Yvonne Rainer
by Annette Michelson

© Annette Michelson on Yvonne Rainer, "Yvonne Rainer, Part One: The Dancer and The Dance," Artforum, January 1974. Annette Michelson on Yvonne Rainer, "Yvonne Rainer, Part Two: Lives of Performers," Artforum, February 1974. 

Part One: The Dancer and the Dance

There are, in the contemporary renewal of performance modes, two basic and diverging impulses which shape and animate its major innovations. The first, grounded in the idealist extensions of a Christian past, is mythopoeic in its aspiration, eclectic in its forms, and constantly traversed by the dominant and polymorphic style which constitutes the most tenacious vestige of that past: expressionism. Its celebrants are: for theater, Artaud, Grotowski, for film Murnau and Brakhage, and for the dance, Wigman, Graham. The second, consistently secular in its commitment to objectification, proceeds from Cubism and Constructivism; its modes are analytic and its spokesmen are: for theater, Meyerhold and Brecht, for film Eisenstein and Snow, for dance, Cunningham and Rainer.

New dance and new film in this country have for the past decade grown and flourished within the latter context, developing as the most sustained and radical instances of its esthetic enterprise. The condition of that radicality has been the painful luxury of homelessness. New dance, like new film, inhabits and works largely out of Soho and those adjunct quarters which constitute the center of our commerce in the visual arts. They live and work, however, entirely on the periphery of their world’s economy, stimulated by the labor and production of that economy, with no support, no place in the structure of its market. New dance and new film have been, in part and whole, unassimilable to commodity value. Existing and developing within their habitat as if on a reservation, they are condemned to a strict reflexiveness. The result is an art of critical discourse, consumingly autoanalytical, at every point explicative of the problems attendant upon the constant revision of the grammar and syntax of that discourse. If Dance in its most innovative instances has insisted on an alteration of the terms of discourse, pressed for an altered relationship between performer and audience, decreeing and soliciting new modes of attention and of gratification, this is, in part, because the audience has been, as well, the most problematic element in the dialectic of performance.¹

The work of Yvonne Rainer, deriving a good deal of its energy and coherence from a systematic investigation of that relationship and those changing modes, begins with an initial investigation of the notion of the Performing Self and an acknowledgement of its questionable character for the contemporary artist. Consider the piece known as Trio A (it is part of the larger work, The Mind Is a Muscle, 1966). Trio A appears and recurs, reworked, quoted, remembered, varied, in the performances of the last several years. (In This is the story of a woman who . . . , 1972, it will be preceded by the remark, “She shows him her dance” which, occurring in the context of a new, fictional structure, assumes a newly equivocal character.) It is not only a very successful piece; it is something of a signature, and constituted, as part of The Mind Is a Muscle, something of a watershed in Rainer’s work, combining as it does, a number of the strategies adopted for her revision of choreographic grammar. Above all, it generates a shift in one’s temporal experience of Dance, and in the performer’s function; it is this conjunction that accounts, no doubt, for the particular pleasure it gives to those who watch it.

Trio A is highly asyndetonic, proceeding from phrase to phrase, without pause or transition, and its evenness of utterance, its seamlessness results from the dancer’s refusal to inflect movement in the sense of emphasis; it is, quite simply in one way, without stress or interruption, a succession of things, a true temporal order of movements experienced as seen one after the other. But this makes of it a rather special work.

Trio A was made within the context of that general reassessment of the dance esthetics and style of the West, which turned upon considerations paralleling those of advanced sculpture of the mid-1960s. Central to those considerations was the distinction between a time one might call synthetic as against a time that is operational, the time of experience, of our actions in the world.

A questioning was initiated by Merce Cunningham and radicalized through the work of Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, and others working and performing in New York in the mid-1960s. Their common aim was the establishment of a radically new economy of movement. This required a systematic critique of the rhetoric, conventions, the esthetic hierarchies imposed by traditional or classical dance forms. That rhetoric was, in fact, reversed, destroyed, in what came to be known as the dance of “ordinary language” and of “task performance.”

The correlative of virtual, sculptural space was the rhythmic, mimetic time, generated by music and/or the narrative situation of traditional dance and theater. Here is a critical text which celebrates that time and its esthetic consequences.

In dancing one keeps taking a step and recovering one’s balance. The risk is a part of the rhythm. One steps out of and into balance; one keeps on doing it, and step by step the mass of the body moves about. But the action is more fun and risk increases when the dancers step to a rhythmic beat of music. Then the pulse of the downbeat can lift the dancer as he takes a step; it can carry him through the air for a moment, and the next downbeat can do it again. Such a steady beat to dance on is what a dancer dreams of and lives for. The lightness that music gives is an imaginary or an imaginative lightness. You know it is an illusion, but you see it happen, you enjoy believing it. There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.²

The New Dance of the 1960s, like the newer sculpture, questioned a stylistics of illusion grounded in that notion of risk. It would use the irrationality of fantasy or comedy as materials, but its fundamental impulse in regard to “insanity” was—as might have been predicted—therapeutic. Rational, objectifying in stance and thrust, it set about redefining the spatial and temporal logic of the dance as a grand exercise in the achievement of “concrete reasonableness.”³

The New Dance, then, set out in much the same manner as the new sculpture of the 1960s to contest, point for point, esthetic conventions which had acquired an ontological status, by rehabilitating, installing within the dance fabric, the task, the movement whose quality is determined by its specifically operational character. Instituting games and tasks within the dance structure, it engendered a specific logic of movement, and, of course, the possibility of that logic’s reversal. Using found materials and found or rule-generated movement, using techniques of disjunction, setting movement against sound, sound against music and against speech, operational movement against recorded movement (that of film) and the image of movement in arrest (slides), it distended the arena of organized temporality, installing within the dance situation a real or operational time, redefining choreography as a situation within which an action may take the time it takes to perform that action. Neither self-contained nor engendered by predetermined rhythmic and rhetorical patterns, it was not “synthetic.” The time of the New Dance brought into play, through an initial asceticism which it shared with the advanced sculpture of that period—that of Morris, Judd, Andre—a multiplicity of new possibilities. The vocabulary of movement was revised through a rethinking of the problem of energy release, and the accumulation of new materials generated paratactic structures.

Trio A involves no set tasks, no purposeful movements; its time is not the “real” time of operational movement, but as Rainer stresses, rather “real movement time,” “the time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through prescribed motion. An ordered time is not imposed.”⁴ It was, then, as though the notion of task performance had been radicalized, becoming performance-of-the-business-at-hand. The “real time” of task or operation is redefined as identical with that of dance. Or one might describe them as collapsed into a single, new, and intimately unified sense of time. That collapse is contingent upon the dissolution of the technique of composition by phrase, the rejection of building toward climax and periodic relaxation which had, by then, begun to seem

excessively dramatic and more simply, unnecessary. Artifice of performance has been re-evaluated, in that action or what one does, is more interesting and important than the exhibition of character and attitude. That action can best be focused on through the submerging of the personality; so ideally one is not even one’s self, one is a neutral doer.⁵

One was, in other words, she-who-performs-the-task, doing-the-business-at-hand-in-dancing.

There is, in all of Rainer’s early work, an assault on the conditions of the performer’s exhibitionism, a rage against the narcissism which animates that thrust toward the annihilation of the Self; it is evident in many ways, and many of them are extremely subtle. The particularly closed and seamless quality of Trio A owes much to the fact that the dancer’s gaze is continually averted from the audience. (Valda Setterfield’s eyes focusing upon the ball she holds in solo dances for performances in 1972–73 and Lives of Performers will play a variation upon this.) That averted gaze is an attempt to short-circuit the projection of Self toward audience, to eliminate the conditions of a narcissistic gratification. Its consequence for the spectator is a problem, or a question. For if the dancer is she/he who performs the task in/of dancing, the spectator, confronting that “neutral doer,” that utter submersion of self in that business at hand which is the performance, must ask himself—and the literalness of the question gives us the measure of its freshness and its urgency—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

“You cannot, nor should you seek to know the difference,” says this Performer in that moment of Dance History. One is offered, instead, a spatio-temporal complex of even, successive, uninflected moments/movements or equivalent focal points in which the use of slides, props, sounds, films, and texts abounds. The distance from the mimetic increases as texts are read in neutral “reading” voices, even when involving direct dialogue. Movement is quoted; parody intrudes. Increasingly, the presence and movement of performers is used as one parameter among others. This is the background of the injunction to “expand the focus away from the personal psychological confrontation with the performer.” And finally, in another telling note, “the performer is the residue from an obsolescent art form: theater. How to use the performer as a medium rather than as a persona. Is a ballet méchanique [sic] the only solution?”⁶ It has been, of course, a frequent temptation in the history of this century’s performance, as it begins in the theatrically utopian projects of Gordon Craig and culminates in Meyerhold’s great postrevolutionary productions of The Magnificent Cuckold and Tarelkin’s Death, in Schlemmer’s Bauhaus spectacles.⁷

For an American modernist working in the latter half of this century, the ballet mécanique is, for a variety of reasons, a less urgent temptation. And the dancer is especially disjunct from that wider continuum of productivity which once generated an intensity of shared aspiration. An American modernist will inherit the preoccupation with production, with therapy, with task or problem-solving that derives from a traditional necessity of justification through works. As we have seen, these paradigms of enterprise, dissociated from a larger community of aspiration, generate the formal strategies which produce the new temporality of Dance, destroying then, in turn, the temporal continuum of narration, the order of beginning, middle, and end, in which drama takes shape and the persona functions. Here is a point of origin for the formal dissolution of performer’s persona and the fictional character: deprived of the time in which he can develop or project, he loses the metaphorical space in which he can breathe and function. It is that temporal order as the medium of narrative form which endures as object of a critique which extends across the century and its art forms. Here are two recent reformulations by filmmakers:

Michael Snow: . . . Passages, then, wherein or post facto or in anticipation I may note revelatory unities and disparities. What’s interesting is not codifying, but expanding and understanding the nature of passages from one state to another without acknowledging “beginning” as having any more importance in the incident than “importance” has in this sentence. Or than ending in this . . .⁸

Jean-Luc Godard: Yes, my films do have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.

But here is one much older, invested with revelatory power of poetry, in the concluding lines of Schwitters’ “Anna Blume”:

Anna Blume! Anne, a-n-n-a, I trickle your name. Your name drips like softest tallow. Do you know, Anna, do you already know? You can also be read from the end, and you, you loveliest of all, are from behind just as you are in front: “a-n-n-a.” 
Tallow trickles caressingly down my back. Anna Blume, you trickle beast, I love your !⁹

Schwitters here acknowledges the libidinal source of the will to confound beginning and ending. The rejection of directionality, or structural purposiveness is linked with pleasure, and the ambivalence of the name stands as a metaphor for the rejection of an imposed teleology. More importantly, both are subsumed in the delighted insistence on the body as text to be ambivalently read as it is polymorphously enjoyed. Schwitters’ wit, identifying the sexual act with that of intellection suggests a source of energy for the contemporary assault on narrative structure and its esthetic uses: the longing for a gratification freed from the constraints of purposiveness, la promesse de bonheur. One begins to see, as well, the possible source of that antinarcissistic rage which obstinately engineers the dissolution of the time of narrative as the condition for the performer’s confrontation of the audience as “neutral doer.” It is the sense of a displaced surrogate and unresolved sexual commerce, and the break with such a situation for a talent as skilled, a presence as commanding as Rainer’s, cannot have been easy. It required more than resolution: the generation of the many strategies elaborated during the mid-‘60s, of which the averted gaze is one single subtle instance.

I have been considering, in a somewhat general manner, aspects of a development essential to Rainer’s work of the 1960s and to our understanding of it, of the way its grammatical and syntactical innovations are a part of something much larger we can genuinely call a radical aspiration. And this account has not described or chronicled the detail of its variety, of its contradictions, pleasures, or even of its innovations, its continual humor, its density of allusion and reference, of affective resonance. I’ve been concerned, rather, with detecting some of the presuppositions of the radical shifts and breaks which support the early work, and without which the extraordinary and by no means quite unproblematic work of the past three years would not be either so extraordinary or so problematic. It is to this period of performance eventuating in a first film that I now turn.

In the spring of 1970, Rainer presented Continuous Project—Altered Daily in three successive evenings at the Whitney Museum. Her fellow performers were Becky Arnold, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Barbara Lloyd, Steve Paxton, and they were joined by a few friends who provided, at intervals of their own choosing, readings from assigned texts. The performances took place in three areas, one of which was central for most activity, and involved the use of objects, props, and “body adjuncts,” the projection of film, and sound/music. This enterprise derived its title, as acknowledged in the program notes, from a sculptural work by Robert Morris then on exhibit in the museum, and indeed one now sees their conjunction retrospectively as an interesting, a critical and transitional moment for both artists.¹⁰

The Morris exhibition had, in fact, been open to the public from the first day of its installation. Its maximal use of the museum’s space and structure, publicly demonstrated through the open installation process, also afforded the realization of sculpture as work, of installation as providing a strikingly clear and instructive text in mechanics, large-scaled demonstrations of the use of lever and of pulley. Artisans, museum personnel, and artist worked at the transport of the huge cement, wood, and steel components, converting the elevator into the giant pulley which hoisted them to the level of the exhibition floor where the assembly crew waited to install them, while a mass of visitors, armed with tape recorders, movie and still cameras, recorded their labor under the artist’s direction. The week of installation and the successive modifications of the structures during the exhibition period formed a single Continuous Project – Altered Daily.

Rainer’s work at the Whitney that spring was a new and considerably longer treatment of a collection of material she had previously offered at Pratt Institute in March of the preceding year. These performances, varying each evening, drew upon several inventories, of which the first articulated the modes of activity possible in performance. These modes, listed in the program notes, were rehearsal, teaching, run-through, working out, marking, then surprises, and a general category of spontaneous and unrehearsed or choreographed behavior. A second inventory analyzes levels of performance reality: primary, performing original material in a personal style; secondary, performing someone else’s material in a style approximating the original, or working in a known style or “genre”; and tertiary, performing someone else’s material in a style completely different from and/or inappropriate to, the original. In this performance, as in preceding and successive ones, the preferred levels indicated are B and C, with some priority for C, guaranteeing maximum distance from the mimetic. Professional and amateur gesture and deportment as visible in experienced and inexperienced performers are invoked in the context of the rapidly blurring distinction between the two categories. The elaboration of the program, the way in which it seeks to make explicit the concerns and processes, the contingencies which shape performance, strongly inflects one’s experience and recollection of the work, orders it, and impels one to parse the work. The readings of assigned texts, mostly reminiscences of performers in film’s silent period, superimposed the dimension of reference to past, completed performance upon a present, evolving one. And finally, a list of “roles” and of “metamuscular conditions affecting, whether visible of not, the execution of physical feats” bestowed upon the performance an expansive effect. Here is a brief excerpt from the long list:

adolescent 
angel 
athlete 
autistic child 
Annette Michelson 
bird 
Barbara Streisand 
Buster Keaton 
anger 
convalescence 
celibacy 
constipation 
catatonia 
drug-induced state 
discipline 
diarrhea

Continuous Project contained a great part of the strategies used and transformed in the film to be made in 1972. For instance, the terms of these inventories functioned in a way approaching that of titles or intertitles; their distribution was left, however, to the spectator. Titles, projected or written on stage, will be used increasingly in the 1972 performances at Hofstra University and at the Whitney before assuming a variable structural function in Lives of Performers.

The principal change in performance structure and dynamics made by Continuous Project, however, came through Rainer’s new emphasis on work with and in the group, through the partial relinquishing of certain controls as choreographer and the admission of stimulus and suggestion from her performers. Continuous Project initiates, in fact, a two-year period during which she will pursue one line of improvisational work, of learning situations and group interaction as they culminate in the occasional, entirely improvisational performances with the group known as The Grand Union. In these public performances a sustained behavioral continuity is supported by no preparation but that of the growing and intensifying intimacy and developing capacity for freedom of personal response.

Reviewing once again my memories and notes of the third and last performance of Continuous Project on April 2, 1970, I find myself recalling first the modalities of learning, teaching, and testing. Instances such as David Gordon and Steve Paxton working as partners, teaching, testing each other; Rainer in a sequence of self-touching, exploring her own body at an accelerating pace that generates a somewhat spastic movement; Gordon working with the entire group, testing the stability of each separate individual, pushing at each, then settling in place with a rocking or rolling movement, facing Rainer and surrounded by the group in a sequence which suggests the development and topology of an encounter situation and a children’s game.

“Body adjuncts” and props were large, odd, intrusive, inflecting movement in ways so unexpected they elicited skill, ingenuity of response, and occasioned collapse as often as they did success. Gordon had a rock-n-roll section in a huge Mexican sombrero, and one female dancer, wearing a stomach-pad, later helped him with that hat, his leg all the while held by Paxton to the ground. Rainer and Barbara Lloyd ran in circles around the group as they did some rock-n-roll, those two rhythms in complete disjunction. Calls for help were repeated, and repeatedly, as one saw reenacted the modes of interaction and performance as “getting by with a little help from my friends,” one saw as well the performance and rehearsal open out into the space of a performer/choreographer’s life.

A conversation between Rainer and Douglas Dunn on the subject of a frame was distanced by Rainer’s extremely conspicuous half turns from microphone, talking into it from alternate sides, like a stand-up comic’s version of a two-sided conversation. It is a variant of a “genre” of performance for which she has a penchant. Conversation touched on art history as Rainer recalled Marjorie Strider’s use of empty stretched canvas, suggesting that she, Rainer, was in a position to have more history than Dunn was, but the reference reached even further for the spectator, to an early piece, Site, by Morris. Other historical precedents invoked: a sequence involving Gordon and Lloyd in which Gordon, reaching for something placed on a very large carton, was held back by Lloyd grasping his leg, so that in the extreme physical tension of that reaching, he reproduced a balletic leg extension. Or again, fragmented recollections of past performance were fleetingly evoked, as when Rainer and Gordon, facing one another with a pillow between them, perform a series of dips of the sort that punctuate erotic ballroom dances such as the tango, thus suggesting a piece I’d known of but have never seen: Waterman Switch.

In addition to pillows, props included the Mexican hat, stomach-pad, cartons, stretched canvas, and both a pair of wings and a tail: angelic and bestial modes of being were lightly evoked as modes of movement, fraught with comedy, somewhat difficult. Parody was almost everywhere present or threatening to appear. After a musical “dance number,” with chairs and pillows, Dunn, tossing a pillow over the chair, draped himself with one arm over its back, with the nonchalance of Fred Astaire. The silent movie actors evoked were Keaton, Betty Blythe, Louise Brooks, among others.

Sound text, props, movement, situations enabled a continual switching from rehearsal to play, to learning, to testing, oscillating between the choreographer’s strict control and the incalculable risks and uncertainties introduced by the challenge of difficult props, the rhythms and tensions of interpersonal exchange. One had a sense of something very different from the effect of game rules or task performance or completed, objectified formalized movement. There was a distinct and constant sense of uncertainty, of the tensions and pathos of testing, failure, recapitulation, abandonment or revision projected in these evenings of extended play. Rainer’s work of the 1960s, always shot through with personal and highly charged references and objects, had been objectified in a number of very self-contained and formal structures. Working now within the delicate dialectic of control and improvisation, she initiates, within the firmly established boundaries of an evening’s performance and its analytic inventories of performance modes, muscular tension, roles, and stylistic options, their gradual and provisional dissolution. The inventories testify to the necessity to admit contingency—but as further subject for analysis, ordering, objectification, and insistence rather like Boulez’ characteristic injunction to “organize frenzy.” Beginning now to work with The Grand Union while at the same time pursuing personal projects, she does indeed begin to work with the performer as medium. Only performer and performance are now questionable notions. As Paxton put it,

The medium is people and what they are doing to and with each other. For the collective head to develop, several years were needed. Grand Union members were influenced as much by their shared past and the particular focus of new developments in collective action as by their own decisions about their future.¹¹

In the ensuing era of togetherness, Trio A might seem in its even, self-contained movement and averted gaze a vestige of a solipsistic past; it was ripe for the series of dissolving variations which converted it into a trademark.

*

In the winter of 1970 Rainer traveled in India, observing the performance and teaching of dance. It was, by her account, an experience of unique intensity, of great moment for the development of her work. This in itself was, apparently, surprising to her and one is somewhat surprised by that surprise. Exposure to a specific vocabulary of movement and gesture as such, through full of interest, was less important than the way in which a reconsideration of the nature and function of narrative in dance was forced upon her. The recognition that Indian dance is wholly dependent upon narrative structure, and the experience of the remarkable forms and energies of its articulation as linked to the sense of “the moral and spiritual ambience surrounding these art forms,” impelled a reconsideration of the possibilities of narrative for her own work.

And it became astonishing to me that I have dealt with dramatic elements in my dance but have never fitted them together to make a story. In fact, my whole emphasis has been to avoid any clear continuity. . . . There’s some kind of sleight of hand going on in the way we don’t want to give a clear message; yet by leaving the interpretation of what we do to the audience, we wish to free it, rather than manipulate it. In India the work was meaningful to the audience in a whole other way.¹²

This dimension of meaningfulness was, as pointed out by her interviewer and acknowledged by Rainer, contingent upon another, all-determining factor: the existence of a shared framework of religious and ethical beliefs, as basis of myth and of narrative form. Then continuing the recital of a recent revelation:

The American way is that each person has to carve the possibilities for communication for himself—we have no continuity, we have no traditions, we have no exemplars in myth. We read the Iliad and the Odyssey as fiction, they contain no moral precepts for us. This throws us back on personal experience. . . .

One knows these words and recalls their tone. They restate once again the mythopoeic aspiration which has touched every major poet from Romanticism on, animating the work of Yeats as of Biely, of Eliot as of Auden and of Stevens, of Artaud as of Blake. Rainer, rediscovering, through the sudden and immediate access to a religious culture, the mythopoeic as the ground of narrative form, makes contact with that other basic impulse which traverses the art of our time. With a characteristic lucidity and fidelity to her sense of her own necessary commitments, she sees that impulse as problematic, as requiring an entire reinvention. The vocabulary of gesture and movement of Kathakali dance, though revelatory, will be useless to her; nor can she assent to the myths and rituals of her own culture. Looking for the materials of that narrative, the space of its structure, she is thrown back upon a secular, ironic consciousness and on the realization that “it’s as though my own life contains possibilities for a mythology.” These possibilities were explored and reexplored in the major performances of the next two years, developing toward a complex work, This is the story of a woman who . . . , in a series of recapitulations, variations, and accumulations. They are resynthesized in the film generated by these events, Lives of Performers, in Rainer’s investigation of the modes and forms of the temporality of a possible fiction.

Part two: "Lives of Performers" 

The immediate consequence of Yvonne Rainer’s Indian voyage was Grand Union Dreams, performed in the very large and featureless gymnasium space of the Emmanuel Midtown YMHA in May, 1971. It seemed then and seems still her most problematic work, but it will interest us particularly as the generative source of future efforts and as a point of departure for that particular work which now mainly concerns us: Lives of Performers.

In Grand Union Dreams, Rainer begins the use of something like fictional “characters,” and it is that use which will eventually solicit a space and structure of narrative. The characters of Dreams are called into being by designation. Remembering, with more than a touch of wistful envy, no doubt, the mythic conventions and certitudes of Kathakali dance, Rainer had divided her dancers into “Gods,” “Heroes,” and “Mortals,” but the notion of character stopped at designation. Dancers were assigned specific functions, movements, and these revived the use of props: a suitcase to be carried, a long plexiglass box to be crawled through, a wooden box or cabin, twice the size of a telephone booth and placed against the far wall, its nearer end open to us and filled by bodies of performers in a frozen choreography of accommodation, or “plastic poses.” The tension between designation and function, reinforced by the recitation of text from Jung and Hesse, was extreme—so extreme, in fact, that it made for a malaise of puzzlement, suggesting for each movement a hidden symbolic function that qualified one’s attention to any given movement in time. A performer, when individualized, was presented as performer. Thus, Valda Setterfield, of the Cunningham Company, beginning now to work with Rainer, was used – and would continue to be so—in a very special way. Her theatrical presence, her humor and chic, her narrow, sloping shoulders, her balletic port de bras, all emphasized by the cut of her black velvet evening dress, were injected as it were, as a reference to performance style—another set of conventions and lost certitudes. It is Setterfield who performs a slow dance, tracing great arcs as she grasps, at arm’s length, the ball to which she steadily attends. Pursued, as in a conventional theatrical performance, by a spotlight which encloses and discloses her, she remains, like the dancer of Trio A, without direct visual contact with her audience. This dance will, like a number of other elements in Dreams, be used in the film to come.

Meanwhile, one could say of such Heroes and of such Gods that they were more like homeless Dancers or that, like the earlier Dancers, they were at one with their physical and spatial functions, and this in a manner we do not normally associate with even mortal “characters.” Trisha Brown,

descending from Olympus and poling her way toward a group of mortals who are putting the squeeze on the heroes, especially on Epp Kotkas, who is squeezing the red ball, says to Epp: “You will soon see things of which you have never heard and which you have never seen. Then you will understand things that I can never tell you. But you must stay awake. You may see them only once.”

Trisha Brown, then, to distinguish only one among the Olympian set, performed, or embodied as one will a task of utterance and of movement; one saw her as a composite of assignments, tasks, designation, rather than as performer of a role or character. The disjunction between the physical particularities of her tasks and her mythic reference was absolute. Grand Union Dreams kept coming apart, as you watched it: this disjunction wrenched it apart. The sense of reference, the constant promise of symbolic disclosure, the tension of the thrust toward that disclosure, were both more and less than frustrating. It was as if the scene of action was not the space in which movement was being performed, but some undefined, undisclosed space in which the designations might have some meaning, and its characters some life: an elsewhere that might indeed be fictive. Grand Union Dreams, then, spelled out, in its irresolution, the symptoms of a variety of “culture shock”: the crisis produced in the secular consciousness of a modernist artist by the discovery of the continuity of belief and narrative. One assumes it was the consciousness of the problematic and tentative character of the attempt to resolve that crisis which impelled Rainer to declare, in the program sheet distributed on the occasion of that performance, that “this is the first in a series of versions.”

The problem now at hand was that of locating new terms for the composition of fictional structures consistent with that secular, modernist consciousness. How, indeed, was one to compose a narrative work without succumbing to the temptations of fictional illusionism and mythical reference? The response was intelligent, if not immediately exalting. First, by falling back, as it were, to the terrain of the private, personal experience in the feeling that one’s own life is as viable as any other material (more accessible, more usable at least). Next came the location of one’s fictional resources through the recognition that the forms and rhetoric of those psychological situations which compose the repertory of domestic drama, constitute a material which has at least the authenticity of one’s own somewhat desperate investment of emotional energy. Finally, the conviction that one’s analytic culture provides the point of departure for a series of formal variations upon disjunction (between sound and image, between present and past, between character and voice, between reading and speaking) that will render the fragmented Self which stands at the center of that fiction.

Following these decisions, elements from Dreams will become usable again. Among them, and in addition to Setterfield’s solo, will be the Box, some specific movements for a group in a rehearsal, and these will animate the next major performance at the Whitney Museum, in 1972. From this point on, indeed, live performances and work for film will be increasingly fused, so that elements from the performance at Hofstra University, reworked for another at the Whitney Museum, given in open rehearsal at Hunter College, performed, in a somewhat altered version, in the Paris Autumn Festival of 1972, and presented at the Theatre for A New City in New York (in the spring of 1973) will prepare work for her second film, currently in progress: This is a film about a woman who . . . Material from Dreams was retained, but it is above all the preoccupation with fictional modes and with the tactics of disjunction which will preside over her newer work. It is in this work, then, that “The Plot Thickens,” producing Lives of Performers.

This is Rainer’s first film, completed in the early summer of 1972. Its feature-length or running time is 120 minutes. It constitutes, of course, the decisive move back and away from the abandonment of directorial and compositional modes of work which had animated her two years of association with The Grand Union. Work on Lives, however, presented Rainer with a new modality of collaborative effort, and a gratification intensified by the production of a work which, though temporal, is remanent. Her principal, nonperforming collaborator for Lives was Babette Mangolte, whose exceptional skill as camerawoman is inseparable from the interest and success of this work on film. Lives departs from a rather long and complex “scenario” composed of material Rainer had been collecting for about a year. The tact of Mangolte’s camera movement, her editing, evoke another subtly articulated presence, steady and graceful. Her lighting, moreover, endows the bare loft space, its paper screens, the props, the nakedness of things with a singular, reserved elegance.

The film is composted of parts, sequences or pieces which give it the total, compositional aspect of a “recital.” And it cannot with any justice be described as an integral whole; its parts, while not wholly disjunct from one another, function as variations upon a number of given themes and strategies. Rainer’s first use of disjunction is for the creation of a semblance of fictional continuity out of situations which are, nevertheless, experienced as largely discrete with respect to the notion of an enveloping fictional whole. The film then begins to project a series of variations upon its themes and strategies. The text, partly projected in titles, partly read off-screen, chronicles the complex interrelationships developing among performers during a period of rehearsal. One must remember that fragments of this scenario had been performed “live” together with commentary at the Whitney Museum, and that evidence of or reference to these presentations is present in the film—largely through the recorded laughter of a knowing and appreciative audience, recorded at performance time. The result is a very complex temporality. One has the retelling, by off-screen voices of past events, fictive in nature involving fictive versions, as it were, of the real performers who in recalling, under their own names, the events of that fictive past, make reference, from time to time, to real performances (that of Grand Union Dreams, or of Inner Appearances). The temporal complexity of this sort of superimposition will on occasion be intensified by the sharing or shifting of roles. A dialogue begins between Yvonne and two performers, Fernando and Shirley, later joined by Valda and John. Yvonne, the director, provides certain information, while Fernando and his fellow-performers discuss the nuances in shifts of feeling and of commitment which animate their complex interrelationship. These, while constantly being explicated, in that idiom of somewhat manic autoanalysis which characterizes life and love in a therapeutically oriented culture, are not always clear. John’s role is particularly shadowy, and Yvonne announces at one point that she is going to assume his role. Although literary texts and cultural heroes are from time to time quoted and evoked, there is really one single mode of intellectual discourse which informs the “action” of this film and its “characters”: that of psychoanalysis, in its latter-day, revisionist modes. Much of the material presented, then, in Lives is the stuff of bourgeois drama—and comedy—the succession of tiny crises and realignments, the small agonies and apperceptions of a milieu existing wholly within the area of performance and rehearsal, its cross analysis of motives and intentions expanding to fill its entire psychic space.

I have, in the first part of this study (published last month), referred to the reflexive character of the New Dance; and the manner in which its consumingly autoanalytical character is to some extent contingent upon the intense restrictedness of the social space in which it flourishes. Rainer, in this first film—as in the performances which preceded it—plays on psychological ambiguity as if, venturing for the first time to create characters, she wishes to preserve their concrete point of origin in a nonfictional esthetic context. Performers, then, preserve their names in the tangle of purely invented interrelationships. Lives of Performers is, among other things, the construction of a series of rather joyless marivaudages, in which protocols and autoanalytic exchanges are invested with the high-minded austerity of Sohoesque life. These ambiguities obviously spoke to a small though growing circle of enthusiasts with the trivial seduction of a roman à clef. Filled with allusions to private and not-so-private problems and agonies—some of these articulated, one suspects, through quotations from private journals and/or psychotherapeutic revelations, and apperceptions—the film’s structure proposes, far more interestingly, the uses of such material, how they can be distanced, the extraction of the formal potential of these constraints and ambiguities. Lives begins, then, with a quotation from the writings of Leo Bersani on the nature and value of cliché, as a principle of intelligibility. One will not feel, as the film progresses, the full and clear deployment of this principle, but one will feel its intermittent presence, as the formalizing agent which replaces that of myth.

The first sequence of Lives of Performers is, however, not a performance, but a rehearsal by Rainer and her colleagues-characters for a future performance at the Whitney Museum. The repetitive character, a formal constituent, of the particular movement being rehearsed is echoed or confirmed by the camera’s movement, perhaps the most active and sustained of the entire film. This movement describes, in a steady series of pans and tilts, a repeated quadrilateral form, discrete, but steady and relentless. The sound track is not audible until part of the way into this sequence, and it is slowly evident that the dialogue is extracted from another, quite different moment in rehearsal. It is as though Rainer is giving instructions (1, 2, 3, 4 . . . the beginning), setting the pattern for camera movement.

In this opening sequence, Rainer and Mangolte establish a series of variations upon a factor that is, of course, particularly interesting—central, in fact,—to dance film: the synechdocal mode of movement articulation through the ratio obtaining between close, medium, and long shots. Rainer and Mangolte are, on the whole, quite free and varied in their handling of group dance movement. One can isolate shots, for example, in which the total screen space is framed by a close-up of head and torso with extended arms, or by feet, at the bottom right or left of frame. The range of shot sizes from this end of the spectrum to that of long shot is full and complete. And there would seem to be a sense in which this variety is particularly appropriate to New Dance. One knows that Nureyev, in supervising the recent film and television versions of major works by Petipa, insisted upon the steady maintenance of the long shot. And there is a way in which the qualities of poise, of presence, ballon, fullness of gesture which characterize the balletic style in general and Nureyev’s in particular, require the use of the long shot and the long take. That dance demands the spatio-temporal continuity of mise-en-scène to manifest itself in its completeness. For it is quite evidently not the fictions of The Sleeping Beauty or of Don Quixote which solicit, indeed impose, an integrity of cinematic illusionism. It is rather the representation of the balletic reality of the dancer moving in theatrical space which insists upon it.

Yvonne Rainer, in an early notebook entry, had proposed the following sequence of movements: “Turn head from side to side while hands flap ears like semaphores. Speak softly—mention a part of the body, move that part. Mention another part, etc. Make it continuous.” It is in the filmic synechdoche that she now performs that analytic and ostensive work upon the body in movement; the assertive cut provides for the cinematic intensification of its continuity.

The rehearsal ends (“dissolves”) in laughter. A title, “all at once our attention is vanished,” provides the transition to the next sequence. Titles will be extensively, variously used. They have been signaled in previous performance by use of extensive program notes, by presentation of lists, nomenclature, and also by the growingly extensive use of slides, the occasional use of blackboard inscriptions. Titles will comment upon the film’s actions, upon characters’ motives. They will speak for characters, directly, or enclosed by quotation marks. They will present literary quotations, the rhetoric of cliché. They will permit a personal utterance which is not weighted with mimetic expressiveness. It is as if Rainer is rediscovering the multiple function of titles in silent American and Soviet film. [One thinks of De Milles Male and Female (1918), a film in which the narrative is reinforced by the titles’ constant introduction of verbal metaphors.]

The title is followed by the second major sequence of Grand Union Dreams, in which a number of the film’s major strategies are established as originating in Grand Union Dreams. We see a succession of eight still photographs from that performance. They are seen, however, upon a background of typescript, the script, in fact, of Lives of Performers. The off-screen dialogue, spoken by Yvonne, Shirley, and Fernando, initiates the reading of those photographs addressed, presumably, to the spectator. A descriptive analysis of the nature of the performance is offered. Thus:

In this first photo Epp and James are engaged in a duet. David and Yvonne have just finished dragging them on the fake grass in a small arc. When they stand they undulate their upper bodies in unison while passing the red ball back and forth. They are about to pick up the grass and involve it in their undulations. Valda waits. My question is “What does it mean?” Are they celebrating something? Yes, that sounds good: Epp and James are doing a dance of pleasure at the advent of spring.

And now begins the dialogue between Shirley and Fernando (whose Spanish accent, extremely heavy, is somewhat at variance with the easy idiom of his text): “It actually was spring when you began working on this piece—and I first met you, Fernando. I think some people went over to your house after that first rehearsal.” The exchange of reminiscences of two characters presumed now to be lovers is occasionally interrupted by Yvonne, who will say, before examining still number four, “This one is out of proper order.” They are joined on the sound track by Valda, and the dialogue shades into discussion of the iconographic and textual sources of Grand Union Dreams. As that shift slowly occurs, Yvonne’s discourse, addressing Shirley, shades into both an explanation of her strategy and the inflections of direct speech, or its mimesis. A disagreement about the qualities of a given Jung text, used in Dreams, elicits from Yvonne the avowal of her present rejection of a

Weakness for the sweeping revelations of great men and her intention of pursuing the coming concert (Whitney, 1972) so different, of simply doing another form of story-telling, more intimate, less epic, and in further explaining, elicits from Valda the query “Were you saying that or reading it?”

In this section, then, still pictures are presented as the documents of a past performance. A superimposed fictional past is presented as generating a future performance, is the recorded performance of the first sequence. And the sequence ends with Rainer’s specific warning to us that she is moving from the temptation of the mythic (the sweeping revelations of great men) from temptations of the epic into some other more intimate form.

Yvonne, when asked whether she is reading or telling her account of things, has replied, “I’m remembering it from Hofstra.” This is a reference to a past performance at Hofstra University, in which the photographic documentation of Dreams was first used, and the laughter which greets the answer informs us that we are listening to a soundtrack which records the use, during a performance at the Whitney Museum, of that same material and the amused reaction of the rather knowing Whitney audience. The recitals and fictions which have now accompanied the images on the screen encapsulate, then, three distinct past temporal points. This somewhat disjunct and multiple present filmic moment will erupt again from recorded audience laughter at another exchange between Shirley and Fernando which spells out the terms of Shirley’s ambivalence and vulnerability. The rather intensively introspective mood of Shirley is interrupted by Valda’s entrance, in her evening dress, announcing she’s seen a film. The response is, “I remember that movie. It’s about all those small betrayals, isn’t it?” (in a title), and we now witness the formalized enactment of another fictional (cliché) situation.

Valda, replying, “You might describe it that way,” begins to extract the full archetypal force from this particular fictional convention and recounts, in an off-screen recital, the three subjectively conditioned, possible versions of a domestic triangle which is “also about a man who loves a woman and can’t leave her when he falls in love with another woman. I mean he can’t seem to make up his mind.” This small drama of ambivalence and guilt is played as we see Valda, Fernando, and Shirley head-on in long shot, aligned before us, pivoting about to and from each other in an elementary choreography which objectifies the terms of the triangle, in extreme formalization of a dramatic situation. And it is this formalization which introduces a further extension and complication of the relationships which have until this point been established as the film’s fictional core. It is now that John is introduced, and it is now that John and Valda begin to be involved in the drama developing between Shirley and Fernando.

The camera has been presenting that drama in a very intimate sort of way, through close-ups which examine the floor, the bed of the bare chamber. Yvonne and Shirley comment: “He’s tired of indecisiveness. She doesn’t know what to do.” And there follows the revelation that “she has always worked in a form which disappears as soon as it reveals itself.” This reflection, loaded with implications as to the dynamics of Shirley’s emotional ambivalence, is accompanied by an embrace during which the camera travels slowly up the joined bodies of Fernando and Shirley, descending, once again, down those bodies now separated.

The chamber in which these dramas are being played out is, of course, not really a room, but rather, as the paper screen which defines its furthermost limit indicates, a playing space. The intrusion of objects (Fernando’s suitcase, for example) is therefore momentous, and the spareness of décor endows them with a particular weight and intensity of presence: those of a prop.

In this playing space, characters do make entrances and exits in a somewhat theatrical way. So that Valda, discussing the complexities of her relationship with John and Shirley, proposes an analysis through an inventory of possible versions of another “classical” situation: the reaction upon entering that chamber to the presence of the two other members of a triangle. These are boldly, unequivocally, “enacted” in a series of takes which are separated by intrusive jump cuts: Valda entering and noticing or not noticing their presence, Valda affectionate, indifferent, brooding.

This playing space is then easily transformed into the space of dream, and as Shirley tells that dream, we see, in slow motion, a child bouncing a ball, while in the background a cat watches. It is rather like a cinematic transposition of Goya’s portrait of a princely child. Shirley is dreaming about a wall (“neither concrete nor metal, but rather of steel mesh”—which is to say, transparent), the surmounting of which produces an experience of release and well-being as she accedes to the playground which can be glimpsed beyond it. And as she describes that wall we sense, rather than see, a limit which separates us from the playing child; it is the limit of the visual field of the camera, so that the bouncing ball is experienced as rebounding away from us, its direction inflected by the invisible, impalpable limit of the cinematic illusion.

The final major mode of fictional representation in the film is constituted by a long series of shots which engage Valda, John, Shirley, and Fernando in tableaux vivants. They are seen against a black background in fixed attitudes of a sort which suggest dramatic action in arrest, very much like movie-production photos. A drama is being enacted in complete silence, all titles, commentary having ceased. The Performers have abandoned rehearsal of their private dramas. They are part of another fiction, and we sense from the trajectory of glances, the tension of bodies, the sudden changes in costume accessories, the extremely artificial studio lighting, that, in fact, they constitute another fictional world in which the impulses of cruelty, guilt, violence are played out in an entirely different register of intensity. They are, in fact, enacting moments drawn from another film, Pandora’s Box, made by G. W. Pabst in 1928, after Wedekind’s drama. They have moved, then, from the formalization of an archetypal domestic triangle seen as choreography, to the projection of a filmic work, seen through photography. For the tableaux are drawn, not directly from film, but rather from the stills accompanying the edition of the film’s script published in 1971 by Simon and Schuster. The notion of cliché as organizing principle, as replacement for archetype, as mode of a possible fiction, has been radicalized and literalized in this final sequence: the psychological drama is wholly objectified in attitudes which succeed each other in silence, drawn from the photographic reduction of a moving picture. Music follows, and Lives of Performers is at an end.

1. These considerations are discussed in detail in my catalogue essay for Robert Morris’ show at the Corcoran Gallery, November-December, 1969, in Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression, Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery, 1969.
2. Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, New York, 1965, p. 165.
3. The reference is to Pierce’s notion of “concrete reasonableness” and its implications for art, a view adumbrated in my account in Artforum, January, 1967, of the “10x10” exhibition at the Dwan Gallery.
4. Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi-Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” in Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1968, p. 270.
5. Ibid.
6. Yvonne Rainer, Unpublished notes for Trio A.
7. It is hardly accidental or surprising that a choreographic development closely linked to the art of the mid- and late ‘60s and, most particularly, to the impulse we know as “Minimalist” should refer us to the historical precedents of Constructivism. As the work of Morris and Andre had impelled us to a fresh consideration of Tatlin and Rodchenko, so, conversely, the sets of the major biomechanical productions anticipate, evoke a corps of dancers tuned to the task performance as the task of performance. In the set for The Magnificent Cuckold, architectural components are placed upon the ground: nothing depends from the flys; costumes are replaced by work clothes; no props nor furniture nor space in which to play out the drama of interiority are offered. Each architectural component solicits an intense, physical, utterly objectified response. And the revolution of a colored disk objectifies, measures, renders visible the passing of time itself.
8. The Meyerholdian style, its biomechanical homogeneity of objectification are supported, however, by a larger, pervasive context, that of the task-oriented society of Socialist Construction in which the abolition of classes was the ground for a total reassessment of art and artifice. In that abolition the boundaries between interior and exterior, sculpture and architecture, leisure and purposeful activity could be reconsidered and given import. It is the largeness and the radicality of the revolutionary enterprise which gives to Tatlin’s Monumentits peculiar iconic power, and to Meyerhold’s work the resonance which surrounds us still. The resonance and radicality are rooted in the common aspiration, the immense task of, Socialist Construction and its analytic working processes.
9. Michael Snow, “Passages,” Artforum, September, 1971, p. 63.
10. Schwitters, “Anna Blume,” in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, New York, 1965, p. 141. The translation is reprinted here with some slight modification.
11. Steve Paxton, “The Grand Union,” The Drama Review, September, 1972, p. 131.
12. Yvonne Rainer, “Response to India,” The Drama Review, Spring, 1971. This quotation and following ones are excerpted from this interview.

Copyright Estate of Annette Michelson. Reprinted by permission.