Chat with Yvonne Rainer

Avant-Garde Dancer and Choreographer

About Yvonne Rainer

In 1965, she stood onstage at the Judson Dance Theater and read aloud a typed list of mundane tasks, 'I chew gum,' 'I scratch my nose,' 'I walk across the stage', while performing them with deliberate neutrality. That was 'Trio A,' a radical rupture: no music, no narrative, no virtuosic display, just unadorned action, timed to a metronome, repeated without variation. Rainer didn’t reject dance; she dismantled its hierarchies, exposing how spectacle, gendered expression, and theatrical illusion had long obscured movement’s material reality. Her films like 'Film About a Woman Who...' (1974) extended this rigor into montage, voiceover, and fragmented narrative, refusing catharsis in favor of structural honesty. She insisted that the body in motion need not signify, it could simply be, with weight, duration, and consequence. This wasn’t austerity for its own sake; it was ethical precision, a refusal to coerce meaning or emotion from viewers. Her legacy lives not in imitation, but in the persistent question she embedded in performance: what must be stripped away before we see what’s actually happening?

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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Yvonne Rainer:

  • “How did your decision to use a metronome in 'Trio A' change dancers' relationship to time?”
  • “What made you shift from live performance to filmmaking in the early 1970s?”
  • “Did your political activism around Vietnam and feminism directly shape pieces like 'War' (1963)?”
  • “Why did you reject the term 'postmodern dance' for your work?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the 'No Manifesto' and why did you write it?
Published in 1965, the 'No Manifesto' declared 'No to spectacle,' 'No to virtuosity,' 'No to transformations and magic and make-believe.' It was a polemical rejection of theatrical conventions that privileged illusion over presence. Rainer wrote it not as dogma but as a working constraint, to force attention onto the dancer’s physical labor, duration, and ordinary gesture. Though she later softened some positions, the manifesto remains a landmark articulation of conceptual rigor in performance.
How did your background in visual art influence your choreography?
Rainer studied painting and sculpture before turning to dance, and that training shaped her compositional eye: she treated the stage like a canvas, arranging bodies in serial, modular, and often asymmetrical groupings. Her use of repetition, spatial economy, and frontal alignment owes as much to Frank Stella and Robert Morris as to Martha Graham. She approached movement as material, not expressive content, but as something to be structured, edited, and observed.
What role did collaboration play in your Judson Dance Theater work?
Collaboration was foundational, not as mutual inspiration, but as methodological necessity. At Judson, Rainer worked closely with composers like Philip Corner and visual artists like Robert Morris, often sharing scores, diagrams, or task lists rather than hierarchical direction. These exchanges challenged authorship itself, producing works where sound, object, text, and movement held equal, non-hierarchical weight, a direct challenge to the choreographer-as-genius model.
Why did you stop making dances in 1972 and focus on film?
Rainer felt live performance increasingly constrained by institutional expectations and commodified spectacle. Film offered new tools, editing, voiceover, intertextuality, to extend her critique of representation, particularly around gender and subjectivity. Works like 'Lives of Performers' (1972) used fictionalized biography and Brechtian distancing to interrogate how stories about women are constructed, and who controls their telling.
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Topics

minimalismconceptualavant-garde

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