with Anna

Halprin, Anna (United States)

  • Add to playlist
04:57

Watermotor

Brown, Trisha (France)

  • Add to playlist
14:26

Opal Loop

Brown, Trisha (France)

  • Add to playlist
32:08

I'm going to toss my arms, if you catch them they're yours

Brown, Trisha (United States)

  • Add to playlist
03:09

Vue sur les marches - Trisha Brown

Brown, Trisha (United States)

  • Add to playlist
01:03:38

Zoom on an interview with Trisha Brown

Brown, Trisha (United States)

  • Add to playlist
03:54

One Story as in Falling [remontage 2016]

Brown, Trisha (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:05

Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503

Brown, Trisha (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:08

Lucinda Childs, Vehicle

Childs, Lucinda (United States)

  • Add to playlist
03:00

Alex Hay, Grass Field

Hay, Alex (United States)

  • Add to playlist
03:14

Sounddance

Cunningham, Merce (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:55

John Cage, Variations VII

  • Add to playlist
03:04

Deborah Hay, Solo

Hay, Deborah (United States)

  • Add to playlist
03:54

Set and Reset / Reset [extrait-remontage 2017]

Brown, Trisha (France)

  • Add to playlist
13:19

Hommage à Trisha [remontage 2014]

Baïz, Josette (France)

  • Add to playlist
58:07

My lunch with Anna

Halprin, Anna (United States)

  • Add to playlist
04:02

Dancing my cancer [Out of boundaries]

Halprin, Anna (United States)

  • Add to playlist
Our themas suggestions
By accessing the website, you acknowledge and accept the use of cookies to assist you in your browsing.
You can block these cookies by modifying the security parameters of your browser or by clicking onthis link.
I accept Learn more