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Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenbergs talent ? always evident in his radical feeling for color, light, composition and new ingredients and juxtapositions ?prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage. From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. And in the late 50s and early 60s, when he first came to fame, he was recurrently (at times constantly) occupied in dancetheater.

When he won the international grand prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, he said he regarded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as his biggest canvas. Although the remark offended some in Cunningham circles (primarily the composer John Cage, who seems to have felt it sounded too proprietorial), it was completely justified. At that time there was no better place to see the range of Rauschenbergs inventiveness than the Cunninghamrepertory.

Rauschenberg wasnt just the designer of most pieces Cunningham had choreographed in the previous 10 years; he was also a permanent colleague. He toured America and, in 1964, the world as stage manager to the Cunningham company, adjusting the lighting and costumes, making several of the dancers into his long-term friends, helping turn the itinerary of a dance company into a fulcrum ofideas.

In 1954 Rauschenberg was the first stage designer to follow the principle of artistic independence already established by Cunningham and Cage. All he needed to know was which dancer to design costumes for, and if Cunningham had any further specifications. So when Cunningham asked (in 1954) for d?cor around which the dancers could move, Rauschenberg placed a large red free-standing combine center stage in “Minutiae”; though the choreography has not survived, the d?cor is still used in some CunninghamEvents.

Sometimes Cunningham gave not specifications but poetic clues. For example, for “Winterbranch” (1964) he said to Rauschenberg, “Think of the night as if it were day.” Rauschenbergs response was to think of images like being caught in the headlights of a car, and he made all-black costumes and lighting that sometimes threw the stage into darkness while viewers were shielding their eyes from thelight.

When Cunningham was experimenting with new definitions of stage space in “Summerspace” (1958), suggesting both that the stage was just a section of a vaster landscape and that the mood was that of a summer idyll, Rauschenberg responded with impressionistic pointillism. The costumes of the dancers matched the backdrop view in near camouflage, and the work evoked scenes by Monet and Seurat while also suggesting a wildlifedocumentary.

In “Crises” (1960) the dancers wore single-color all-over tights that glowed fiercely against the surrounding blackness. In such works Rauschenberg also became one of the all-time masters of theatricallighting.

Rauschenberg had come to know the young Paul Taylor in 1953, while Taylor was a Cunningham dancer. When Taylor began to choreograph in the succeeding years, Rauschenberg was his designer; works like “Three Epitaphs” (1956, all-black costumes again) survive in Taylor repertory today. In the 1960s Rauschenberg was involved in the radical dance-theater experiments at and around Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and was close to Cunningham-connected experimentalists like Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber and Steve Paxton; he even choreographedhimself.

Rauschenbergs full-time connection to the Cunningham company ended with its 1964 world tour. Though he and Cage had stimulated each other profoundly and were in many ways like-minded, their egos had clashed; Rauschenbergs “my biggest canvas” remark sounded like colonization in a dance theater where the point wasindependence.

But others led him back to dance theater, nobody more beautifully than Trisha Brown. Her “Set and Reset” (1983) was an instant masterpiece, largely thanks to Rauschenbergs astonishingly imaginative designs. Three screens simultaneously broadcast separate video collages in black and white (more than 20 years before a video component became the norm in new choreography), while the dancers rippled around the stage in part-translucent costumes marked with gray and black figures that resemblednewsprint.

Rauschenberg and Cunningham did collaborate again ? though collaboration may have always been too tight a word for the freedom they gave each other ? on several pieces over the decades. The last of these was only last October, “XOVER”(pronounced “Crossover”), which had its premiere at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. (It has yet to be seen in New York or most other cities.) The white costumes against a largely white backdrop recall the all-white paintings of 50 years before; the nonwhite parts of the backdrop, combining silk-screen photography and painting, connect isolated images (a bicycle, a fence, an industrial view) with beautiful color and details oflight.

IBM, () Intel () and other U.S. tech companies with facilities in the Sichuan province, epicenter of China’s 7.9- magnitude earthquake Monday, reported no injuries and little damage. The quake killed more than 12,000 people and leveled more than 3.46 million homes, Chinese news agency Xinhua said Tuesday. Despite the tragic loss of life, tech analysts and representatives for U.S. tech companies said they see little impact on U.S. high-tech firms. “The main manufacturing stuff...