Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental.
[3] Rainer grew up, along with an older brother, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, which she has described as "a neighborhood of white Protestant working class families".
She attended Lowell High School, and after graduation she enrolled in San Francisco Junior College and dropped out after a year.
Doris Casella, a musician and close friend, introduced Rainer around 1957 to the dance classes of Edith Stephen, a modern dancer.
In late 1960, both Forti and Rainer attended the choreography workshop that musician-composer Robert Dunn began to conduct in the Cunningham studio based on the theories of John Cage.
[8] In 1962, Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Ruth Emerson approached the Reverend Al Carmines at the Judson Memorial Church to ask if they could begin performing there.
Rainer is noted for an approach to dance that treats "the body more as the source of an infinite variety of movements" than as the purveyor of plot or drama.
In 1965, when writing about a recent dance — Parts of Some Sextets — for the Tulane Drama Review, she ended the essay with what became her notorious No Manifesto, which she "reconsidered" in 2008.
Trio A is often referred to as a task-oriented performance due to this style of energy distribution, also for its emphasis on a neutral, or characterless, approach to movement execution and a lack of interaction with the audience.
In 2017, Lives of Performers was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.
[2] Rainer continued to choreograph works based on classical pieces, including RoS Indexical (2007), inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring.
(2013), two pieces in which Rainer explores the theatrical and historic motif of tableau vivants among political, philosophical and economic readings.
(2015), commissioned by Performa and The Getty Research Institute, a performance containing choreographed work interspersed with a wide range of political, historical, and journalistic texts read intermittently by the dancers and Rainer herself.
This work was presented at The Museum of Modern Art, and later toured European venues including La Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy, Marseille Objectif Danse in France, and the Louvre.
[24][27] A latter version of this same dance, called The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project-Altered Annually was performed in 2016 at The Kitchen in New York, and in Marseilles, Porto, and Barcelona in 2017.
[28] [29] As a white, unconsciously ambitious artist, oblivious to art world sexism and racism and ensconced in dancing (a socially acceptable female pursuit), I started reading the angry experimental writing in Robin Morgan's anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful and the fiery polemics of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex.
Reading feminist writing and theory allowed Rainer to examine her own experience as a woman, and she was able to think of herself as a participant in culture and society.
Throughout the 1980s, Rainer was celibate, and she was determined "not to enter into any more ill-fated heterosexual adventures ..." She began attending Gay Pride Parades and considered herself a "political lesbian."