Product Code Database
Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an American , choreography, and film director, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. "Yvonne Rainer - Biography", The New York Times, Retrieved 3 November 2014. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York. "Dia Art Foundation - Yvonne Foundation" , Dia Art Foundation, Retrieved 3 November 2014.
Rainer grew up, along with an older brother, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, which she has described as "a neighborhood of white Protestant working class families". From the age of twelve, she was "exposed to the heady commingling of poets, painters, writers, and Italian anarchists."
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, 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"; 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. (2025). 9780520293366, University of California Press. ISBN 9780520293366
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.
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.
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 Erik 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."Banes, Sachs (2003), p. 24. 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 Hector Berlioz's Requiem.Banes, Sachs (2003), p. 29. 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 simultaneously, 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.
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 among political, philosophical and economic readings.
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.
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. 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 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.
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."Rainer (2006), pp. 386, 387, 438, 446, 454.
Rainer was interviewed for the feminist film !Women Art Revolution.
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. (2015). 9781118360606, Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781118360606
|
|
