Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works, Raven Row

Focusing on the years 1961-1972 Yvonne Rainer:Dance Works (Raven Row, London) celebrates the genesis of the influential choreographer's  profound contribution to dance

A post-modern dance legend, revolutionary and magnetic performer, Yvonne Rainer’s career has spanned many creative forms. Swinging mainly from dance to film and back again, she could never be called popular. But she has always been influential. This exhibition sets her writings, sketches, photographs and film alongside 45 minute performances of her work.  

Rainer and the Judson Dance Theatre

An unconventional upbringing and unfinished studies in acting led Rainer to dance, where she trained under two giants of the contemporary scene, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. After a meeting with dancer Trisha Brown at an experimental summer school, the two became founding members of the Judson Dance Theatre Group, to whose work and ideas much of this exhibition’s material relates. 

The collective rejected traditional performance norms for a more ‘essential’ experience that refused to consider the spectator in its choreography. It didn’t last long, but their influence was widespread, and Rainer later said of them: “we were among the artists that opened the gates of high art and stormed the citadel.” 

Post-modern performance

Rainer’s seminal work Trio A (1966), was a kind of manifesto. At Raven Row this and other works will be performed by a group of dancers led by the choreographer’s long-time collaborator Pat Catterson. The performer never looks at the audience, dancing small, task-like movements as though alone embodying Rainer’s “non-committal concentration”. There are moments when the steps seem almost recognisable - is that the twist, a plié, a fouetté turn? But, stripped of context and emotion, the familiar becomes something utterly foreign.

Rainer’s film-making

Rainer’s intense relationships with artist Al held and dancer Richard Morris lead to celibacy and political lesbianism in later life, and many gender-conscious ideas that would inform her film-making as she turned away from live performance in the 70s. But the early works and documentaries in this exhibition show the seeds of that phase. The 1966 Hand and Movie was made while recovering from a suicide attempt soon after the split with Morris. Compared with her confrontational anti-performance live works, the tiny movements of disembodied fingers border on erotic. 

A strange contradiction

Rainer’s efforts to un-perform almost contradict the magnetic force of her presence as both dancer and speaker, revealed here in much of the documentary material. She has returned to choreography in recent years, and continues to brandish new forms and ideas. This exhibition is not only an insight into a great and mercurial talent, but the roots of an entire dance movement.