source: conzepteorg

Yvonne Rainer wurde 1934 in San Francisco geboren. 1957 begann sie in New York modernen Tanz zu studieren und 1960 choreographierte sie bereits ihre ersten Stücke. 1962 gründete Rainer gemeinsam mit anderen das Judson Dance Theater, das sich in den darauffolgenden Jahrzehnten zur treibenden Kraft der modernen Tanzszene entwickelte. 1968 zeigte Yvonne Rainer als Bestandteil ihrer Live-Performances erste Kurzfilme und im Jahr 1975 hatte sie das Filmemachen schließlich zum zentralen Element in ihrer Arbeit gemacht.

Schon zu Beginn ihrer Filmkarriere brachte Rainer ihr Publikum zur Reflexion darüber, was es da sah. Sie verwob das Reale mit dem Fiktiven, das Persönliche mit dem Politischen, das Konkrete mit dem Abstrakten und sie tat dies auf einfallsreiche, unvorhersehbare Weise. Ihre queer-feministische Position und die oft auch kontroversiellen Inhalte, versetzt mit ihrem eigenwilligen Humor, machten Yvonne Rainer, wie die Village Voice das 1986 formuliert hat, zu einer der wichtigsten amerikanischen Avantgarde-Filmemacher/innen – deren Einfluss nicht nur in New York, sondern auch in London und Berlin deutlich zu spüren ist.

Rainers Filme wurden im Kino präsentiert und gewannen Preise auf Festivals: so beim Sundance Film Festival, Park City / Utah, oder beim Internationalen Dokumentarfilmfestival in München. Ihre Arbeit wurde zudem auch in wichtigen Kunstinstitutionen und -ausstellungen gezeigt: im Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in der Tate Modern in London, oder auf der Documenta in Kassel. Erst kürzlich hatte Yvonne Rainer eine große Retrospektive im Kunsthaus Bregenz und im Museum Ludwig in Köln: „Raum. Körper. Sprache“, 2012. Sie lebt und arbeitet in New York und Los Angeles.
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source: makingarthappen

Yvonne Rainer é uma das personalidades artísticas mais vibrantes do século XX e XXI. Nasceu em San Francisco, EUA, em 1934. Em 1957, muda-se para Nova Iorque para estudar dança com Martha Graham e Merce Cunningham. As suas experiências de trabalho e relações interpessoais com Anna Halprin (dança), Robert Dunn (aluno de John Cage) e, também, com Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Steve Paxton, e David Gordon (todos ligados à dança) estão na origem da criação do Judson Dance Theatre em NY. Rainer mantinha, também, proximidade com alguns artistas visuais como Carl Andre, Robert Morris e Robert Rauschenberg que participavam nas suas criações, como intérpretes ou com outra função.

Yvonne Rainer criou coreografias surpreendentes onde desenvolveu uma linguagem totalmente nova, marcada pela inclusão de gestos e actividades diárias nas suas criações. A escala de trabalho para o corpo humano e a repetição deliberada já são visíveis nos seus primeiros trabalhos, hoje considerados um marco histórico na dança pós-moderna, como “Trio A” de 1966 (no vídeo em cima). No início dos anos 1970, Yvonne Rainer voltou as costas ao palco e dedica-se a realizar filmes onde mistura a ficção e a realidade, o pessoal e o político. A rejeição de uma narrativa linear, a identificação com os actores e a abstracção intelectual da emoção são temas que trabalha nos seus filmes.
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source: gettyedu

Dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer (American, b. 1934) is one of the most influential artistic figures of the last 50 years. Her work has been foundational across multiple disciplines and movements: dance, cinema, feminism, minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism.

Rainer first came to prominence as a leading figure in the Judson Dance Theater movement, a loose collection of dancers and artists whose performances (often held at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City) crossed fluidly between the fields of dance and visual art, creating a striking and intellectualized form of performance that denied the theatricality and emotionalism of modern dance in favor of movements that seemed casual, spare, and cool.
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source: zeitgeistfilms

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “The most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”

Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.

In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).

Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F., NuArt-L.A, Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.

A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.

In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
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source: interviewmagazine

In 1962, San Francisco native Yvonne Rainer, then 27, and fellow dancers Ruth Emerson and Steve Paxton approached the Reverend Al Carmines of Judson Memorial Church on New York City’s Washington Square Park to ask if they might use the sanctuary to present dances. The result was the Judson Dance Theater, which changed the course of dance history. The 50th anniversary of the first Judson Concert of Dance has been celebrated throughout 2012 at a number of venues, with many of the original Judson participants revisiting the past or making new works.

Rainer was the most radical among the Judson dancers, and with her essay “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” she became their theoretician. Published in Gregory Battcock’s groundbreaking anthology, Minimal Art, in 1968, Rainer’s manifesto linked the new tendencies in dance to those in sculpture. The essay’s title is telling of Rainer, who has always been voluble and funny, as well as tough-minded and searching. In 1963, Rainer’s dance Terrain became the first full-evening work at Judson, and her famous Trio A, first performed at Judson in 1966 by Rainer, Paxton, and David Gordon, has lived on in many incarnations and become not only Rainer’s signature dance work but an iconic 1960s dance in a league with George Balanchine’s Jewels, Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time, and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. A continuous, uninflected series of deceptively simple movements in which the dancers never allow their gaze to meet that of the spectator, Trio A takes roughly five minutes to perform. It was originally meant to be teachable to anybody, although Rainer would be the first to say that it’s far from easy to execute. Nevertheless, for the past several years, you could walk into many a museum and see a group of dancers doing it.

In the early 1970s, Rainer founded an improvisatory New York City-based dance group called Grand Union with a number of her Judson colleagues and went on a life-changing trip to India. At the height of protests against the Vietnam War, she and several Judson dancers also performed a notorious version of Trio A nude and draped with American flags. Then she unexpectedly turned to narrative, which led to an entirely new career in filmmaking. From 1972 to 1996, Rainer made seven feature-length films, beginning with the autobiographical Lives of Performers, an investigation of what she called “the nuts and bolts of emotional life” that “shaped the unseen (or should I say unseemly?)” side of minimalism, and ending with MURDER and murder, a searing comedy about breast cancer and lesbian love. But in 1999, something unexpected happened: Mikhail Baryshnikov asked Rainer to choreograph a new dance for his White Oak Dance Project. She returned to her 1960s dances—”raiding her icebox,” as she puts itand made After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which thrilled audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since then, Rainer, now 78, has made five more major dance pieces, responding to commissions from Dance Theater Workshop, Performa, Documenta, the Getty Trust, Yale.