Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York.
Early life
Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24, 1934, in San Francisco, California. Her parents, Joseph and Jeanette, considered themselves radicals. Her mother, a stenographer, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, and her father, a stonemason and house painter, was born in Vallanzengo, northern Italy, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 21.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.
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
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.
Repetition and sound were employed in her first choreographed piece, Three Satie Spoons, 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." Over time her work shifted to include more narrative and cohesive spoken words. Ordinary Dance 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 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. 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, 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.
Select choreography
- Three Seascapes a solo in three parts, with each section exploring a different type of relationship between movement and sound. 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.
- Terrain was Rainer's first evening length work. It had a number of sections, including two "Talking Solos," with stories by Spencer Holst recited to an unrelated and simultaneous series of movements.
- Continuous Project-Altered Daily was performed at the Whitney Museum, eventually morphing into the improvisational Grand Union, of which Rainer was a member for two years.
- War, an antiwar dance performed by thirty people at Douglass College protesting the Vietnam War.
- Street Action, 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.
- This is the story of a woman who..., 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.
Cinematic work