Then you see them in bed. For ten years I’d made dances, and the kind of dancing I did, I began to feel had limitations. Or, after having just done a backward somersault, I come up with my eyes closed. When I was teaching it to the original performers of it, I remember David Gordon doing something in a way that seemed very mannered to me and I asked him, “What’s your image?” He said, “I’m thinking of myself as a faun, the mythical character” and I said, “Well, try thinking of yourself as a barrel!” I had in mind more material and inanimate things. We talk a lot about her early work, the focus of her recent solo exhibition at London’s Raven Row, and many of those accounts go back to the flurry of activity of the Judson Dance Theater at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.U. KELSEY: And what about the influence of someone like Warhol, and his work with duration and silence?RAINER: The second wave feminist movement came along in the late ’60s, early ’70s, and I began to be restless as a choreographer. So I was launched into filmmaking—the story in short.KELSEY: How do you feel watching some of these early films?KELSEY: Did you feel a connection between choreographing dance with the body versus “choreographing” a film through editing, working with actors, et cetera?KELSEY: Were you always dancing?KELSEY: What first brought you to New York?KELSEY: You’ve used Sontag’s term “radical juxtaposition” when talking about your films. I didn’t feel I could do that in dance. Revisiting History: Yvonne Rainer, Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others Reviewed by Rachel Valinsky A collection of texts by and about the …
There is also a reference to the fact that this was before hormone replacement therapy was discredited as not being the best thing a woman could do and, of course, there was an earlier generation of doctors who were pushing it on women.It came out of my own development and therapy. How are you defining yourself at the present?
I made a performance and a film on this $10,000 grant. But it’s hard to remember exactly where each movement came from. So a lot of the ecstatic, desperate movements from the dance of the virgin are in my piece, in reference to the story of the Slavic tribal ritual that required a virgin to dance herself to death to bring on spring and the crops.I played with various sources. . When I met the great dancer, choreographer and film-maker in her Manhattan apartment I was too shy to ask whether or not she had noticed what I was reading.
From what I understand, some of Merce Cunningham’s early solos had speaking in them.CRIMP: Or issues that were both personal and public for you—race, breast cancer. I felt not in control. Everyone was crossing the boundaries. There was also the 92nd Street Y where Cage presented his work. She wants to tell Yvonne about an incident that happened when she was a young dancer in New York.Yvonne Rainer, 1964.
What else? As she describes her relationships, work, ambitions and memories, I am struck by how appreciative she is of her contemporaries: Rainer studied with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, lived with Robert Morris, danced with Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton.
One of her interviewees is a woman by the name of Jenny.
Her work has been foundational across multiple disciplines and movements: dance, cinema, feminism, minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism. What was your relationship to the visual artists who were entering, as performers, into the world that had previously been dance?Visit our store to buy archival issues of the magazine, prints, T-shirts, and accessories.Can you explain the circumstances of your going back to choreographing dance in recent years?Could you talk a little bit about the context in which this piece was made and where the movements themselves came from? Mubarak It kind of grows out of traffic.
In 1966, while recovering from major surgery, Yvonne Rainer directed her first film, Hand Movie, from the confines of her hospital bed.Heading eastward to Manhattan from her hometown of San Francisco in 1956, Rainer soon abandoned studying the Stanislavski acting method to …
Yvonne Rainer (left) performing ‘Corridor Solo’ and ‘Crawling Through’ from Parts of Some Sextets at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1965. I had been exposed to European art films and the New American Cinema, structuralist cinema, and I just saw film as offering greater possibilities for my interests.
I hope this Danspace series will disabuse people of that notion.