Yvonne Rainer facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Yvonne Rainer
Rainer in 2014
Born	(1934-11-24) November 24, 1934 (age 90) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Education	One year at San Francisco Junior College Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance
Known for	Performance art, Choreography, Dancing, Film
Awards	MacArthur Fellows Program

Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker. Her work in these areas is known for being challenging and experimental. Some people describe her work as minimalist art, which means it uses very simple forms and ideas. Yvonne Rainer lives and works in New York.

Early Life and Dance Training

Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24, 1934, in San Francisco, California. Her parents, Joseph and Jeanette, had strong beliefs about social change. Her mother was from Brooklyn, and her father came from Italy.

Yvonne grew up in the Sunset District of San Francisco. She remembers being around poets, painters, writers, and Italian anarchists from a young age. Her father often took her to foreign films, and her mother took her to the ballet and opera. After high school, she went to San Francisco Junior College for a year.

In her late teens, Yvonne worked as a clerk-typist. She spent time at a jazz club in San Francisco, where she met a painter named Al Held. In 1956, when she was 21, she moved to New York to live with him.

Around 1957, a friend introduced Yvonne to modern dance classes. She soon realized that her body shape might make it hard for her to join a big dance company. In 1959, she studied at the Martha Graham School. Later, she took ballet classes and studied with Merce Cunningham for eight years.

In 1959-1960, Yvonne met Simone Forti and Nancy Meehan, who had worked with Anna Halprin. In 1960, they rented a studio in New York and practiced movement improvisations. Yvonne also attended a choreography workshop led by musician Robert Dunn. Here, she created and performed her first dances.

Dance and Choreographic Work

In 1962, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Ruth Emerson started performing at the Judson Memorial Church. This church was already a place for art and theater. It soon became a center for new and experimental dance.

Rainer is known for treating the body in dance as a source of many different movements. She did not use dance to tell a story or show drama. She used elements like repeating movements, simple tasks, and chance. These ideas later became common in modern dance. In 1965, she wrote an essay that ended with her famous No Manifesto, which shared her ideas about what dance should not be.

Her first choreographed piece was Three Satie Spoons (1961). It was a solo dance where she moved to music by Eric Satie. She also used sounds like "beep beep beep" and spoken words. Over time, her dances included more spoken words and stories. Ordinary Dance (1962) combined movement with a story about the streets she lived on in San Francisco.

Yvonne Rainer was also interested in using people who were not trained dancers. In We Shall Run (1963), twelve performers, some dancers and some not, ran around the stage for twelve minutes. They wore regular clothes. Her first full-length dance, Terrain, was performed at Judson Church in 1963.

One of Rainer's most famous pieces is Trio A (1966). In this dance, she made movements with an even amount of energy, challenging traditional dance styles. The performer never makes eye contact with the audience. If the movement makes the dancer face the audience, their eyes are closed or their head is moving. Trio A does not repeat any movements. It is often called a "task-oriented" performance because of its simple, neutral movements and lack of audience interaction. Trio A has been taught and performed by many other dancers.

Rainer has created over 40 dance pieces.

Selected Choreography

• Three Seascapes (1961): A solo dance with three parts. In one part, Rainer moved slowly with her body in wavy spasms. The final part was considered very new and featured Rainer screaming and moving wildly with a black overcoat.
• Terrain (1962): Rainer's first full-length work. It included "Talking Solos" where stories were read while movements happened at the same time.
• Continuous Project-Altered Daily (1970): This piece was performed at the Whitney Museum. It later became the improvisational dance group Grand Union, which Rainer was part of for two years.
• War (1970): An anti-war dance performed by thirty people to protest the Vietnam War.
• Street Action (1970): A protest against the invasion of Cambodia. People wearing black armbands swayed and moved through the streets of Lower Manhattan.
• This is the story of a woman who ... (1973): A dance drama that used projected texts, a vacuum cleaner, and objects like a mattress, a gun, and a suitcase.

Filmmaking Work

Yvonne Rainer sometimes included film clips in her dances. In 1972, she started directing full-length films. Her films often explored how women were shown in movies. Rainer's early films did not follow traditional story rules. Instead, they mixed her own life with made-up stories, sounds, and text to talk about social and political issues.

Rainer directed several experimental films about dance and performance, including Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who (1974), and Kristina Talking Pictures (1976). Her later films include Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). MURDER and murder had a more traditional story. It was a love story that also dealt with Rainer's own experience with a health challenge. In 2017, Lives of Performers was chosen for the National Film Registry because it was seen as important for culture and history.

Filmography

• Hand Movie (1966)
• Volleyball (1967)
• Trio Film (1968)
• Rhode Island Red (1968)
• Line (1969)
• Five Easy Pieces (1966–69)
• Lives of Performers (1972)
• Film About A Woman Who... (1974)
• Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)
• Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980)
• The Man Who Envied Women (1985)
• Privilege (1990)
• Murder And Murder (1996)
• After Many A Summer Dies The Swan: Hybrid (2002)

Return to Dance

In 2000, Rainer returned to creating dances. She choreographed After Many a Summer Dies the Swan for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. In 2006, she created AG Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M., which was a new version of George Balanchine's Agon. Rainer continued to create works based on classical pieces, like RoS Indexical (2007), inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring.

Later works include Spiraling Down (2010), Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2010), and Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money? (2013). In these pieces, Rainer explored the idea of tableau vivants (living pictures) along with political and economic themes.

An exhibition in London showed live performances of her 1960s dances. It also featured photos, notes from her career, and film screenings.

In 2015, she choreographed The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there's nothing left to move? This performance included dance movements mixed with political, historical, and news texts read by the dancers and Rainer herself. It was shown at The Museum of Modern Art and later toured in Europe. A later version, The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project-Altered Annually, was performed in 2016 and 2017.

In 2019, Rainer recreated her 1965 work Parts of Some Sextets. This piece was shown as part of Performa 19. In 2024, her famous dance piece Trio A was performed several times daily in Berlin. Created in 1966, Trio A is considered one of the most important choreographies of the 20th century.

Views on Art and Society

Reading about feminist ideas helped Yvonne Rainer think about her own experiences as a woman. She realized that her earlier dances, even without her knowing it at the time, challenged traditional dance and had feminist ideas.

Rainer was interviewed for the feminist film !Women Art Revolution. Her work is often mentioned in books about feminism and art, showing her importance as an artist and a woman who challenged norms.

Recognition and Awards

In 1990, Yvonne Rainer received a MacArthur Fellows Program award, sometimes called a "Genius Grant," for her important contributions to dance. In 2015, she received the Merce Cunningham Award. She also received a USA Grant in 2017 and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988).

See also

• List of female film and television directors
• List of lesbian filmmakers
• List of LGBT-related films directed by women