Yvonne Rainer

Born in San Francisco in 1934, Yvonne Rainer had alreadymoved to New York by 1957 to study dance with the legendary Martha Graham and the early Merce Cunningham. She would later distance herself from their influence, however, as her interest in Martha Graham’s expressivedance and in Cunningham’s emphasis on improvised and combined chance operations progressively waned. Her experiences with the dancer Anna Halprin and with Robert Dunn, a musician who studied under John Cage, and the friendships that she formed there with Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon eventually led to the founding of the Judson Dance Theater in New York. Interested laypeople - often from the visual arts or the music, film, or poetry scenes - worked together with contemporary dance professionals in this hub of the New York avant-garde scene. Both personally and professionally, Yvonne Rainer already had closecontact here with visual artists, some of whom such as Carl Andre, Robert Morris, or Robert Rauschenberg were involved in her dance pieces, as dancers or in someother capacity.

This was the era of the hybrid art forms of Fluxus and Happening. Yvonne Rainer created surprising choreoraphies in which she impressively developed an entirely independent language of expression marked, amongother things, by the extension of dance to include everyday gestures and activities. Her legendary comparison of minimal sculpture and dance, which she herself also questioned at the time, showed vividly just how close the practice of avant-garde visual art and dance were in the1960’s. The scaling of the work to the human body and deliberate repetition are some of the major points of comparison that she stressed in this connection, premises that are already conspicuous in one of her early works now considered a milestone of postmodern dance: Trio A (1966). Later incorporated in her evening-length dance program The Mind Is a Muscle, this short work lasting only five minutes appeals on account of the reduction of its movements and the simultaneous technical prowess and understatement of their execution. Additional features are - and this holds for other early works by Rainer ‘repetition, variation, and the underlining of her actors’real bodily presence. Her eschewal of a specific narrative line with intro, climax, and finale and her avoidance of eye contact with the audience are also typical of her works. Moreover, in The Mind Is a Muscle Yvonne Rainer’s interest in combining dance with other forms of expression such as film and installation also emerged - during the performance she ran the film Volleyball which she had made a year earlier and a slide show, and used a cassette recorder, foam plastic sheets, and mattresses as stage design and as props. In line with her critique of the adulatory enshrinement of choreographer and individual dancers,and the concomitant star cult, she dissolved her own company in 1970 and founded a democratically operating dance group Grand Union with likeminded friends.

In the early 1970s, Yvonne Rainer turned her back on the stage to make movies with her specific type of directorial work uniting fiction and reality, the personal and the political. Yet this did not entail turning her back on the subjects and strategies she had dealt with and implemented there. Her rejection of linear narrative and identification with actors, no less than her intellectual abstracting ofemotion are also found in her films. Quite apart from the historical documentary value of the seven movies Rainer made from 1972 to 1996, their treatment of political themes (such as racism), autobiographical aspects, and feminist issues makes them outstanding works of 20th centurymovie history.