Who is yvonne rainer

Rainer created many of the best-known works produced by the Judson, including We Shall Run , Terrain and Part of a Sextet This sequence prohibits the dancers from looking at the audience while performing an uninterrupted series of complex movements. Trio A later became an independent work and was performed by Rainer and a number of other artists. Although she had integrated projected images into her performance environments since the mid s, Rainer wrote and directed her first medium length film, Lives of Performers , in A selection of her poetry was published in by Paul Chan 's Badlands Unlimited.

My overall M. I appreciate the ability of the audience to follow two or more parallel or interrupted trajectories that intersect and sometimes collide with unexpected results, or a collision of the personal and political carried to unpredictable lengths. My films focus on issues of race, gender, and sexual identity.

As a choreographer, I continue to combine diverse sources of movement with specific social and political concerns conveyed through language.

Her famous dance manifesto of see "In her own words", below and her Trio A became not only signatures for her but emblems of the whole Judson movement. In , Rainer and her dancers became founders of another highly influential performance collective, the Grand Union. In , following a separation from Morris, Rainer attempted suicide. She returned to work with a "resurgence of ego", increasingly interested in film as a medium to explore more sharply defined personal and political concerns.

She had used film in her multimedia performances for some time already — most notoriously in , when a group of avant-gardists were invited to an uptown Broadway theatre and Rainer, ever the downtown rebel, had shown a pornographic film "the filthiest thing I ever hope to see in a theatre", wrote one critic.

But by , Rainer had abandoned live performance altogether, devoting herself to film-making with the same adversarial determination that she had shown in dance — and attracting as much attention in the art world. Then, in , ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov invited her to choreograph for his White Oak Dance project — and her interest in dance was rekindled.

In the last decade, she has abandoned film and returned, circumspectly, to choreography. Watching is a key word: Rainer is always very conscious of the spectator. She favoured a matter-of-fact delivery rather than "performing" a movement, the dancer would "just do it" , task-like actions, monotone dynamics, sometimes excruciating repetitions.

Spectators might be baffled, maddened or bored, but Rainer was not interested in gratifying her audience. Just as she had refused to "bedeck" herself for social occasions as a girl, so her choreography insisted that the audience see plainly what is there instead of buying into some comfy illusion.

Trio A became her signature work — except Rainer was uncomfortable with the very idea of a "signature", because it implicated her as the "boss lady". She relinquished her "authorship" of Trio A by announcing that anyone who had performed it could teach it to anyone else. She also altered it herself several times it was danced variously as a trio, a solo and in relays — an idea that she furthered in works that were inherently mutable, such as Continuous Project — Altered Daily, which accumulated bits of material as they were performed, depending on the performers themselves.

With her film work, you could say that Rainer shifted her attention from object what the viewer sees to subject what the viewer reads. The subjects of Rainer's films were close to her heart — the lives of performers, feminism, ageing, racial identity, menopause, lesbianism Rainer took the step from a rhetorically "political lesbian" to a practising one in the mids. Though her cinema was more obviously thematic than her choreography, Rainer remained more interested in confounding viewers than gratifying them.

Returning to dance, her recent choreography has taken a sly stance on dance and movement itself. Her two "indexical" pieces — AG Indexical with a little help from HM and RoS Indexical — cheekily refer to or "index" Balanchine's Agon and Nijinsky's Rite of Spring respectively, peppered with other references such as the Pink Panther theme, bowling and tennis, Marx-brothers pratfalls and — perhaps inevitably — Trio A.