Yvonne Rainer

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Yvonne Rainer
Born	November 24, 1934 (1934-11-24) (age 74) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Field	Performance art, Choreography, Dancing, Film
Training	Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance

Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934, San Francisco) is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Dance and choreographic work 3 Cinematic work 4 Bibliography 4.1 Archival Collection 5 External links

[edit] Early life

Rainer was born in San Francisco. Her parents considered themselves radicals, but Rainer's childhood was difficult, being sent for several years to live at a boarding institution rather than at home. In 1957, she moved to New York to study theater. She found herself more strongly drawn to modern dance than acting, however, and began studying at the Martha Graham School and later with Merce Cunningham.

[edit] Dance and choreographic work

Rainer was one of the organizers of the Judson Dance Theater, a focal point for vanguard activity in the dance world throughout the 1960s, and she formed her own company for a brief time after the Judson performances ended. Rainer is noted for an approach to dance that treats the body more as the source of an infinite variety of movements than as the purveyor of emotion or drama. Many of the elements she employed—such as repetition, patterning, tasks, and games—later became standard features of modern dance.

In her early dances, Rainer focused on sounds and movements, and often juxtaposed the two in arbitrary combinations. Somewhat inspired by the chance tactics favored by Cunningham, Rainer’s choreography was a combination of classical dance steps contrasted with everyday, pedestrian movement. She used a great deal of repetition, and employed narrative and verbal noises (including wails, grunts, mumbles and shrieks, etc.) within the body of her dances.

Ordinary Dance (1962) was a combination of movement and narrative, and featured the repetition of simple movements while Rainer recited a poetic autobiography. One characteristic of Rainer’s early choreography was her fascination with using non-dancer performers. We Shall Run (1963) was such a piece, featuring twelve people clad in street clothes running around the stage for seven minutes creating various floor patterns. Some of the performers were dancers while others were not.

A turning point in Rainer’s choreography came in 1964, when, in an effort to strip movements of their expressive qualities, she turned to game structures to create works. All movement aimed to be direct, functional, and to avoid stylization. In so doing, she aimed to remove the drama from the dance movement, and to question the role of entertainment in dance. Throughout this stage of her choreography she worked towards movement becoming something of an object, to be examined without any psychological, social or formal motives. She opted for neutrality in her dances, presenting the objective presence of the human body and its movements, and refused to project a persona or create a narrative within her dances. In 1965, as a reaction to many of the previously stated feelings, Rainer created her "No Manifesto," which was a strategy formulated to demystify dance.

This exploration in reducing dance to the essentials climaxed with one of Rainer’s most famous pieces, Trio A (1966), initially part of a larger work entitled The Mind Is a Muscle. Something of a paradigmatic statement that questioned the aesthetic goals of postmodern dance, Trio A was a short dance that consisted of one long phrase. In Trio A, Rainer intended to remove objects from the dance while simultaneously retaining a workmanlike approach of task performance. Not simple but certainly not fancy, it was a demanding piece of work, both to watch and to perform. She explored such dynamics as repetition, the distribution of energy, and phrasing. The movement consisted of task-oriented actions, emphasizing neutral performance and featuring no interaction with the audience. The dancer was to never make eye contact with her observers, and in the case that the movement required the dancer to face the audience, their eyes were to remain shut for the duration of their face time. The first time the piece was performed it was entitled The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1, and was performed by a set of three simultaneous solos by Rainer, Stephen Paxton, and David Gordon. Trio A has been widely adapted and interpreted by other choreographers.

Rainer has choreographed more than 40 concert works, including Terrain and This Is a Woman Who….

[edit] Cinematic work

Rainer sometimes included filmed sequences in her dances, and in the mid-1970s she began to turn her attention to film directing. Her early films do not follow narrative conventions, instead combining reality and fiction, sound and visuals, to address social and political issues. Rainer directed several experimental films about dance and performance, including Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who (1974), and Kristina Talking Pictures (1976). Her later films include The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). The last-mentioned work, more conventional in its narrative structure, is a lesbian love story as well as a reflection on urban life and on breast cancer, and it features Rainer herself. Her film work has received several awards, and in 1990 she was a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

[edit] Bibliography

• Rainer, Yvonne (2006). Feelings Are Facts: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18251-3. 
• Green, Shelley (1994). Radical Juxtaposition. The films of Yvonne Rainer. New York: Scarecrow Press Inc.. ISBN 0-8108-28634. 

[edit] Archival Collection

The Fales Library at NYU houses the Yvonne Rainer Grand Union performance videotape collection. This collection contains seven videotapes that document a series of Grand Union performances. The performances took place on May 28, 1972 at the Joe LoGiudice Gallery at 59 Wooster Street in SoHo.

[edit] External links

• Yvonne Rainer speaks to Robert Storr about her her life as choreographer and filmmaker at the Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts.
• The Fales Library Guide to the Yvonne Rainer Grand Union performance videotape collection
• Biography on sensesofcinema.com.
• Review of Feelings Are Facts, by Daniel Ross.
• Yvonne Rainer in the Video Data Bank
• [1] Films by Yvonne Rainer and Writings by and about Yvonne Rainer at Ubuweb