Life Class

An interview with Yvonne Rainer, one of the most influential artists of the past 40 years.

Dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer was one of the founders of Judson Dance Theatre in 1962. In the early 1960s she trained with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham and collaborated with dancers Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon and Lucinda Childs. Seminal works include Trio A (1966) and Continuous Project – Altered Daily (1970). Rainer has also completed seven films including Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who … (1974), The Man Who Envied Women (1985) and Privilege (1990). She returned to dance after a 25 year break with After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2002). Her memoir Feelings Are Facts: A Life is published in June 2006 by MIT Press.

Chrissie Iles: Yvonne, you were brought up in San Francisco by anarchist parents. How did the atmosphere of radicalism that characterized San Francisco since the 19th century affect the development of your approach to dance and art?
Yvonne Rainer: My father was Italian. At 20 he came to San Francisco where he met my mother in a raw food dining room; they were drawn to each other by their radicalism. By the time my brother and I came along in the early 1930s there were annual picnics in the Italian anarchist community and by the 1950s a mix of New York anarchists, poets and artists had gravitated to San Francisco. In my teens I was indoctrinated in anarchist thought and had no aspiration to be an artist until my early 20s. I met Al Held, followed him to New York and studied acting. Then I stumbled into a dance class and that was it.
CI Who did you study with in New York?
YR I started studying dance with Edith Stephen and then for a year with Martha Graham and Anna Halprin but between 1960 and 1968 I studied with Merce Cunningham, although I was never in his company. I also studied and performed with James Wearing who did very abstract austere dances, a la Cunningham, and also very campy vaudevillian type extravaganzas.
CI You also attended performances in Yoko Ono’s loft of the group she and La Monte Young put together. Were the cross-disciplinary events that were going on outside dance, such as happenings in the late 1950s and early 1960s important to you?
YR The early 1960s was a very fertile time for intermingling of avant-garde activity in all the arts, primarily through the influence of John Cage; his writings about chance and Zen and silence affected painting, sculpture, dance and performance. Some of this activity took place in Yoko Ono’s loft between 1960 and ‘61. Also at the Ruben Gallery and the Judson Church Gallery artists like Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow presented their work.
CI Anna Halprin seems to be a crucial figure at this point.
YR She was very conscious of what Cage was doing in music and was using some of these ideas in her teaching. I attended a workshop in the summer of 1960, which was partly taught by La Monte Young. I composed a score for screen door, flashlight and dancer. Anna’s teaching and performances were radical but she always had a theatrical flair and in her workshops you might run around carrying an object; she was very influential on me. On the West Coast she was a pivotal figure and still is. Her own dancing is quite phenomenal; at the age of 83 she’s still running around.
CI So poetry, text and experimental film were influential in your performance and film work later on?
YR There weren’t specific film influences, although I certainly followed avant-garde film from the early 1950s when I first saw Maya Deren’s films. I wasn’t so interested in narrative as a dancer, although at first I told stories while I danced but one of the reasons I began to think about making films was that narrative via Hollywood had been under-utilized in avant-garde film; I also wanted to deal with my own ageing body, autobiography and specific emotional content.
CI In New York in the early 1960s a cross-over emerged between dance, sculpture, film, performance and happenings. In this environment, did you think of yourself as a dancer or as something else?
YR I thought of myself as a dancer who was challenging the boundaries that had been established by Martha Graham and other American matriarchs who had been so innovative in the previous half of the century. I thought of myself much more as a dancer than, say, Simone Forti, whose use of pedestrian movement was a big influence on me. In May 1961 she presented an evening of dance constructions at Yoko Ono’s loft that involved simple actions with constructions like a slanted platform, tilted at 45 degrees, attached to the wall; the dancers navigated on it by use of ropes. Bob Morris and I performed on a seesaw; there was a wooden box that she lay under, bouncing a ball.
CI Was that the first time you met Simone Forti?
YR I met her at the Graham School through a friend from San Francisco, Nancy Meehan, who is still dancing and choreographing.
CI And when did you meet Trisha Brown?
YR In the Halprin Workshop in 1960 in San Francisco, in Marin County where Anna still lives and conducts her workshops.
CI At that time, breakthroughs were occurring in art. Were you aware of the parallel developments taking place in the work of Sol
LeWitt, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin in New York?
YR Absolutely, I went to all the openings at the Green gallery and Minimalism was the rising aesthetic of course. But even before that in 1957 or ‘58 I saw Robert Rauschenberg’s show where the goat with the tyre was first exhibited and I all but rolled on the floor with the revelation of it. I was very attuned to all of these breakthroughs; I like to say there was ground to be broken and we were standing on it.
CI And those artists were, likewise, very influenced by you. Judd even named his daughter Rainer after you.
YR Yeah; it was a very febrile, exhilarating time for everyone.
CI How did you come to make the important book, Work 1961- 73, which was published in 1974 by the Nova Scotia Press?
YR This book and others in the series were the brain children of Kasper König who was the editor of the series.
CI König is now the director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Was he working in Nova Scotia then?
YR Yes. I first met him in New York and he proposed this series of books by and about artists like Dan Graham, Claus Oldenburg and Steve Reich. Simone Forti’s Handbook in Motion (1974) was another. I went up to Nova Scotia in 1973 and assembled writings and met with König every day. It was really a collaboration.
CI The relationship between art and dance at this time is epitomized in your text ‘The Mind is a Muscle’ (1966), which was published in Minimalism: A Critical Anthology which was edited by Gregory Battcock and first published in 1968.
YR I wanted to show parallels and differences in thinking about objects and time and space, or time and activity. A key is the idea that the artist’s hand has been replaced by factory fabrication. The phrasing in dance suggests that in terms of tradition, musical phrasing, accents and dealing with a given set of movements or a development of movement in time are substituted by energy, equality and found movement. In traditional ballet no one ever walks as they walk in the street; in my early performances, I was criticized for doing this. What came to be known as reductivism and minimalism were simply a way of challenging all these notions of what constituted art. Cage was key here. In his piece 4’33” where David Tudor sat at the piano for that length of time and you started listening to what was going on around it introduced a whole new way of teaching and of looking at the world. As Cage says, it was so beautiful if you just paid attention to it.
CI I’ve watched you teach an NYU workshop where a group of young dancers sit in a chair and perform everyday actions. None of the students had your fluidity and naturalness.
YR The paradox is that it’s impossible to behave in an everyday fashion when 100 eyes are upon you. In 1962 a critic said of us ‘why are they so hell bent on just being themselves?’ I am discovering this all over again in this present dance, AG Indexical, With a Little Help from H.M. (2005) which is based on George Balanchine’s Agon of 1957. It has three post-modern choreographers, two of them have studied ballet, one has not. The ballet trained dancer performs my dance entirely en pointe. There is a point where the others have to circle around her before a big partnering section, originally performed by one man and one woman and now performed by three partnering women who manipulate the limbs of the ballerina. I said ‘behave as you do in the subway when you want to look at someone, but you have to look out the corner of your eye, and then you avert your glance as soon as their gaze meets yours’. This kind of studied behaviour is best exemplified in a classic postmodern dance by Steve Paxton, first performed in 1967, called Satisfying Lover that involves him feeding 42 people who came on in ones, two and threes with specific instructions about how far to walk and to stand for a certain amount of counts and then they exited. It was at though you had never seen ordinary people walk across a space. It was a highly revelatory.
CI You have described your work as post-Minimalist to counter Minimalism’s anti-metaphorical strategies.
YR I never wanted to be confined to a single aesthetic. In my early solos I was drawing on many different resources and references from the pedestrian to idiosyncratic choreographed movement.

Chrissie Iles