Yvonne Rainer Continues to Defy Expectations at 90

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 246, ‘Dance’

In October 1999, after more than two decades directing experimental films, Yvonne Rainer returned to dance. It was like ‘coming home’, she told me in a 2015 interview for Artpress. The event took place at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in New York, the very same venue where, in the early 1960s, Rainer – along with like-minded artists such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and Robert Rauschenberg – redefined what movements counted as dance by introducing commonplace actions like walking, running and skating into their performances, and championing an anti-virtuoso sensibility.

The programme that night centred on Trio A, a four-and-a-half-minute choreography which Rainer premiered in 1966. At the time, Trio A knocked down expressionist expectations of modern dance: it demanded a uniform motion flow, with no dramatic inflection, and refused to indulge in audience pleasing (performers never lock eyes with viewers). Over the years, Trio A became a totem of postmodern dance and was passed on between dancers or learned via bootleg videos. By 1999, Rainer was unhappy with what she considered adulterated versions circulating and decided to set the record straight.

In re-asserting how to do Trio A ‘right’, Rainer also delivered a masterclass in artistic introspection. That night, in a programme she titled Trio A Pressured, she showed the piece several times: as a solo, as a duo with Pat Catterson and as a trio with Steve Paxton and Douglas Dunn (simultaneously, but not in unison, per its original presentation). Yet, it wasn’t a simple celebration: Rainer used the occasion to test the limits of her own work. Catterson gave a ‘Retrograde’ rendition, executing the routine backwards, while Rainer presented ‘Facing’, in which a second performer follows her and attempts to sustain eye contact, thus negating a founding principle of the work.

Mikhail Baryshnikov was in attendance and, a few days later, the ballet dancer and director invited Rainer to choreograph a new piece for his company, White Oak Dance Project. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan premiered in June 2000 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It established the foundations for Rainer’s second choreographic career: revisiting and recombining ideas from her past – a process she described to me as ‘raiding my icebox’ – while confronting them with the context of a new century.

The piece also exhibited Rainer’s penchant for ‘radical juxtapositions’, a term she had borrowed from critic Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Happenings’ (1962) and applied to her own film-editing style. Rainer compares it to urban life, like being bombarded by discordant noises, bold signs and garish outfits while walking down a street. This technique underpinned her seven feature-length films, in which she would repeatedly place heterogeneous images, text and music in clashing combinations to let free associations lead to new meanings for the viewer.

Most of the movements in Swan stemmed from Work 1961–73 (1974), a catalogue of scores, drawings, notes and essays that Rainer published before departing the world of dance for cinema. Over and in between these dance sequences – walking in plié, waddling with straight legs while arms perform windmill-like motions, alternating small skips with leaping runs – performers recite a mix of purported deathbed utterances and excerpts from written works by figures as varied as actor Marlene Dietrich, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Katha Pollitt and revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Most striking, however, is a six-minute piece called ‘Valda’s Solo’, also integrated into the body  of Swan, which Rainer decided to put under pressure for the occasion. The original dance appears in Rainer’s first feature, Lives of Performers (1972). In this film, the dancer Valda Setterfield is entangled in a love triangle and seeks to strut her stuff. In the black and white feature, the short-haired, slender performer wears a glamorous black gown that conceals her bare feet but leaves her shoulders and arms exposed. Alone within the frame, she dances sensually with a small ball. Her arms swing gracefully around her waist, then extend in dramatic ways. She moves confidently back and forth along an invisible line, followed by a spotlight. Her magnetism pierces the screen.

Rainer redefined what movements counted as dance.

For Swan, Rainer turned to Baryshnikov to perform ‘Valda’s Solo’. Centre stage, the male ballet dancer plays the part with exactitude. Shirtless, he attaches Valda’s dress to his chest, wearing it over his pants. With bare shoulders, he emulates her vamp demeanour. His limbs flow smoothly about his body. With delicacy, he strikes stylish poses, his wrists breaking in affectation like Setterfield’s. In contrast, and at the same time, a dancer at downstage left pulls a large cardboard box across the stage using a cord. Behind the box, another dancer follows the movement, rolling backwards on the floor at the same pace.

Despite the interference, Baryshnikov channels the poised Valda, turning the erotic charge of the original solo upside down. By changing the gender of her soloist, Rainer revelled in complicating the game of desires she had set out in her original piece, while keeping cheap audience manipulation at bay: Baryshnikov never properly wears the dress; he only places it on his chest, as if dancing with Valda’s ghost.

In the two decades since Swan, Rainer has progressively assembled a group of dancers around her whom she affectionately calls the ‘Raindears’. This informal company includes Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuèle Phuon, Keith Sabado and David Thomson. Together, they have continued to ‘raid Rainer’s icebox’, unpacking past ideas and seeing how these hold up under new circumstances.

For instance, Rainer’s 2015 commission for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?, revived the playful collaborative movements that constituted her 1970 work Continuous Project–Altered Daily. In the original piece, dancers move in scrums, walk on all fours (sometimes with other performers sitting on their backs) and play with each other’s weight: a performer might slowly push against another until gently falling to the floor with their assistance. In the 1970s, Rainer and her energetic peers could execute these movements with ease and agility. 45 years later, the same simple operations performed by older dancers take on a divergent meaning: they put centre stage the care needed towards each other.

Approaching her 90th birthday, Rainer remains far from retirement. She is still determined to shake her own certitudes and, once again, Trio A is on the line. It began with Trio A: Geriatric with Talking (2010), in which she attempted to perform the piece while explaining live the limitations of her ageing body to complete its so-called ordinary movements. Later, Remembering and Dismembering Trio A (2020), performed by dancer Brittany Bailey, confronted the dance with excerpts from a poignant text by writer Peter Schjeldahl, in which he contemplates his imminent death from terminal lung cancer. These days, Rainer and Bailey are crafting a surprising new hybrid: they are incorporating into Trio A fragments of Donald O’Connor’s exuberant solo ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ from the 1952 musical film Singin’ in the Rain. Defying expectations, Trio A Demolition sets out to keep audiences dazzled, with Rainer injecting acrobatic falls and stumbles executed by Bailey into the piece’s deadpan style, as if thumbing her nose at her own legacy.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 246 with the headline ‘Raiding the Icebox’

^{Main image: Yvonne Rainer, The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (detail), 2015, performance view. Courtesy: © Digital Image IN2329.11, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Scala, Florence; photograph: Julieta Cervantes}