Yvonne Rainer: An American Cinematheque Retrospective

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Yvonne Rainer is an American choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker. A pioneering figure of the American avant-garde movement with a career spanning over five decades, Rainer’s artistic work has emphasized minimalism and experimentalism and has challenged conventional form to explore subversive political and social themes.

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934 to a Polish-Jewish mother and an Italian father. Exposed to the art world at a young age from attending ballet performances, Rainer moved to New York City with painter Al Held in 1956. In 1962, along with Ruth Emerson and Steve Paxton, she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, a coalition of radical performance artists inspired by the avant-garde aesthetics of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. The group brought experimentalism to the fore, challenging conventional choreography and incorporating randomness, improvisation, everyday movement, and multimedia in the collective’s work. This ethos is embodied in Rainer’s seminal 1965 essay that came to be known as the No Manifesto, in which Rainer outlines a theory of dance committed to minimalism and a rejection of ‘spectacle’ and the ‘star image.’

In 1972, Rainer released her first feature film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS, casting performers from Grand Union and incorporating archival footage and her original choreography into a subversive reflection on romantic alliances. Over the course of the next three decades, Rainer released six additional feature films, each challenging conventional narrative structure to explore social and political themes, from imperialism and identity to aging and romantic love. Among Rainer’s renowned features are FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…, an unconventionally structured meditation on doubt, relationships, and performance and JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971, exploring the daily experience of terrorism through an American woman’s extended therapy session. PRIVILEGE focuses on menopause and the experience of aging, and Rainer’s final feature, MURDER and murder, chronicles the challenges and pleasures of a budding romance between two middle-aged women. Rainer’s films’ explorations of feminism, radical politics, and personal struggles, as well as their subversion of conventional narrative form, have cemented Yvonne Rainer as an essential artist of the American avant-garde.