Performance, in its many manifestations, was at the core of much of Rauschenberg’s artistic output. His involvement with performance began at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he danced in student productions and, in August 1952, participated in the composer John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 (an originally untitled work that is often referred to as the first Happening). Throughout his career, Rauschenberg not only designed sets, costumes, and lighting for Merce Cunningham and other choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor but also choreographed and performed his own works. Moreover, theatrical elements are often integral to his nonperformance works, such as a sculpture that incorporates a hidden sound (Music Box, 1953); a Combine that includes a working clock (Third Time Painting, 1961); and a technology work that churns mud (Mud Muse, 1968–71).

Indeed, Rauschenberg often intentionally blurred the lines between his performance work and his work in other media. For example, a freestanding Combine, Minutiae (1954), was created as a stage set for a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, while First Time Painting (1961), another Combine, was made by the artist while on stage at the United States Embassy’s theater in Paris as part of the performance Homage to David Tudor, which also included Jasper Johns, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and the composer Tudor himself. When on tour with Cunningham, Rauschenberg frequently created scenery by spontaneously assimilating found objects and sounds, as he developed the concept of “live décor,” or scenery generated by human activity.

Rauschenberg’s artistic dialogue with Cage and Cunningham positioned the artist at the cutting edge of postmodern dance. His involvement in the early 1960s with Judson Dance Theater, New York, an experimental collective that included dancers as well as visual artists, resulted in performances free of narrative, emphasizing instead the purity of movement—sometimes conventionally dance-like, sometimes more mundane, allowing untrained performers to participate alongside professional dancers. Throughout his career, Rauschenberg found collaboration to be a productive means for pushing the boundaries of conventional art making.