- Yvonne Rainer
Infobox Artist
bgcolour = #6495ED
name = Yvonne Rainer
imagesize =
caption =
birthname =
birthdate = 1934
location =San Francisco, California
deathdate =
deathplace =
nationality = American
field =Performance art ,Choreography ,Dancing ,Film
training =
movement =
works =
patrons =
influenced by =
influenced =
awards =Yvonne Rainer (born
November 24 ,1934 ,San Francisco ) is an American choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in both disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental.Choreography
In 1957 Rainer moved to
New York to study theater. She found herself more strongly drawn to modern dance than acting, however, and began studying at the Martha Graham School and later withMerce Cunningham . Rainer was one of the organizers of theJudson Dance Theater , a focal point for vanguard activity in the dance world throughout the 1960s, and she formed her own company for a brief time after the Judson performances ended. 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 emotion or drama. Many of the elements she employed—such as repetition, patterning, tasks, and games—later became standard features of modern dance.Her best-known dance, “Trio A,” a section of a larger work called "The Mind Is a Muscle", consists of a simultaneous performance by three dancers that includes a difficult series of circular and spiral movements. It has been widely adapted and interpreted by other choreographers. She choreographed more than 40 concert works, most notably "Terrain" and "This Is a Woman Who…".
Cinema
Rainer sometimes included filmed sequences in her dances, and in the mid-1970s she began to turn her attention to film directing. Her early films do not follow narrative conventions, instead combining reality and fiction, sound and visuals, to address 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 "The Man Who Envied Women" (1985), "Privilege" (1990), and "MURDER and murder" (1996). The last-mentioned work, more conventional in its narrative structure, is a lesbian love story as well as a reflection on urban life and on breast cancer, and it features Rainer herself. Her [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0707033/ film work] has received several awards, and in 1990 she was a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
Bibliography
*cite book | first=Yvonne | last=Rainer | title=Feelings Are Facts: A Life | year=2006 | publisher=The MIT Press|location= Cambridge, Massachusetts & London | id=ISBN 0-262-18251-3
*cite book |last=Green |first=Shelley |title=Radical Juxtaposition. The films of Yvonne Rainer |year=1994 |publisher= Scarecrow Press Inc.|location= New York |id=ISBN 0-8108-28634External links
* [http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/rainer.html Biography on sensesofcinema.com] .
* [http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/21/feelings-are-facts.html Review of "Feelings Are Facts"] , by Daniel Ross.
* [http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?RAINERY Yvonne Rainer] in the [http://www.vdb.org/ Video Data Bank]
* [http://www.ubu.com/film/rainer.html] Films by Yvonne Rainer and Writings by and about Yvonne Rainer atUbuweb
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.