Yvonne Rainer

Born in 1934 in San Francisco to a European father [1], Yvonne Rainer is internationally recognised not only as a dancer and choreographer who pioneered postmodern dance, but also as a politically engaged filmmaker working in independent, feminist and lesbian cinema. Her stimulating experimental works, produced over a period of seven« years, continue to influence young artists, performers, choreographers and filmmakers.

She moved to New York in 1956 to study theatre, and began training in dance the following year. From 1959 to 1960, she successively studied under Martha Graham (1894 -1991), Merce Cunningham (1919 -2009), Robert Ellis Dunn (1928 -1996) eand also took part in Ann Halprin’s (1920 -2021) summer workshop alongside Simone Forti (1935). In 1961, she began presenting her choreographic works. In 1962, together with Steve Paxton (1939 - 2024), she created an informal group of choreographers that soon came to be known as the Judson Dance Theater, whose members included Trisha Brown (1936 - 2017), Lucinda Childs (1940) and David Gordon (1936 - 2022). Until 1964, the group met on Monday evenings at Judson Memorial Church,, 55 Washington Square, South. In 1966, , Yvonne Rainer created and performed Trio A - The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 at Judson Memorial Church, a piece that indisputably remains her most well-known work. Its title evokes “the life of the dancer—a life of work, dedication, of the mind requiring the same kind of daily work and stimulation as the dancer’s muscle”. [2]

Yvonne Rainer’s innovative, disruptive vision broke from the traditional and/or conventional approach to dance, by incorporating interrelation with objects, and analysis of formal and structural devices: repetition, interruption, simultaneity, and the juxtaposition of unrelated elements, borrowing Susan Sontag’s concept “radical juxtaposition”. [3]

Critics associate her 1960s work with North American minimalism, with Fluxus, with the emergence of performance art, and with happenings. Yvonne Rainer described her approach to dance in a famous text titled No Manifesto (1965). It was motivated by a simple desire to make a clean sweep, and has probably been commented upon too widely. She tried to bury it several times, and even revisited its content through Manifesto Reconsidered (2008). But Yvonne Rainer does not conceive of her choreography as purely anti-metaphorical, even declaring in an interview: “As a dancer I knew it was impossible: the body speaks no matter
how you try to suppress it”. [4].
In the mid-1960s, Yvonne Rainer started creating cinema, initially directing five short films [i], which were like awkward objectifications of bodies and/or body parts. Between 1962 and 1975, she presented her choreographic works throughout the United States and Europe. [5].
From 1970 to 1974, her performances and films overlapped. In 1975, she turned entirely to making features. Her films (seven in total between 1971 and 1996) explore a broad range of subjects like sexuality, domestic conflicts, North American imperialism, social privilege, gender inequality, illness, ageing, everyday life, menopause, hormone therapy, and gentrification. They contain a wide variety of autobiographical elements that are used for political and artistic purposes. Her first three features (Lives of Performers – 1972, Film About a Woman Who – 1974, Kristina Talking Pictures – 1976) are non-narrative works examining dance and the professional, social and emotional lives of performers. They combine reality and fiction, sonic and visual elements. Yvonne Rainer was no longer opposing affect to experience; she filmed emotion as a fact at the root of a future emancipation.

Her fourth film, Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979), was inspired by a 1976-1977 residency in West Berlin, as well as by a certain fascination with Ulrike Meinhof (1934 - 1976)—head of the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF). It offers a rich and audacious reflection on state power, repression, violence and revolution. Her fifth film, The Man Who Envied Women (1985) proposes, as she herself says, to “throw down the gauntlet to psychoanalytical feminist film theory” [6] through a film essay that is as funny as it is provocative. Out of reach of the male gaze, her female character (played by dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown) exists only through a voiceover, making her both ubiquitous and invisible. Through this device, Yvonne Rainer aimed to preserve and even restore the dignity of her female characters—her unheroic heroines.

Her next film, Privilege (1990), continues her exploration of the emotions at play in human, social and sexual relations. From that moment on, the moving image became a weapon serving a cinematic mission that engaged in the fight against the gendering of the world, and in dismantling the markers of domination and oppression of marginalised groups like women, gays, lesbians, and people of colour. Her last feature films, MURDER and murder, is based on the universal dimension of an egalitarian Relationship in a post-menopausal lesbian couple. [7]
At the dawn of the year 2000, when a loss of interest in the film economy led her to decide that she would no longer direct new films, she received a call from Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948) who commissioned a new piece for his New-York-based company White Oak Dance Project. This event marked a major return to dance. Titled After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000), this work represented a renewal of her choreographic production, through which she endeavoured to undo—even demolish—a practice she had established over several decades. This desire to examine and reconsider her own contribution to the history of art and dance is characteristic of the vitality and liveliness of a body of work that particularly resonated with the crises of a century that was just beginning.

Throughout her long career, Yvonne Rainer published many articles looking back on her work and her long-term political engagement, including (Yvonne Rainer : Work 1961-73 – 1974, The Films of Yvonne Rainer – 1989, A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts – 1999, Feelings are a Fact, A Life – 2006, Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others – 2020). She has been awarded several prizes and grants, including Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, 1996), MacArthur Fellowship (1990-1995), Wexner Prize (1995). The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles acquired her archives in 2006, and the following year, Performa NYC [8] initiated a presentation of her choreographic work by commissioning
new pieces (RoS Indexical – 2007, The Concept of Dust – 2015, Parts of Some Sextets – 1965-2019, Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees? – 2021) and an oral history project looking back on her return to dance, from the early 2000s to
today. [9]

Her contribution to the history of art and dance is widely recognised, and her works are regularly presented in the United States, but opportunities to discover or see her work are rarer in Europe, especially in France. In fact, her one and only appearance at the Festival d’Automne dates back to its first edition in 1972. [10]
However, other invitations did follow, including the film programme “Traveling Cultures” at the American Center in Paris in June 1995, the 1996 Montpellier Danse festival, a special evening event organised by Christophe Wavelet at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2006, as well as a performance of The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing le to move ? at both the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris and Mucem in Marseille, in 2015. Among other notable projects are The Yvonne Rainer Project, which included the group exhibition Lives of Performers (organised by Julie Pellegrin, then the director of La Ferme du Buisson) and the conference “Nexus Rainer” organised by Chantal Pontbriand at the Palais de Tokyo and the Jeu de Paume in 2011. And let us not forget the exhibition Yvonne Rainer : Dance Works curated by Catherine Wood in 2014 at Raven Row in Londres, and the book The Mind is a Muscle published in 2007. There was also the 2017s exhibition A Different Way to Move, in which minimalism and postmodern dance met, curated by Marcella Lista at Carré d’Art in Nîmes, and finally, the oral history project coordinated by Charles Aubin for Performa, which looked back at the revival of Yvonne Rainer’s choreographic career after the 2000s, and completed her archive conserved at the Getty Research Institute.

Text by Arlène Berceliot Courtin. Extracted from the book Yvonne Rainer: A Reader, JRP|Editions, (“Documents” Collection), to be published in 2026.