Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an

American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, Yvonne Rainer
whose work in these disciplines is regarded as
challenging and experimental.[1] Her work is
sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer
currently lives and works in New York.[2]

Early life
Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24, 1934, in
San Francisco, California.[1] Her parents, Joseph and
Jeanette, considered themselves radicals. Her mother, a Rainer in 2014
stenographer, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish
Born November 24, 1934
immigrants from Warsaw, and her father, a stonemason
San Francisco, California, U.S.
and house painter, was born in Vallanzengo, northern
Italy, and emigrated to the United States at the age of Education One year at San Francisco Junior
College Martha Graham Center of
21.[3]
Contemporary Dance
Rainer grew up, along with an older brother, in the Known for Performance art, Choreography,
Sunset District of San Francisco, which she has Dancing, Film
described as "a neighborhood of white Protestant Awards MacArthur Fellows Program
working class families". From the age of twelve, she
was "exposed to the heady commingling of poets,
painters, writers, and Italian anarchists."[4]

Throughout her childhood, her father took her to foreign films at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, while
her mother took her to the ballet and opera. She attended Lowell High School, and after graduation she
enrolled in San Francisco Junior College and dropped out after a year.

In her late teens, while earning her living as a clerk-typist at an insurance company, Rainer found herself
hanging out at the Cellar,[5] a jazz club in North Beach in San Francisco, where she would listen to poets
accompanied by live cool jazz musicians. It was here that she met Al Held, a painter. He introduced her to
various artists who were natives of New York. In August 1956, aged 21, she followed Held to New York
and lived with him for the next three years.

Doris Casella, a musician and close friend, introduced Rainer around 1957 to the dance classes of Edith
Stephen, a modern dancer. At her first class Stephen told her that she was not very "turned out." Rainer
admits, "What she didn't say was something that I would gradually recognize in the next couple of years,
that my lack of turn-out and limberness coupled with a long back and short legs would reduce my
chances of performing with any established dance company." Beginning in 1959, she studied for a year at
the Martha Graham School, where Graham notoriously told her, "When you accept yourself as a woman,
you will have turn-out";[4] later she took ballet classes with Mia Slavenska followed by classes with
James Waring, in whose company she danced briefly, and for eight years she studied with Merce
Cunningham.

In the year in which Rainer studied at the Graham School – 1959-60 – Rainer met Simone Forti and
Nancy Meehan, who had worked with Anna Halprin and Welland Lathrop in San Francisco.[6]

In mid-1960, the three rented a New York studio and worked on movement improvisations. In August
1960, she traveled with Forti to Marin County, California to take Halprin's summer workshop, which was
very important, in addition to Forti's influence, to Rainer's early solo dance work. In late 1960, both Forti
and Rainer attended the choreography workshop that musician-composer Robert Dunn began to conduct
in the Cunningham studio based on the theories of John Cage. Here, Rainer created and performed her
earliest dances.

Dance and choreographic work

There is a lot of gesture in my stuff—also sounds and movements that accompany them. I
imagine what comes across is incongruity, bizarre—maybe odd or eccentric—although I
make no conscious attempts at humor. My image sometimes takes the form of a
disorientated body in which one part doesn't know what the other part is doing.[7]

In 1962, Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Ruth Emerson approached the Reverend Al Carmines at the Judson
Memorial Church to ask if they could begin performing there. The Church was already known for the
Judson Poets' Theater and Judson Art Gallery, which had been showing the work of Claes Oldenburg,
Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann. It now became a focal point for
vanguard dance activity and concerts of dance.

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 plot or drama. Many of the elements she employed—such as
repetition, tasks, and indeterminacy—later became standard features of contemporary dance. In 1965,
when writing about a recent dance — Parts of Some Sextets — for the Tulane Drama Review, she ended
the essay with what became her notorious No Manifesto, which she "reconsidered" in 2008. In 1969, her
work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication which experimented with language
and meaning-making.

NO to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star
image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
 No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the
performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.[8]

Repetition and sound were employed in her first choreographed piece, Three Satie Spoons (1961), a solo
in three parts performed by Rainer to the accompaniment of Eric Satie's Trois Gymnopedies. The last
section contained a repeated "beep beep beep in a falsetto squeak" and the spoken line: "The grass is
greener when the sun is yellower."[9] Over time her work shifted to include more narrative and cohesive
spoken words. Ordinary Dance (1962) was a combination of movement and narrative, and featured the
repetition of simple movements while Rainer recited an autobiographical monologue containing the
names of the streets on which she had lived while in San Francisco. One characteristic of Rainer's early
choreography was her fascination with using untrained performers. We Shall Run (1963) had twelve
performers, both dancers and non-dancers who, clad in street clothes, ran around the stage in various
floor patterns for twelve minutes to the "Tuba Mirum" from Berlioz's Requiem.[10] Her first evening
length choreography, for six dancers, called Terrain, was performed at Judson Church in 1963.

One of Rainer's most famous pieces, Trio A (1966), was initially the first section of an evening-long work
entitled The Mind Is a Muscle. Her decision in Trio A to execute movements with an even distribution of
energy reflected a challenge to traditional attitudes to "phrasing," which can be defined as the way in
which energy is distributed in the execution of a movement or series of movements. The innovation of
Trio A lies in its attempt to erase the differences of energy investment within both a given phrase and the
transition from one to another, resulting in an absence of the classical appearance of "attack" at the
beginning of a phrase and recovery at the end with energy arrested somewhere in the middle, as in a
grand jeté. Another characteristic of this five-minute dance is that the performer never makes eye contact
with the spectators, and in the instance in which the movement requires the dancer to face the audience,
the eyes are closed or the head is involved in movement. Although Rainer used repetition in earlier works
as a device to make movement easier to read, she decided to not repeat any movements in the piece. Trio
A is often referred to as a task-oriented performance due to this style of energy distribution, also for its
emphasis on a neutral, or characterless, approach to movement execution and a lack of interaction with
the audience. The first time the piece was performed it was entitled The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1, and
was performed simultaneous, but not in unison, by Rainer, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon. Trio A has
been widely taught and performed by other dancers.

Rainer has choreographed more than 40 concert works.

Select choreography
Three Seascapes (1961) a solo in three parts, with each section exploring a different type of
relationship between movement and sound.[11] In the first section, wearing a black overcoat,
Rainer trots around the perimeter of the stage to the last three minutes of Rachmaninoff's
Piano Concerto No. 2, occasionally lying down in a scrunched up position on her side. In the
second segment, she moves slowly across the space, moving her body in undulating
spasms. In the first performance in the Judson Church gym, La Monte Young and cohorts
performed his "Poem for Tables, Chairs, and Benches" by scraping these objects over a
concrete floor in the corridor outside the gymnasium. The finale, which was considered to be
 radical, featured Rainer screaming wildly and thrashing around with a black overcoat and
twenty yards of white tulle.[12]
Terrain (1962) was Rainer's first evening length work.[13] It had a number of sections,
including two "Talking Solos," with stories by Spencer Holst recited to an unrelated and
simultaneous series of movements.[14]
Continuous Project-Altered Daily (1970) was performed at the Whitney Museum, eventually
morphing into the improvisational Grand Union, of which Rainer was a member for two
years.
War (1970), an antiwar dance performed by thirty people at Douglass College protesting the
Vietnam War.
Street Action (1970), an action in protest of the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. forces in
1970. It consisted of three columns of people wearing black armbands and swaying from
side to side with bowed heads while moving through the streets of Lower Manhattan.[15]
This is the story of a woman who ... (1973), a dance drama using projected narrative texts, a
vacuum cleaner, and objects invested with strong meanings such as a mattress, a gun, and
a suitcase.[16]

Cinematic work

I made the transition from choreography to filmmaking between 1972 and 1975. In a
general sense my burgeoning feminist consciousness was an important factor. An equally
urgent stimulus was the encroaching physical changes in my aging body.[17]

Rainer sometimes included filmed sequences in her dances, and in 1972 she began to turn her attention to
directing feature-length films.[13] The feminist tone of her films, characterized by an interest in how the
female body was being viewed or objectified by male directors, resonated with the feminist film theory
emerging at the time in seminal texts like Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.[18] Her
early films do not follow narrative conventions; instead, Rainer's films combine autobiography and
fiction, sound and intertitles, 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 Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980),
The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). MURDER and
murder, more conventional in its narrative structure, is a lesbian love story dealing with Rainer's own
experience of breast cancer. In 2017, Lives of Performers was included in the annual selection of 25
motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress being deemed "culturally,
historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.[19][20]

Filmography
Hand Movie (1966)
Volleyball (1967)
Trio Film (1968)
Rhode Island Red (1968)
Line (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1966–69)
 Lives of Performers (1972)
Film About A Woman Who... (1974)
Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)
Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980)
The Man Who Envied Women (1985)
Privilege (1990)
Murder And Murder (1996)
After Many A Summer Dies The Swan: Hybrid (2002)

Return to dance
In 2000, Rainer returned to dance and choreography to create After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, for
Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project.[21] In 2006, Rainer choreographed a work entitled AG
Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M., which was a reinterpretation George Balanchine's Agon.[2]
Rainer continued to choreograph works based on classical pieces, including RoS Indexical (2007) ([Link]
[Link]/archive/07b-pc-0013), inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring.[2] This
work was commissioned for the Performa 07 biennial organized by performance art organization
Performa, which has managed Rainer since then.[22][23]

Subsequent works include Spiraling Down (2010), Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2010) and Assisted
Living: Do You Have Any Money? (2013), two pieces in which Rainer explores the theatrical and historic
motif of tableau vivants among political, philosophical and economic readings.[24]

An exhibition at London's Raven Row Gallery was the first to feature live performances of her 1960's
dances during an exhibition of photos and scores from her entire career, in addition to film screenings.[25]

In 2015, she choreographed and presented The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there's nothing
left to move? (2015), commissioned by Performa and The Getty Research Institute, a performance
containing choreographed work interspersed with a wide range of political, historical, and journalistic
texts read intermittently by the dancers and Rainer herself. This work was presented at The Museum of
Modern Art, and later toured European venues including La Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy,
Marseille Objectif Danse in France, and the Louvre.[23][26] A latter version of this same dance, called The
Concept of Dust: Continuous Project-Altered Annually was performed in 2016 at The Kitchen in New
York, and in Marseilles, Porto, and Barcelona in 2017.

In 2019, commissioned by Performa, Rainer reconstructed her 1965 work Parts of Some Sextets.
Supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Performa Commissioning Fund, Parts of
Some Sextets, 1965/2019 ([Link] was presented at the
Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center as part of Performa 19.
In 2024, Yvonne Rainer's iconic dance piece Trio A was performed several times daily in the upper hall of
the Neue Nationalgalerie during Berlin Art Week as part of the PERFORM! festival series. Created in
1966, Trio A is considered one of the most influential choreographies of the 20th century, featuring a
continuous, non-repetitive sequence of movements.[27] [28]

Feminism

As a white, unconsciously ambitious artist, oblivious to art world sexism and racism and
ensconced in dancing (a socially acceptable female pursuit), I started reading the angry
experimental writing in Robin Morgan's anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful and the fiery
polemics of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex.

Reading feminist writing and theory allowed Rainer to examine her own experience as a woman, and she
was able to think of herself as a participant in culture and society. Little did Rainer realize that her prior
choreography was a direct challenge of the "traditional" dance and ultimately feminist in nature.
Throughout the 1980s, Rainer was celibate, and she was determined "not to enter into any more ill-fated
heterosexual adventures ..."

She began attending Gay Pride Parades and considered herself a "political lesbian." Rainer participated in
a demonstration in New York and Washington D.C. to protest the challenges to Roe v. Wade during this
same time period. At the age of 56, she overcame her fears of identifying as a lesbian by becoming
intimate with Martha Gever. They are still together today.

Feminist Audre Lorde's famous statement posed, "You can't dismantle the master's house using the
master's tools." Rainer rebutted her theory by stating: "You can, if you expose the tools."[29]

Rainer was interviewed for the feminist film !Women Art Revolution.[30]

Rainer is referenced in several places as example of artist, feminist, and lesbian in the second edition of
Feminism Art Theory edited by Hilary Robinson.[31]

Recognition
In 1990, Rainer was awarded with a MacArthur Fellows Program award (or "Genius Grant") for her
contributions to dance.[32] In 2015 she received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts's Merce
Cunningham Award;[33] in 2017 she received a USA Grant. She has also received two Guggenheim
Fellowships (1969,1988).

See also
List of female film and television directors
List of lesbian filmmakers
 List of LGBT-related films directed by women

References
1. "Yvonne Rainer - Biography" ([Link]
[Link]/movies/person/107430/Yvonne-Rainer/biography), The New York Times,
Retrieved 3 November 2014.
2. "Dia Art Foundation - Yvonne Foundation" ([Link]
Archived ([Link]
e/42/1637) 2014-11-04 at the Wayback Machine, Dia Art Foundation, Retrieved 3 November
2014.
3. Roy, Sanjoy (2010-12-24). "Step-by-step guide to dance: Yvonne Rainer" ([Link]
[Link]/stage/2010/dec/24/step-by-step-yvonne-rainer). The Guardian. Retrieved
2013-12-28.
4. Rainer, Yvonne (2006). Feelings are facts: a life ([Link]
0rain). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0262182513. OCLC 61353153 ([Link]
[Link]/oclc/61353153).
5. "The Cellar" ([Link] FoundSF. Retrieved
2 January 2023.
6. Bennahum, Ninotchka; Perron, Wendy; Robertson, Bruce, eds. (2017). Radical bodies :
Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520293366. OCLC 956633830 (http
s://[Link]/oclc/956633830).
7. Rainer (2006), p. 204
8. Yvonne Rainer, Trio A at perform feminism ([Link]
a/) Archived ([Link]
onne-rainer-trio-a/) August 12, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
9. Banes, Sachs (2003), p. 24.
10. Banes, Sachs (2003), p. 29.
11. Banes, Sally (1983). "Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964". 91–92.
12. Artforum, Bruce Hainley on the early performance work of Sturtevant ([Link]
printarchive/id=30329) Archived ([Link]
[Link]/inprintarchive/id=30329) 2015-09-15 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved: February
19, 2015.
13. Crimp, Douglas. "Dance Mom: Yvonne Rainer" ([Link]
ance-mom-yvonne-rainer), Interview Magazine, Retrieved 3 November 2014.
14. Rainer (2006), p. 393.
15. Rainer (2006), pp. 317, 343, 346.
16. Rainer (2006), p. 400.
17. Armstrong, Carol; de Zegher, Catherine (2006). Women Artists at the Millennium.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 5.
18. Senses of Cinema, Yvonne Rainer ([Link]
Retrieved: February 19, 2015.
19. "2017 National Film Registry Is More Than a 'Field of Dreams' " ([Link]
n-17-178/2017-national-film-registry-is-more-than-a-field-of-dreams/2017-12-13/). Library of
Congress. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
20. "Complete National Film Registry Listing" ([Link]
vation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/). Library of Congress.
Retrieved 2020-11-24.
21. "Yvonne Rainer" ([Link] Video Database, Retrieved 3
November 2014.
22. "RoS Indexical" ([Link]
[Link]?id=14). Performa 07. Performa. Archived from the original ([Link]
[Link]/[Link]?id=14) on 14 August 2014. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
23. "Yvonne Rainer" ([Link] Performa.
Retrieved 23 October 2015.
24. Kaufman, Sarah (April 26, 2014). "Drowning out the noise to appreciate the beauty in
'Assisted Living: Good Sports 2' " ([Link]
ance/drowning-out-the-noise-to-appreciate-the-beauty-in-assisted-living-good-sports-2/201
4/04/26/3e37bd0c-cd72-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html). The Washington Post.
Retrieved October 23, 2015.
25. "Raven Row" ([Link]
26. Coon, Ella (September 20, 2015). "Performa Announces Yvonne Rainer's European Tour" (h
ttp://[Link]/2015/09/30/performa-announces-yvonne-rainer-european-tour/). Art
News. Retrieved October 23, 2015.
27. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu. "PERFORM! 2024" ([Link]
detail/perform-2024/). [Link] (in German). Retrieved 2024-09-18.
28. "Yvonne Rainer - Trio A - 1978" ([Link] MoMA
Website. Retrieved 2024-09-18.
29. Rainer (2006), pp. 386, 387, 438, 446, 454.
30. Anon 2018
31. Robinson, Hilary, ed. (2015-04-20). "Lesbian and Queer Practices". Feminism-art-theory :
an anthology 1968-2014 (Second ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 398–434.
ISBN 978-1-118-36060-6. OCLC 896127026 ([Link]
32. "Fellows" ([Link] MacArthur Foundation, Retrieved 3
November 2014.
33. "Foundation for Contemporary Arts announces Inaugural Merce Cunningham Award
Recipient for 2015" ([Link]
2015-cunningham-award-press-3341/2015%20Cunningham%20Award%20Press%20Relea
[Link]) (PDF). Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Retrieved 8 March 2015.

Bibliography
Anon (2018). "Artist, Curator & Critic Interviews" ([Link]
olution/feature/artist-curator-critic-interviews). !Women Art Revolution - Spotlight at Stanford.
Archived ([Link]
-art-revolution/feature/artist-curator-critic-interviews) from the original on March 26, 2018.
Retrieved August 23, 2018.
Atlas, Charles. Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions. Philadelphia, PA: University of the
arts.
Lambert, Carrie. "Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's Trio A," October 89 (Summer
1999): 87–112.
Liza Béar, Yvonne Rainer, and Willoughby Sharp. "Yvonne Rainer," Avalanche Magazine 5
(Summer 1972): 46–59.
Green, Shelley (1994). Radical Juxtaposition. The films of Yvonne Rainer ([Link]
g/details/radicaljuxtaposi00gree_0). New York: Scarecrow Press Inc. ISBN 0-8108-2863-4.
Rainer, Yvonne (1974). Work 1961-73. Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-919616-04-6.
 Rainer, Yvonne (1999). A Woman Who ... Essays, Interviews, Scripts. Baltimore, Maryland:
The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-6078-4.
Rainer, Yvonne (2006). Feelings Are Facts: A Life ([Link]
00rain). Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18251-3.
Broude, Norma; Garrard, Mary, eds. (1994). The Power of Feminist Art ([Link]
etails/poweroffeminista0000unse). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-2659-8.
Rainer, Yvonne (2011). Poems. New York: Badlands Unlimited. ISBN 978-1-936440-10-8.

External links
"The Life of Yvonne Rainer" ([Link] [Link].
Accessed February 19, 2024.
Yvonne Rainer's Trio A ([Link]
78), [Link]. Accessed February 19, 2024.
Yvonne Rainer's Kristina Taking Pictures ([Link]
ne-rainer-kristina-talking-pictures-1976/), [Link]. Accessed February 19, 2024.
HOW TO SEE | Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done featuring Yvonne Rainer
([Link] [Link]. Accessed February 19,
2024.
Yvonne Rainer and other artists interviewed for MoMA Audio: Judson Dance Theater: The
Work is Never Done, 2017 ([Link]
Yvonne Rainer: The Concept of Dust--or How do you look when there's nothing left to
move? ([Link] [Link]. Accessed February
19, 2024.
2003 biography ([Link]
[Link]. Accessed February 19, 2024.
Review of Feelings Are Facts ([Link]
[Link]), by Daniel Ross. Accessed February 19, 2024.
Conceptual Paradise ([Link]
[Link]/socialsoftware/paradise/[Link]/Conceptual_Paradise), [Link].
Accessed February 19, 2024.
"Step-by-step guide to dance: Yvonne Rainer" ([Link]
c/24/step-by-step-yvonne-rainer), [Link]. Accessed February 19, 2024.
Yvonne Rainer ([Link] at IMDb
Archival footage of Yvonne Rainer's Debate 2002 and Three Seascapes in 2002 ([Link]
[Link]/dance/martha-pillow), [Link]. Accessed February 19,
2024.
Rainer gives a lecture, discussing and showing video excerpts of works made after 2000 (htt
p://[Link]/watch/yvonne-rainer-5362/), [Link]. Accessed February 19, 2024.
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.
Yvonne Rainer papers ([Link]
[Link]), Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

Retrieved from "[Link]