While hip-hop, chamber music and jazz meet on one Blacksburg stage Tuesday, a painting will make its debut in the Squires Studio Theatre.

"Dancers III" is an ink-and-water media on super silk fabric more than 16 feet high by 33 feet long. The painting, created in October, has a history dating to the 1950s.

Composer, writer and artist John Cage created the original performance painting titled "STEPS" in 1989 in the studio of Ray Kass, then a professor of studio art at Virginia Tech, with the assistance of volunteers in the Mountain Lake Workshop, a collaborative community-based art group.

The format of "STEPS," the basis for "Dancers III," was conceived as a salute to Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 painting, "Automobile Tire Track," in which Cage had collaborated.

On Oct. 23, three large versions of "STEPS" were choreographed and performed by dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and the Cunningham Repertory Understudy Dance Company, with the assistance of Kass and the Mountain Lake Workshop, at the Cunningham Dance Studio in New York City to create three paintings, "Dancers I," "Dancers II" and Dancers III."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a program of short documentary digital videos of the 2008 performances created by Simone Paterson, professor in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.

Following its debut at Tech, "Dancers III" will be exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.

-- Amy Matzke-Fawcett