Resume of Yvonne Rainer
(approximately 1974)
YVONNE RAINER
Major performance works and places of-initial presentation:
1963 We Shall Run)
Terrain )
Room Service;
1965 Parts of Some Sextets
1966 Carriage Discreteness
1968 The Mind is a Muscle
Untitled Work for 40 People North East losing
1969 Rose Fractions Performance tractions for the
West Coast
Connecticut Composite
1970 Continuous Project-Altered Daily WAR
1971 Grand Union Breams
1972 In the College "Performance”
1973 This is the story of a woman who...
Judson Memorial Church, NYC
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. Nine Evenings - Theater and Engineering, 69th Peg._Armory, NYC Anderson Theater, NTT New York University Goddard College, Vermont Billy Rose Theater, NYC Music Conservatory, Los Angeles, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mills College Connecticut College Whitney .Museum of American Art Douglass College, Smithsonian Institute, New York University Emanuel Midtown YMHA, NYC Oberlin College, Ohio Hofstra University, Whitney Museum Theater for the Mew City, NYC
Films and film-centered performances:
Camera:
1967 Volleyball Bud Wirtschafter
16mm, b/w, 10 minutes
1968 Hand Movie William Baris
8mm, b/w 5 minutes Trio Film Phill Niblock
16mm, b/w, 13 minutes Rhode island Red Roy Levin
1969 Line Phill Niblock
16mm, b/w, 10 minutes
1972 Lives of Performers Babette Mangote
16mm, b/w, sound, 90 minutes
Anderson Theater, NYC
Brandeis University
Billy Rose Theater, NYC
Billy Pose Theater Paula Conner Gallery, NYC
"New Forms in Film”, Gugg.
I was born in. San Francisco in 1934. In 1956 I came to New York to study acting. Serious involvement in dance and choreography ensued when I started studying with Martha Graham and subsequently with Merce Cunningham. Also studied ballet with Mia Slavenska, James Waring, Peter Saul, and others, and composition wish Robert Dunn and Ann Halprin. Began choreographing my own work in 1961, In 1962 Steve Paxton and I formed the workshop that spawned the Judson Dance Treater, a generative force- behind the modern end "post-modern” dance activity in America in the 60’s, In 1970 I helped form the Grand Union, a co-operative New Ycrk-based performing group.
My chorecgraphic works have been seen throughout the United States and in many European cities. They have made use of large numbers of people -both skilled and inexperienced in dance techniques - and incorporated speech, objects, film, slices, and elaborate choreography to music, By 1972 my growing interest in film resulted in a 16mm feature-length narrative film entitled ’’Lives cf Performers,” which I wrote and directed, In recent work I have continued to exolore the relationship of language and image; Film and slides play an increasingly important role in my performances as a necessary visual and fictional dimension.
YVONNE RAINER
1974 Performance around a Babette Nangolte
film about a woman who...
16mm, b/w. with simultanecus 35mm slides, sound, 120 minutes
Performances and screenings outside the United States:
1964 program for two performers
(Y.R. and Robert Norris)
1965 same
Solo Concert
1967 program for two performers (Y.R. and Wlliam Davis)
1969 program of films and one performer (Steve Pamen)
1972 program for two performers
(Y.R, and Phil Glass)
Lives of Performers (film) program for two performers (Y.R. and John Eraman)
Lives of Performers
1973 Lives of Performers
1974 This is the story of a woman who... Performance around a film about a
woman who...
Lives of Performers
Festival of Music and Dance, Rome
Festival D’Automne a Paris
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Projections Gallery, Dusseldorf Festival of Avant-Garde Film,London Contemporanea, Rome
Recent American Art, Melbourne Projects '74, Cologne New Forms in Film, Montreux, Switzerland
Awards and Grants:
1967 Harper's Bazaar "Woman of Accomplishment"
1968 Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, Lena Robbins Foundation grant 1969 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship)
1971 Experiments in Art and Technology grant for travel in India National Endowment on the Arts grant
Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, Lena Rcbbins Foundation grant
1973 Creative Artist Public Service grant
1974 American Theater Laboratory grant
Festival of Music and Dance, Rome
Teaching: New School for Social Research, Goddard College, Connecticut College, George Washington University, Vancouver Art Gallery, School of Visual Arts, University of California-Fresno, Neva Scotia College of Art and Design, Resources Center of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
"There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.”
Edwin Denby
Dancers. Buildings. People in the Streets New York, 1965
1. Reacting to that "insanity", or the illusion of a weightless transcendent physical presense, I explored, with presumed rationality a more elemental existence before the audience. Running. Spontaneous laughter, hatching a colleague perform, that perform-ers do. What people do. The credulity of the spectator was_ a central "prob-lem", which, once established, could sustain flights of fancy end, eventually, a return to illusion via film.
"The Performers have abandoned the rehearsal of their private dramas. They are part of another fiction, end we sense from the trajectory of glances and tension of bodies, the sudden changes of costume accessories, the extremely artificial studio lighting, that, in fact, they constitute another fictional world in which the impulses of cruelty, guilt, and violence are played out in an entirely different register of intensity,"
Annette Michelson Artforum, February 1974
2, The whole body in a field delineated by the eye of the viewer is replaced by a head, a. nose, a hand, a person in a field particularised and delimited by the eye of the camera. This potential for greater intimacy with, and control of, physical presence makes possible another shift in focus: the body merges with fictionalized character, furthermore, filmic devices - such as intertitle and voice-over; slow-motion and close-up; the play between moving and stillness, between the camera and subject - offer a "permission" to investigate metaphor, cliche, and transition, as well as specific emotional incident. These have become increasingly difficult to deal with - at least for me -in live presentations. There is a bit of insanity in the movies that I now find liberating.
