Yvonne Rainer

From 1963–65, Greenwich Village’s most progressive ministry, Judson Memorial Church, hosted a group of young dancers—alongside poets, painters, community activists, and its parishioners—who did appear to be uniquely of their time. The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done is centrally an invocation of the zeitgeist of that historical moment and the artists who helped shape it. Written into the show’s title as well as the curation as a whole, the exhibition’s implicit inquiry is: how do we look back from where we are; what does that time tell us about our times? And for those who accept the invitation: what might the creative action of that fertile and contentious era ask us of being and acting in our own?

Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image is a rich exploration of the choreographic in cinema.  It traces the history of the dancefilm form from some of its earliest manifestations in the silent film era, through the historic avant-garde, musicals and music videos to contemporary experimental short dancefilms. In so doing it also traverses some of the most significant collaborations between dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers.  Bringing film theory and dance theory into dialogue, the book argues that the combination of dance and film produces cine-choreographic practices that are specific to the dancefilm form. As whole, the book thus presents new models of cinematic movement that are historically informed and interdisciplinary in nature.  An extensive companion website provide key video illustrations and links to online resources.

Corps souffrants, corps vulnérables, corps mourants : les dégradations et les altérations corporelles liées à la maladie ont constitué un champ d’exploration important pour les femmes artistes pratiquant la performance dans les années 1980- et 1990. À rebours des normes de représentation de la féminité, alliant beauté, séduction, vigueur et jeunesse, leurs œuvres performatives donnent à voir des états de corps socialement inacceptables, habituellement dissimulés ou censurés. Atteintes par différents types de cancers, Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spence et Hannah Wilke ont développé des explorations performatives et documentaires, qui font du corps pathologisé un espace de questionnement, de représentation et de lutte. Comment performer son identité sexuelle lorsque l’on en a perdu les marqueurs fondamentaux (les seins, les cheveux, la beauté) ? Comment le corps malade permet-il de déjouer la mascarade de la féminité ? Du corps-objet au corps-sujet, l’article montre comment l’exhibition et l’expérimentation de la corporéité souffrante participent d’un processus de subjectivisation féministe.

In this study, Josefine Wikström challenges a concept of performance that makes no difference between art and non-art and argues for a new concept. This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in art theory and performance and dance studies. Through an analysis of 1960s performance practices, Wikström focuses specifically on task-dance and event-score practices and provides an examination of the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from such a concept of art and are necessary for the reconstruction of a critical concept of performance, such as "practice", "experience", "object", "abstraction" and "structure". This book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory. Josefine Wikström is Associate Professor of Dance Theory at Stockholm University of the Arts.

This paper takes up the philosophical problem of modernism as it arises with respect to dance. While the “of” in the phrase “philosophy of dance” is most often construed as an objective genitive—philosophical which takes dance as its object—the “of” can also be construed as a subjective genitive: philosophical reflection that belongs to dance itself. The paper seeks to clarify the conditions for the possibility of this kind of approach. In the first half of the paper, I characterize a standard approach to philosophy of dance that I take to be implicit in and shared by several attempts to adapt conceptions of modernism, which were developed in the first instance to explain changes in the visual arts, to dance. Once we make the standard approach explicit, I argue, it becomes clear that this approach fails to clarify any sense in which philosophical reflection might genuinely belong to dance that is art. The approach shows only that philosophical reflection is in some sense present in the work of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham or Yvonne Rainer. To say of a form of philosophical reflection that it belongs to dance, I argue, is to make a stronger and a more compelling claim: that there is a necessary relation between the aesthetic and the philosophical achievement of the work. In the second half of the paper, drawing on the conception of modernism developed by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, I develop an alternative approach. Following them, I argue that modernism is the condition an art enters when it enters the condition of philosophy. I show that this approach is able to make sense of the following possibility: a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence obtains between the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of some forms of dance. Through elaborating this idea, I show that the alternative approach affords a far more compelling point of departure for something deserving the title “philosophy of dance”.

Art’s primary function, at least for a certain tradition of thinking, is to criticize capitalist society. But what in capitalism should be criticized? And how can art perform such a critique? Taking these questions as its staring point this article argues for three things mainly. First, by expanding on Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno’s form theory, that art primarily should criticize capitalism through its form, understood as “sedimented content.” Secondly, taking Marx’s term abstract labour and the way it has been further theorized by contemporary thinkers such as Moishe Postone and Chris Arthur, that abstract labour is the main mediating social form of capitalism and therefore should be the main focus for critique. Finally that art can only negate the social form of abstract labour though its own form. These arguments are being discussed through American choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s (1934-) work, which can be categorised as “task-dance”, an artistic strategy that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by choreographers Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Rainer. Through Adorno’s understanding of form, I argue that Rainer’s early task-dance works criticise capitalism at the level of form rather than at the level of representation.

My current research project, Dance as a Model for Interdisciplinary Composition, examines compositional language, processes and strategies beginning with dance and its disciplinary specificity, but moving towards considering the deeply interdisciplinary status of contemporary dance. The project argues for the special status of dance within the current broader interdisciplinary milieu of contemporary performance regarding originary compositional strategies grounded in the body, and the form’s capacity for collaboration.

I begin with the premise that contemporary dance is both produced through, and performed as, experimental composition.

"Twisted feet, snapped heads, jarring, abrupt movements, rhythmic stomping and trembling. In the end, death by exhaustion, the staged sacrifice for the heathen sun god. Dancing – excessive, powerful, disturbing.

The premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps” at the Parisian Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 shocked audiences. Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography and Igor Stravinsky’s music created one of the greatest scandals in 20th-century dance history. Performed on the eve of World War I, the ballet uncannily foreshadowed the slaughter on the battlefields: “Le Sacre du Printemps” – a dance over trenches.

One hundred years later, an international and interdisciplinary conference has addressed the special role that “Le Sacre du Printemps” played in dance modernity and as a cultural-historical phenomenon. The debate focused on the aspects of victims and sacrifice, the relationship between abstraction and ornamentation, and the peculiar interweave of modernism and primitivism. What exactly caused the uproar at the premiere in 1913 and what relevance does the piece have today?

More than 500 visitors participated in debates and discussions, and over 2,000 people watched the performances staged at RADIALSYSTEM V and the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theatre. One of the artistic highlights of the congress was the reconstruction of Mary Wigman’s “The Rite of Spring” (1957), performed by the dance ensembles at the theatres in Osnabrück und Bielefeld. Another highlight was “The Autumn of Le Sacre du Printemps”, a reconstruction of Nijinsky’s choreography performed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer together with 20 members of the Sasha Waltz & Guests dance company. The scenographer Detlef Weitz and artist Dominique Müller presented a video installation created especially for the congress, featuring clips of various performances of “The Rite of Spring”. Earlier this year, the HAU Hebbel am Ufer launched an open call for treatments of the “Rite of Spring” by young choreographers. A selection of these contemporary approaches to the “Dance over Trenches” was presented at the congress.

With: Jan Assmann, Gabriele Brandstetter, Laurent Chétouane, deufert&plischke, Christine Gaigg, Lynn Garafola, Jack Halberstam, Millicent Hodson, Stephanie Jordan, Herfried Münkler, Sasha Waltz, Sigrid Weigel and others."

In my contribution to this panel I would like to investigate in how far the recent spread of the workshop format especially in the dance field in its difference from the formats of rehearsal, training, or showing can be situated in the area of conflict between group technologies and technologies of the self. At the end of my talk I will briefly say a few sentences about the durational event Life Forms which took place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin from April 25 till 27 (2019). My proposition is that workshops take place in a tension between the form of collectivity they involve and the individual positions they put their participants into. Though historically they were conceived to foster groups in preference to individuals, in the present means and ends seem to have changed. Whilst in the Neo-Avantgardes of the 1960s many workshops were trying to produce other subjectivities, today they are rather about the reproduction of one and the same subjectivity: That of the individual. Seen from this angle, workshops establish both relations of individuals to themselves and relations inbetween exceeding them as individuals. They include not only a collective situation but also the formatting and formation of subjectivity in relation to that situation in terms of practice.

This article focuses on two experimental films from the 1960s: Yvonne Rainer's Hand Movie (1966) and Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968). It scrutinizes the way both works exhibit a hybridized and indeterminate approach to artistic media. It offers an empirical reading of the films' movement and contextualizes them historically to move on to a theory of medium informed by Deleuze, Levinson, and Rajewsky. How does Rainer's move from the time-based media of dance and choreography, and Serra's move from the object arts of painting and sculpture, into the medium of film, advance our understanding of what is at stake aesthetically when boundaries of media are dissolved, transited, or displaced? Dance aesthetics requires that we show how movement gets translated into medium. I propose that the movement of media creates a displacement that is parallel to the displacement from the empirical to the theoretical in this article, where displacement becomes a form of reflection and critique.

Une appréhension du réel qui met l’accent sur le détail ordinaire, le rien ou le pas grand‑chose, les petites actions banales. Un temps qui dure, qui s’étend, qui pèse, qui n’évolue pas. Un flux gestuel qui se déploie dans une continuité plate, sans inflexions. Nivelant les saillances affectives, favorisant des états toniques atones et étales, dans les années 1960, l’œuvre chorégraphique de la danseuse, chorégraphe, cinéaste, poète et théoricienne américaine Yvonne Rainer fait émerger une tonalité émotionnelle très particulière. Nous proposons de rapporter cette forme d’expérience kinesthésique à l’émergence d’une nouvelle sensibilité dans le champ de l’avant-garde à New York : dans le sillage de Marcel Duchamp et de John Cage, la décennie 1960 voit en effet s’imposer l’ennui à la fois comme stratégie esthétique et comme style affectif, façonné par les normes et les valeurs partagées par cette communauté artistique. Dans l’œuvre de Rainer, la tonalité émotionnelle de l’ennui devient prégnante, et influe sur la fabrique même du geste dansé, à partir de la pièce Parts of Some Sextets (1965): tous les matériaux constitutifs de la danse y semblent imprégnés d'ennui. Simple coloration affective ou véritable stratégie d’avant-garde, comment interpréter le recours à l’ennui dans Parts of Some Sextets ? Au-delà, que nous enseigne ce dispositif sur le rapport au matériau émotionnel dans la danse de Rainer ?

A perception of reality emphasizing ordinary detail, nothingness and small mundane actions. Time which lasts, draws on, weighs down, and does not evolve. A flow of movement that progresses in flat continuity, without inflections. Equalizing affective saliences, foregrounding blank, flat and still states, the work of the American dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s brought out a very singular emotional tonality. This article links this kind of kinesthetic experience to the rise of a new sensibility in the New York avant-garde: indeed, in the wake of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, boredom increasingly came to the fore in the artistic practices of this period, both as an aesthetic issue and an affective style, shaped by the shared standards and values of this artistic community. In Rainer's work, the emotional tonality of boredom first became significant in Parts of Some Sextets (1965), affecting the way the movement itself was fabricated and pervading the dance material. How are we to interpret the use of boredom in Parts of Some Sextets? As simply an emotional coloring or as a truly avant-garde strategy? And beyond that, what can this choreographic apparatus teach us about the relation to emotional material in Rainer's work?

Num mundo em constante mutação, novas tendências e novas explorações surgem. Nos anos 60, nos Estados Unidos, uma revolução iniciava-se: o panorama da dança e da performance modificavam-se e os paradigmas, inerentes aos mesmos, quebravam-se. O corpo enquanto corpo presente, a dança enquanto um conjunto de movimentos banais, expressos por um corpo do qual o público não consegue fugir. A norma clássica cai: o pós-modernismo, nos anos 60, quebrou com as convenções daquilo que poderia ou não ser considerado dança ou performance. Yvonne Rainer, cineasta, coreógrafa e bailarina, fez parte do Judson Dance Group, nos anos 60, e marcou-se, nessa altura, enquanto uma das mais influentes coreógrafas e bailarinas do pós-modernismo-ou anti-modernismo-do universo da dança. Trio A e Terrain são alguns dos exemplos das peças mais influentes do seu trabalho, e que questionam, no seu cerne, a forma como a dança é representada, a forma como o corpo é representado, tal como o papel disruptivo e transgressivo da performance. Ainda que esta seja a perspectiva actual, a realidade é que a opinião de grande parte dos críticos da época não era favorável em relação às performances de Rainer. As suas criações, no entanto, não tinham por objectivo agradar ao público, nem induzir uma relação de affect com o público. O público, neste caso, era predominantemente composto por indivíduos do mundo da dança, ou das artes em geral. Qual será o real efeito de tal tipo de performance num público não inserido no mundo das artes, ou até mesmo num público especializado? Neste ensaio, o foco é colocado no trabalho de Yvonne Rainer, no seu papel no panorama da dança e da performance, e, igualmente, na análise da recepção, por parte do público, de algo que quebra com as convenções e com as expectativas.

Published in the exhibition catalog, _A minimal future? : art as object 1958-1968_, edited by curator Ann Goldstein in 2004, this essay considers the convergence of action-like objects and object-like actions in mid-1960s New York. "[Dances' dual difference from Minimalism,] their more than and not quite, allows the dances to open up aspects of Minimalism's temporality and visuality and reframe its internal complexity. In the end it is not the likeness of dance and visual art in the 1960s so much as the misfit between them that is the reason to find slots for dance artists in the Minimalist roster, to rebuild Minimalism with performance."

Hot » contre « cool », approche formaliste contre esthétique camp, virilité contre féminité : ces dichotomies ont considérablement marqué l’historiographie du Judson Dance Theater, consacrant une danse neutre, abstraite et dépersonnalisée et escamotant la part de la subjectivité et de l'émotion dans les approches chorégraphiques de Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris ou Lucinda Childs. Pour autant, à rebours d'une certaine doxa minimaliste, en travaillant le geste ordinaire et le corps tangible, la danse judsonnienne déjoue l’idéal d’un art « neutre ». Afin d'éclairer ce triomphe de la rhétorique de l'anti-subjectivité dans l'histoire du Judson Dance Theater, la communication se penchera notamment sur le rôle prescripteur des critiques de danse publiées par Robert Morris en 1965-1966. Nous démontrerons comment ces discours ont pu être influencés par le régime émotionnel dominant durant cette période, la sensibilité cool, qui impose des codes et des valeurs aussi bien affectifs qu'esthétiques.

As praias de Agnès é um filme elaborado por meio de um movimento retrospectivo em que a cineasta Agnès Varda reflete sobre sua vida e compõe uma costura entre a sua narrativa e a maneira como mobiliza trechos de diversas obras suas. O trabalho está voltado para analisar o filme partindo da hipótese de que As praias de Agnes, além de estabelecer esse contato entre recordações e processo de criação, reúne elementos que atravessam a filmografia da cineasta. A pesquisa esteve dedicada a lançar luz sobre as recorrências mas também observando as singularidades de cada trabalho, percebendo neles o que torna Agnès Varda uma artista que instiga o estudo sobre sua obra. O esforço foi de investigar o modo como a cineasta aliou seus temas à forma fílmica a partir da relação que estabelece entre memórias, história e os contatos que promove entre o cinema e outras artes.

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The beaches of Agnès is a film elaborated through a retrospective movement in which filmmaker Agnès Varda reflects about her life and composes an articulation between her narrative and the way she mobilizes excerpts from her various works. This work is focused on analyzing the film based on the hypothesis that The beaches of Agnès, in addition to establishing this contact between memories and the creation process, brings together recurring elements in the work of the filmmaker. The research was dedicated to shed light on the recurrences but also observing the singularities of each work, realizing in them what makes Agnès Varda an artist whose study of the work becomes so instigating. The thesis investigates the way in which Varda articulates form and content through an analysis of the rapport between memory ans history and of cinema relationship with other forms of art.

Yvonne Rainer's transition from choreography to filmmaking in the 1970s coincided with the widespread social and political impact of the women's movement. Through a close analysis of her second feature-length film, this essay argues that Film About a Woman Who … (1974) can be understood as a complex reflection on the widely influential feminist idea “the personal is the political.” Rather than seeing Rainer's turn to the personal and emotional as the antithesis of a materialist political analysis—as Marxist influenced critics have tended to—I draw upon Raymond Williams's concept of “structures of feeling” as a way of discerning emergent social change through figurations of lived experience. This analysis identifies moments of rupture in the film's narrative structure where questions of queerness and racial difference emerge to complicate the film's focus on (white, heterosexual) female identity. Moreover, Rainer's engagement with the emotional or personal has typically been seen as related only to her work's content and as such these references have been set in opposition to formal experimentation, whereas Williams's notion of the “structures of feeling” is addressed to transformations at the level of aesthetic form. By focusing on film form, this essay displaces the commonly held opposition of “structure” and “feeling” that continues to give shape to critical analyses of post—minimalist and post—conceptualist work of this period.

The task of the actor has long been a subject of scepticism, and often scorn, accused of being not real work: either it is ‘not real’, in that it is only pretending or simulation, or it is ‘not work’, in that it is merely the pursuit of pleasure.  But in thinking through its own work, theatre can also help us to think through how work is understood and valued in culture more broadly. In this chapter I focus on two moments in which theatre seems to have been particularly interested in its relationship to work, and in which, by turn, we can track the changing nature of work itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, performance artists turned to ‘task-like’ or ‘work-like’ performance as a way to bring everyday reality to the theatrical event—and, by extension, as a remedy to the way in which wider culture was perceived as increasingly alienating and ‘theatricalized.’ Here the apparent ‘realness’ and ‘authenticity’ of work-like performance is positioned in contrast to the increasing alienation and disembodiment of everyday life. But in subsequent decades, the nature of work itself has undergone a gradual but irreversible shift, such that its paradigmatic figure is no longer the factory worker (or the craftsperson), but instead the service provider, who is a kind of ‘emotional labourer’ whose work is very similar to that of the actor. Here again, new forms of theatre, such as immersive and one-to-one theatre, emerge as a challenge to the theatricality of everyday life. I explore these themes through a comparison of how two artists from very different periods, Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s and Adrian Howells in the 2000s, used their creative practice to think through questions of work, alienation, and everyday life.

URL : http://www.danse.univ-paris8.fr/chercheur_bibliographie.php?cc_id=4&ch_id=10
En 1972, la chorégraphe Yvonne Rainer réalise son premier long-métrage, amorçant sa carrière dans le cinéma expérimental. Plutôt que de rupture, il faut ici considérer une trajectoire artistique qui tisse des liens entre danse et cinéma, en prolongeant un certain nombre de questionnements : sur le rapport au public, sur la composition (montage, fragmentation, logiques narratives), sur l'expression et la théâtralité (la neutralité de l'interprétation, le refus de la psychologie et des affects, le retour des émotions). Ces recherches chorégraphiques viennent s'insinuer dans le film et bousculer les conventions, la forme, la structure narrative de l'art cinématographique.
Publié avec l'aimable autorisation de Fabienne Costa

La contribution essentielle d’Yvonne Rainer à l’histoire de la conférence-performance est encore largement sous-estimée. Ingrédient crucial de la danse rainerienne, la voix s’impose pourtant dès ses premières pièces chorégraphiques, au début des années 1960. Dans ces œuvres, la juxtaposition disjonctive de la danse, du bruitage vocal et du discours oscille entre parodie ironique, didactisme et parole autobiographique. Celle qui affirme que « la danse est difficile à voir », intègre au cœur de sa démarche chorégraphique les questions de la monstration et de la démonstration du mouvement. Entre 1968 et 1970, Rainer développe un format performatif qu’elle dénomme performance demonstration (performance-démonstration), un genre de collage en perpétuelle mutation, mêlant mouvements, textes, images et sons. En éclairant les enjeux kinesthésiques, pédagogiques, théoriques et personnels des conférences performées créées par la danseuse et chorégraphe durant les années 1960, nous proposons de décaler le regard pour discuter la part de la subjectivité, de la critique et de la subversion dans ce format performatif.

In feminist and queer genealogies, the importance of seemingly negative affective states such as shame, sadness or anger have been strongly emphasized (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Sally Munt, Ann Cvetkovich). Some of these everyday negative emotions may contribute to build bonds and engender political potentialities. Looking at feminist and queer avant-garde film practices from the 1970s to the 1990s, one may notice the predominance of the prosaic affective tonality of boredom. Repetitions, extended duration, lassitude, depictions of the tediousness of daily life, long monologues: the films of Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Susan Sontag, and Su Friedrich are deliberately exploring this irritating state of mind. Elaborating a counter-cinema, in opposition to the heterosexist visual and narrative standards perpetuated by the movie industry, these filmmakers are investigating the formal and political radicalness of boredom. Through text, sound and image, they convey the experience of an endless, stagnant, and fruitless temporality, investigating the female corporeality associated with mundane alienation. Drawing on several examples, ranging from Je tu il elle (Akerman, 1974) to Sink or Swim (Friedrich, 1990), and from Brother Carl (Sontag, 1971) to MURDER and murder (Rainer, 1996), I will argue that the question of boredom is raised as both an aesthetic response, a phenomenological problem, and a political strategy, offering us a reflexive and emancipatory space-time. I would finally emphasize that this disapproved affect generates ambivalent feminist and queer processes of subjectivation.

Danseuse, chorégraphe puis cinéaste expérimentale, l’artiste américaine Yvonne Rainer a marque l’histoire de l’avant-garde new-yorkaise des années 1960 aux années 1990. Son cinéma donne la primauté à la parole sur l’image, délaissant la narration classique au profit d’une juxtaposition de discours multiples. Si la voix-off tient une place centrale dans la plupart des films de Rainer, c’est dans The Man Who Envied Women (1985) que son rôle est le plus fondamental. En effet, influencée par la théorie féministe du cinéma et notamment par la réflexion de Laura Mulvey – qui montre comment le dispositif cinématographique construit la femme comme objet du regard masculin, à la fois fascinant et menaçant – Yvonne Rainer propose une réflexion sur les rapports de genre et sur l’instrumentalisation du corps féminin. Désirant contrer la fascination cinématographique pour l’image des femmes, elle transforme son héroïne en voix désincarnée, en personnage hors-champ n’apparaissant jamais à l’image. Afin d’analyser comment le recours à un personnage principal invisible dans The Man who Envied Women permet à Rainer d’expérimenter de nouvelles formes narratives, on se penchera sur l’effet de cette voix-off en termes d’énonciation, de représentation, d’identification et d’auteurité.

A personal text where the artist reflects on being part of a recently created artist's association, along with his biographic stories, in a particular tense moment for Portuguese culture, where the coronavirus pandemic revealed fragilities on all communities.

This paper examines the transition point in the nature of spectatorship transpired in the art of the 1960s that was initiated both by the experimental dance of the performance collective Judson Dance Theater and the Minimalist sculpture. The theoretical ideas developed by minimalist artists (e.g. Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra) and innovative dancers (e.g. Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton) position the viewer as a self-conscious subject creating a context in which embodied experience appears now to be of crucial importance. The concerns about the experience of viewing and reading the artwork were met with criticism as these were troubling widely accepted ideas about the aesthetic appreciation that had been formed during the Enlightenment, as Ramsay Burt articulates
(Burt 2006:30) .
The subject is studied on the basis of artistic works of Yvonne Rainer, choreographer, dancer, film-maker, and co-founder of the Judson performance collective and Robert Morris, a leading artist associated with Minimalism, a key figure in Judson experimentations, as well as Rainer’s partner at the time. However, on occasion, reference can be made to their contemporaries who actively engaged in the downtown New York scene.

The paper adresses dance in regard to logistical capitalism and its operational politics. Operational politics denotes the control of processes from their inside, regulated and modulated by their very own logic. Instead of subsuming processes to external regulators such as pregiven scripts, goals or acting and moving subjects, operational politics is based on the logic of process itself and its regulation via immanent techniques. In regard to movement, operational politics started to gain hold in the field of logistics in the 1960s. Over the last decades, these operational choreographies proliferated into all realms of society, creating a logistical regime that comprises modes of thinking as much as modes of existence and action. It governs the movements of economic production as much as the way we perceive, live and move. Dance – seen as a practice in which new modes of thinking, moving and acting as well as new forms of subjectivity are explored in a physical manner – became an integral part of this logistical regime: In dance, the logic of operations is exercised beyond the realm of business organization. The study of operational choreography in dance as it is proposed in the paper is therefore twofold: On the one hand, it offers an analysis of the modes of logistical power at work in performances. On the other hand, it reveals how performances investigate the logistical regime itself and its operational politics on a bodily level.

In this essay, I reexamine Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 dance Word Words, arguing that this apparently “minimalist” work in fact deployed “underground” strategies, those of female (and male) impersonation. Camp performance, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were not possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A. Word Words did not simply “overwrite” Rainer's (female) gender, as has been suggested alongside similar discussions of Trio A and gender, but destabilized the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances using camp.

Yvonne’s exhibition feels like a concerted effort to experiment with the construction of dance as a performance art. Right of the bat, from the order the pieces follow, there is an effort to take apart and put together the physical aspects of dance, and the expectation f the parties involved (the author, dancer and the audience). For example, ‘We shall Run’ offers an introduction of the conventional dance: the score, the dancer, the meticulous choreography which is later counteracted by the improvisation that occurs in a later piece - ‘Diagonal’. The latter appears to be the antithesis of the former piece. Where ‘We shall Run’ features intentional pre-constructed choreography and a sense of meticulousness, ‘Diagonal’ contrasts with spontaneity, taking the reins out of Rainer’s hand and giving the dancer the agency to improvise and influence the piece itself, together with other dancers involved in the same piece, in this case becoming the ‘author ‘themselves. The overall effect in ‘Diagonal’ is the creation of a piece that feels unique and unrepeatable.

Si le cinéma de Rainer semble de prime abord centré sur le langage, le corps y joue pour autant un rôle crucial, ancré dans le présent le plus concret. Juxtaposé aux discours, au texte et aux images, impliqué dans des activités ordinaires et minimalistes, il impose une représentation corporelle du réel, ou, pour reprendre le terme de la théoricienne du cinéma Ivone Margulies, une « corporéalité ». En mettant en évidence la singularité de la forme cinématographique polymorphe élaborée par la cinéaste, nous montrerons comment la danse participe à fabriquer une esthétique filmique corporéelle radicalement opposée au voyeurisme cinématographique, entre temporalité longue, lenteur, répétition, banalité et exploration de la subjectivité féminine.

This paper calls into question the context in which artistic production related to industrial history may enter art official narratives. Drawing on the examples of the Voltron sculpture series by David Smith (1962); Yvonne Rainer's performance Carriage Discreteness (1966) and Stuart Brisley's work at the Hille Fellowship Poly Wheel factory (1970), I will propose that observing the production of artworks within industrial environments implies a twofold commitment for art history. On the one hand, investigating artworks relying on industrial materials and production modes calls for the analysis of the " concrete and direct evidence " that materials provide (Didi-Huberman, 2015; Domínguez Rubio, 2012). On the other, they invite consideration of informal archives and " suspect evidence " related to the tacit knowledge of production, subjective self-documentation and oral history (Rosnow and Fine, 1976). Seen from this perspective, artists' production in the context of industrial culture and workers' practices of self-managed time both contribute another point of view on how the inscription within the realm of high and low culture is done in art history. At a time when contemporary artistic and curatorial practices show a renewed interest in " outsiders' " artefacts, the different work models and modes adopted by the proposed case studies enable a reading of potential art historical narratives through the lens of working-class studies and the contemporary material turn.

Artists included: Yvonne Rainer, Natalie Bookchin, Gregg Bordowitz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Ralph Lemon, Simon Leung, Jimmy Robert, Meg Stuart

Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer gathers together recent works by artists who take up Yvonne Rainer’s experimental approach to the body as a material in the 1960s and explore its political implications with fresh eyes. Rainer's dance in the 1960s showed us what was possible when ordinary movement was made the material of a work of art. These artists mobilize Rainer’s abstracted version of ordinary movement to create situations or tell stories in which the particular ways bodies perform tasks or give in to gravity, or simply the paths through space that their daily lives require, become as much or more significant than markers of cultural identity or difference. The juxtaposition of these varied practices allows the different valences of a broad-reaching conversation about one of contemporary art’s most important ancestors to be heard.
Curated by Elise Archias