Yvonne Rainer has been a prominent figure in the American avant-garde since the sixties. She came from an anarchist milieu of European origin from the West coast and eventually left San Francisco for New York in 1956. She began attending art events (such as a performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl) in her hometown and was already prepared to confront the New York avant-garde when she emigrated. She first studied as an actress before studying dance where she found a more adequate environment for herself, her personality and her capacities as an artist. One of these adequacies was the fact that a woman could occupy a position of strength at that time in the dance world more than in most other art disciplines. She was also more prone to dance, as she had difficulty assuming role-playing, that “being-another” which was conditional to acting. This rejection of the notion of representation has followed her throughout her lifework.
From 1957 to 1971 (age 23 to 37), she was a dancer and choreographer, first with the James Waring Dance Company and then as part of different groups or associations such as the Judson Church Dance Theater and then with a group she founded called Grand Union. In 1972, she finished her first feature films, based on previous choreographies of the same title, Lives of Performers quickly followed by Film about A Woman Who… in 1974. Five other feature films have appeared since then: Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), Journeys from Berlin/1977 (1980), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), MURDER and Murder (1996).
She almost never created dance pieces after turning to film, except when Mikhail Baryshnikov asked her to choreograph a new piece for a show he was putting together in 19991. Her change from choreography to film was radical, determined and non-equivocal. In film, she had found a way of expressing certain artistic ideas she had been dealing with in dance in a more sophisticated manner. What strikes me is the radicalism of this change at that period in time. Today, it seems so evident for artists of all disciplines to turn to media at a certain point in their artistic evolution. In the beginning of the seventies, Yvonne Rainer’s change was innovative, and even radical, although many visual artists were turning to film or video in order to express some of their ideas, none that I know of made a definite switch to film or video that early in time. And certainly, no choreographer on the scene was at that time that interested in the moving image and none other ventured into filmmaking in such a committed, forward-looking manner.
The particularity of this change, of this metamorphosis must be looked at more insistently by the fact of this uniqueness. It makes Yvonne Rainer and her work certainly distinctive amongst choreographers of her time and amongst filmmakers also.
One of the aspects that is particular to this endeavor and which on the first hand, links the work in dance and the work she did in film is the body. Should I say the body in movement? Dance is characterized by body and motion, just as is film in some aspects. Rainer came to dance at the contact of John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s environment. Cunningham had already formulated a response to Modern Dance with an insistence on the materiality of the body in space, and on the singularity of bodily movement versus other elements in the dance such as music or sound and sets or accessories. Cunningham also did away with characterization, role-playing. Instead of working on interpretation, Cunningham insisted on the notion of task, which will have been taken up by the next generation of which Rainer was to become an important player...(Extrait)
ETC