Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover

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Yvonne Rainer. ThreeSeascapes, “Climax andDénoument,” 1962. Performedby Patricia Hoffbauer at theGetty, Los Angeles, May 8–9,2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust.

Grey Room 22, Winter 2005, pp. 48–67. © 2006 Douglas Crimp 49

Yvonne Rainer, Muciz LoverDOUGLAS CRIMP

As an epigraph, I quote a quotation of a quotation—Yvonne Rainer/John Cage/Arnold Schoenberg. Rainer:

John Cage’s famous story may be relevant here:

After I had been studying with him for two years,Schönberg said, “In order to write music you musthave a feeling for harmony.” I then explained to himthat I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that Iwould always encounter an obstacle, that it wouldbe as though I came to a wall through which I couldnot pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life tobeating my head against that wall.”

In my case, lacking a “feeling” for plot and character,the essentials of traditional narrative, I have devotedmuch of my career to banging my head against that wall—with no expectations, I should add, of gaining entrance to a narrative mainstream, but rather to wrestle with itsprescriptions.1

Nearly thirty years after moving from dance to film as herprincipal medium,2 Yvonne Rainer was asked by MikhailBaryshnikov to choreograph a piece for his White Oak DanceProject. The resulting work, After Many a Summer Dies theSwan, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2000. Ittook the form Rainer had developed in the late 1960s that shecalled, alternately, “performance demonstrations,” “performancefractions,” or “composites,” in which she combined fragmentsof earlier dances, new dance material, spoken monologues,slide projections, films, and sound tapes.3

One of those works, Rose Fractions (1969), constitutedRainer’s infamous Broadway debut at the Billy Rose Theater.The infamy derives from Rainer’s having shown, on the secondevening of the run, a hard-core porn film juxtaposed with herown Trio Film in which dancers Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold,both nude, form a trio with a large white balloon and movemethodically around and over the completely white furniturein the completely white Dakota apartment of Virginia Dwan,the dealer in minimal art. All the while, Rainer recited a LennyBruce monologue, “On Snot,” delivered with the flat intonationof someone reading a text but not “getting” the joke, or—better—

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creating a form of wacky humor out of not reading with theexpected inflection (which might, after all, be compared withdance phrasing—something Rainer had challenged severalyears before in what has become her most famous dance, TrioA from The Mind Is a Muscle):

I’m going to tell you the dirtiest word you ever heard onstage. It’s just disgusting! I’m not going to look at youwhen I say it, cause this way we won’t know who said it.I may blame that cat over there. It’s a four-letter word,starts with “s” and ends with “t” . . . and . . . just don’t takeme off the stage, just . . . don’t embarrass my Mom. I’ll goquietly. The word is—Oh, I’m going to say it and just get itdone with. I’m tired of walking the streets. “Snot!” I can’tlook at you, but that’s the word: snot.4

Snot had a precursor appearance, in the Latinate rather thanGermanic form of the word, in Performance Demonstration, thefirst of Rainer’s composite pieces, presented at the Library ofthe Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in September 1968. Itsurfaced in a different sort of routine, a diatribe against the useof music for dance in which the word “music” is consistentlymispronounced in variations on Muzak, a term that hadrecently come into common use to denote canned backgroundmusic played in elevators, department stores, and other com-mercial spaces.5 One mispronunciation is spelled m-u-c-i-z,“muciz.” Rainer came to call this her “mucus rant.” The mono-logue begins with a description of Trio Film before the filmitself had been made:

The most flagrant omission today [in the Lincoln CenterPerformance Demonstration] is a film that will be shot ina large white living room with two large white sofas andtwo large white nudes—one male, one female—and onelarge white balloon about four feet in diameter. The filmis neither pornographic nor racist. The nudes never touch.They are either separated by the balloon between them orare apart in space. They walk with the balloon between themin and out of the frame. . . . Many variations on balloon-male-female relationships within a very narrow format. Itis not a symbolic film, although obviously these descrip-tions suggest possibilities for metaphorical reading.6

Eventually Rainer comes to the antimusic portion of her mono-logue:

That’s right, I would like to say that I am a music-hater.The only remaining meaningful role for muzeek in relationto dance is to be totally absent or to mock itself. To use“serious” muzach simultaneously with dance is to give a

Crimp | Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover 51

glamorous “high art” aura to what is seen. To use “Program”moosick or pop or rock is to generate excitement or col-oration which the dance itself would not otherwise evoke.

The medium in which Rainer sees this bad symbiosis mostclearly is, not surprisingly, film:

True: mussuck is rarely far (in time) from an above-groundfilm image, but in this case a hybrid beast has emergedwhich I shall designate as “movie-museek,” a form thatextends the image and merges with it rather than callingattention to its own quality or lack of quality. A conse-quence of this kind of subordination is that the closermovie-moozeek approaches cliché and mediocrity themore clarified its function in successfully interacting withthe film image. . . .

[M]ediocre music did not reach its zenith until themovies began to exploit the colossal talents of composerssuch as Dimitri Tiomkin and Henry Mancini. The rangeand depth of the explorations by these men into the hack-neyed nuances of sound stereotype and feeling-form correlations stagger the imagination. Their work makes all previous work in the same genre seem stunted andunambitious.7

“I am all for one medium at a time,” insists Rainer.8

As she says all this, on tape, she and Becky Arnold performthe section of The Mind Is a Muscle called Mat. The “mucusrant” is, thus, a sound score of sorts for this part of PerformanceDemonstration, and so the work hardly consists of “one mediumat a time.” Rainer is here demonstrating that saying “no” tomusic for dance is not sufficient. “When dances are performedin silence—and practically everyone has done one at somepoint in one’s career—they are still considered either dry orrevolutionary or both.”9 Rainer would seem to want her dancesto solicit more complex reactions than the easy knowingness ofthat epithet “dry and revolutionary.”

In the “mucus rant” Rainer spells and pronounces musiccorrectly in only one context, when she speaks of Erik Satie,and here she also suggests one possibility for her own use ofmusic: “In Satie’s idea of furniture music (although not in themusic itself) I see an alternative that has not been followed thruin theater: Meesik-to-sit-and-wait-by. A juxtaposition in timewith visual elements rather than a superimposition.”10

Although this suggests something closer to the musicalinterludes Rainer sometimes used between “fractions” of hercomposite pieces, Rainer’s dances all employed what she wouldlater come to call “radical juxtapositions”—of bodies, objects,sounds, and images—and music is more often than not a key

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component. For her first dance, Three Satie Spoons (1961),Rainer applied John Cage’s Fontana Mix to the score of Satie’sown Trois Gymnopédies. She used Satie again in 1962 for Satiefor Two, set to his Trois Gnossiennes.11 Three Seascapes, alsofrom 1962, used the final movement of Rachmaninoff’s SecondPiano Concerto in the first Seascape and La Monte Young’sPoem for Tables, Chairs, and Benches in the second; for thethird part, Rainer made her own music by throwing a scream-ing tantrum in a pile of tulle—her version of Fokine’s DyingSwan, as I see it. The next year, 1963, in We Shall Run, Rainerhad over a dozen people jog in a group, from which one, two,or a few occasionally break away and then eventually rejoin; themusic for the piece is the “Tuba mirum” from Berlioz’s Requiem.At My Body’s House (1964) opened with Rainer standing stillfor three minutes accompanied by very loud organ music byDietrich Buxtehude.

From the beginning of her career as a choreographer, Rainerhad combined other sounds with the “dance music.” In ThreeSatie Spoons she made squeaking noises and repeatedly said,“The grass is greener when the sun is yellower.” For The Bells(1962), Rainer remembers speaking the line “I told you every-thing would be all right, Harry.” Also in 1962, her OrdinaryDance employed an autobiographical spoken monologue. Spokenmonologues, whether written by Rainer and autobiographicalor taken from an existing text, would play a fundamental rolein Rainer’s work throughout her entire career, but for the momentI want to stay with dance music. Perhaps the most radicalsoundscape Rainer used was for early performances of her bestknown work, Trio A. The soundscape consisted of woodenslats being thrown onto the floor from above “with metronome-like regularity.”12 We now know Trio A best from Rainer’s per-formance of it in the film made by Sally Banes in 1978. The filmis silent, and the dance is performed not as a trio—that is, by

Yvonne Rainer. We Shall Run,1963. Performed at the Getty,Los Angeles, May 8–9, 2004.Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust.


three people at once, each with his or her own timing—but asa solo, followed by some repeated “details” of the choreography.But not only was it not performed in silence when first done asThe Mind Is a Muscle, Part I, in 1966 and in the full eveningversion of The Mind Is a Muscle performed at the AndersonTheater in New York in 1968, but for Performance Demonstration,also in 1968, Steve Paxton began performing Trio A to theChambers Brothers singing Wilson Pickett’s “In the MidnightHour.” Paxton’s “vernacularization” of the dance—a dance, likerock and roll, supposedly learnable and performable by any-one—was something Rainer would retain, so that when Trio Awas performed by Baryshnikov’s White Oak Company in 2002as part of its Judson Dance Theater revival program Past Forward,it was performed “pressured,” to use Rainer’s word; that is,backward, facing (whereby a second performermoves around the other trying to face her as sheexecutes the dance), and then forward by the fullcompany to “In the Midnight Hour.”13 Ironically,in a work whose essential ambition is to elimi-nate phrasing from dance, the addition of therock and roll track almost inevitably puts phras-ing back in, or at least tests the performers’ abil-ities not to phrase when the steady rock beatvirtually demands it.

This might be the point of Rainer’s most sen-sational use of rock and roll music. In 1969 shechoreographed a four-minute sequence called“Chair/Pillow” for Continuous Project AlteredDaily to Ike and Tina Turner’s “River DeepMountain High.” In this case it’s one move forone beat, right on the music—the kind of obvi-ous choreographic practice that Rainer mostabhors. But in this case it is so insistent, so sin-gle-minded that it becomes a kind of screwball,repetitive back-up routine to the beat of themusic, like the Ikettes doing a furious-pacedSwim while Tina Turner belts out the song,except that Rainer’s movements are performedwith objects—chairs, pillows—stand up, sitdown, sit on the pillow, pull the pillow outfrom under your seat, throw the pillow on thefloor, stand up, step on the pillow, walk aroundthe chair, stand on the chair, and so forth.

I think it should be clear from this brief run-down of her uses of music in her dances thatnot only does Rainer often make dances to (orin juxtaposition with) music, contrary to whather “mucus rant” might lead us to believe and

Top: Yvonne Rainer. Trio A,1966. Performed by Rainer at the Portland Center forVisual Arts, 1973.

Bottom: Yvonne Rainer. Trio A(Pressured), Facing, 1966–2004.Performed by Shelley Senterand Linda K. Johnson at theGetty, Los Angeles, May 8–9,2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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to our sense of the “minimalism” of Judson dance, but also shehas a broad, eclectic, and sophisticated knowledge of music.Anyone who has seen the first of the Three Seascapes, We ShallRun, and “Chair/Pillow” will have heard Rachmaninoff, Berlioz,and Ike and Tina Turner very differently as a result of the music’sjuxtaposition with Rainer’s dances.

My interest in Rainer’s uses of music derives from how thor-oughly overlooked are music’s connotations in the context ofRainer’s ambivalent embrace of narrative when she moved fromdance to film in the early 1970s. Rainer writes about this tran-sition in the title chapter of her new memoir Feelings Are Facts:

Ignored or denied in the work of my 60s peers, the nutsand bolts of emotional life shaped the unseen (or should I say “unseemly”?) underbelly of high U.S. Minimalism.While we aspired to the lofty and cerebral plane of a quo-tidian materiality, our unconscious lives unraveled withan intensity and melodrama that inversely matched theirabsence in the boxes, beams, jogging, and standing still ofour austere sculptural and choreographic creations.14

Rainer’s change of mediums so that she could take on therepressed melodrama of her own life was multiply determined:by a six-week trip to India during which she followed the tour-ing Kathekali troupe, by reading Shulamith Firestone’s earlyfeminist polemic Dialectics of Sex, by befriending the Frenchcinematographer Babette Mangolte, who had recently moved toNew York City. But her sense of permission to use film to takeon the melodrama was filtered through her experience of thefilm avant-garde—she cites particularly Maya Daren, AndyWarhol, and Hollis Frampton. The ambivalence of her approach

Yvonne Rainer. “Chair/Pillow,”(section of Continuous ProjectAltered Daily), 1970. Performedat the Getty, Los Angeles, May 8–9, 2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust.


is captured in the opening shot of Lives of Performers, a type-written title card. Taken from Leo Bersani’s introduction to anedition of Madame Bovary, the text reads, “Cliché is, in a sense,the purest art of intelligibility; it tempts us with the possibilityof enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas, ofobscuring the arbitrary nature of imagination with an appear-ance of necessity.” Lives of Performers is a narrative of the “nutsand bolts of emotional life” “ignored or denied in the work of[Rainer’s] 60s peers” done as a series of clichés, choreographedby the camera, the performers, and text. It culminates in whatis announced in a title as “Final Performance: Lulu in 35 shots,”a series of staged tableaux-vivants modeled by the actors anddancers of Lives of Performers on film stills illustrating thescript of G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, which had recently beenpublished in the United States.15 Each tableau is held as steadyas possible by the performers for twenty seconds, after whichthey break to form a new tableau; as they begin forming it, thereis a cut, and we see the next tableau. This entire section of thefilm is silent through tableau 28, after which the Rolling Stones’“No Expectations” is heard in its entirety. This is Lives ofPerformers’ only music, a striking fact given that the film is fullof dance images: rehearsals of Walk, She Said; photographs ofRainer’s first narrative dance work Grand Union Dreams; a chore-ographed “succession of [three characters’] turnings toward or away from each other”16 in a schematic enactment of a man’sindecisiveness; and, most famously, Valda Setterfield’s solo witha ball—also from Grand Union Dreams, but here photographedat the Whitney Museum—choreographed after Nazimova’s filmversion of Salome’s dance. The Rolling Stones’ music accom-plishes in Lives of Performers just what the Camera Obscuracollective suggests in its interview with Rainer in 1976:

Music in your films often plays a seductive role. Forexample, you show images without any sound, and theyhave a certain duration. As soon as the music comes in,the sense of time is radically different. You sense that thepacing of the image track will have a coherent relation-ship to the sound track. You (the audience) are no longerresponsible (and feel relieved). The time passes faster, asit is marked and now quantifiable. So that you get a verysharp contrast when you are watching a silent image track,a silent screen in motion, and then suddenly emotive andrhythmic music is added. It’s extremely effective in mak-ing the audience aware of the concepts of duration andexpectation.17

What is missing from this otherwise discerning analysis is thatthe sense of change of pace wrought by the music is, in fact, thesense of an ending. Of course, in Lives of Performers we already

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know that the end of the film is immanent because an intertitlehas told us that we are watching the “final performance” andthat that performance will consist of thirty-five tableaux. Still,the ten minutes of silent tableaux that we experience before the start of “No Expectations” seem long and slow, and “NoExpectations” leads us, paradoxically enough given the song’stitle, precisely to the expectation of the film’s end. The song isthe musical strain that swells up to announce that the film hascome to an end.

At the time of the Camera Obscura interview, Rainer hadcompleted only one other film, Film About a Woman Who. . . ,and it, too, ends with music—twice over, or perhaps even fourtimes over. The end of the film’s narrative of a love affair gone


sour is accompanied by the Baja Marimba Band playing “MariaElena.” A short interlude follows in which two of the actors inthe drama share a light-hearted moment with Rainer on thesubway. Then comes a three-part coda of dances by James Barthand Epp Kotkas set to three Grieg piano pieces. In the final barsof the third piece, the dance is replaced with a shot of the oceanwith superimposed texts returning us to the central drama andthe final title: “You could always have an ocean ending.” Theending of the film is itself thus extraordinarily durational,dance-like, ironic in relation to narrative closure, and, signifi-cantly, musical.

Music is used in only one other way in Film About a WomanWho. . . , one that is strikingly overlooked in the commentaryon the film. Rainer alludes to a portion of it in her response tothe Camera Obscura collective’s comments about her use of musicto change the audience’s sense of duration. She says, in part,

I’m not that involved with opera, but this whole spectrumof seeing, hearing, seems really important. Or again, as ameans of changing the context, like the aria in WomanWho. . . that comes on during the intertitle that stays onfor a long time: “Oh Christ, now he’ll never screw me again.”First you read the whole thing; then you hear the music,which gives it a different flavor, and that goes on and on andthen the title goes off and you’re just listening to the music.18

What Rainer refers to as “the aria” is the opening of the cantabilesection of the first-act finale of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. WhatRainer does not mention is that, at this point in Film About aWoman Who. . . , we have just heard (thus reversing their orderin Bellini’s score) the cabaletta of that ensemble finale, begin-ning with the tempo di mezzo, accompanying what is itself a

Opposite, top left: YvonneRainer. Lives of Performers,1972. Valda’s Solo (originalchoreography 1971), ValdaSetterfield. Production still:Babette Mangolte. © 1972Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved.

Opposite, bottom left: YvonneRainer. Lives of Performers,“Final Performance: Lulu in 35Shots,” 1972. Valda Setterfieldand John Erdman. Frameenlargement.

Opposite, right: Yvonne Rainer.Lives of Performers, “FinalPerformance: Lulu in 35 Shots,”1972. Fernando Torm, ShirleySoffer, Valda Setterfield. Film strip.

Below: Yvonne Rainer. Film About a Woman Who. . . ,1974. Epp Kotkas. Frameenlargement.

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finale of sorts, shots number 29 through 48 of the film’s famoussequence “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps.” So exemplaryis this sequence taken to be, that David James, in his Allegoriesof Cinema, sees it as demonstrating the relation betweenRainer’s minimalist choreographic principles, outlined by herin her famous analysis of Trio A written for Gregory Battcock’sMinimal Art anthology, and structuralist cinema:

“An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps” demonstrates howRainer’s previous career in minimalist dance initially sup-plied the formal paradigms for her filmmaking and soplaced it within structural film’s dominant frame of refer-ence. It may be understood as the performance of a pre-determined set of compositional procedures. Numberedso as to eliminate dramatic inflection of the whole, thesteps manifest various possibilities in the combination ofwords and images: the verbal text may be narrated in eitherthe first or third person, on- or off-screen, with or withoutlip sync, by a male or female voice; the text may be real-ized in either sound or written words, in white on blackor black on white, accompanying or disjunct from actionsit refers to. The image track may be blank, or it may containeither text or figures, the latter either silent or speakingand more or less accurately performing the roles described forthem. Reminiscent of Hollis Frampton’s cross-referencingof visual and verbal languages, the sequence may be readas either the didactic presentation of the forms of soundand image that constitute film language (in Rainer’s ownwords, “the acting of narrative film, the inter-titles of thesilent movie, the sub-titles and dubbing of the foreign language film, the voice-over of the documentary and the

Yvonne Rainer. Film About aWoman Who. . . , “An EmotionalAccrection in 48 Steps,” 1974.Renfreu Neff and DempsterLeech. Frame enlargement.


flashback, and the face-front-to-camera delivery of Godard”)or as the formalist juxtaposition of them, their mutualnegation in a self-ironizing paradigm.19

The absence of music from Rainer’s list might be accounted forby the fact that James takes it from her book Work 1961–73,written before Film About a Woman Who. . . was made. Theabsence of music from James’s analysis of “An EmotionalAccretion in 48 Steps” is harder to explain, but the same absenceoccurs in every other account of Rainer’s film that I know.

This is astonishing because the music is itself so dramatic,even melodramatic. At this point in the opera, its heroine,Amina, the somnambulist, has sleepwalked into the bed cham-ber of Count Rodolfo only to be discovered there by her fiancé,Elvino, and her rival for Elvino’s affections, Lisa. Amina awak-ens to confusion and horror as her fiancé declares, “Non piùnozze,” “There’ll be no wedding.” This, indeed, is the first lineof the cabaletta that begins at step 29, whose title in Rainer’sfilm is “They see each other that night in a complicated socialsituation.” Complicated indeed.

I am not suggesting that we are meant to know or understandthe lyrics or even the general story line of La Sonnambula here.But neither do I think Rainer’s choice of music is random orwithout import. The choice of a bel canto opera in a recordingwith Joan Sutherland in the title role puts a particular pressureon the film’s “formal paradigms” and “compositional proce-dures,” to use James’s terms. Or rather, Rainer’s choice of theSonnambula Act I finale, with cantabile and cabaletta reversed,is itself a compositional procedure. Bel canto is, of course, themost conventionally Romantic of operatic forms, so much sothat it had gone almost entirely out of favor until it was revivedby the partnership of Tulio Sarafin and Maria Callas in the late1940s. The reinvesting of bel canto with meaning comprehen-sible to the modern ear owed much to Callas’s particularstrengths, a near-perfect vocal technique that was a product ofher training by the coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, a pro-found musical understanding, and an exceptionally large anddramatic instrument. This meant that Callas could bring to belcanto a dramatic power and emotional significance that madeit far more than the vocal fireworks display to which it had all butdegenerated. But, Callas is reported to have said of Sutherland,whom we hear in Rainer’s film, “She has put back my work bya hundred years.”20 If the conventions of bel canto are often loston us, with murderous fury and stark-raving madness con-veyed by the sweetest melodies and most florid vocal orna-mentation in all of opera, the character of Sutherland’s singingonly exaggerates the problems. Not only is her voice, unlikeCallas’s, exceptionally lovely, but her characteristic drooping

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portamento and lack of consonant enunciation reduces thevitality of the language, both musical and textual. Thus, toreturn to Film About a Woman Who. . . and “An EmotionalAccretion in 48 Steps,” Rainer’s schematic depiction of a melo-dramatic lover’s quarrel is doubled, first by Sonnambula’sRomantic conventions in depicting a lover’s quarrel, and sec-ond by Sutherland’s overly schematic rendering of those con-ventions, at least if compared with the example of Callas.21 Butthis is not the whole story.

To understand the effects that the finale of Act I of LaSonnambula in the 1962 Sutherland/Bonynge recording has on“An Emotional Accretion” (and the film’s following sequence),it is necessary to return for a moment to Trio A. I recentlyshowed a DVD of the White Oak Project’s performance of TrioA (Pressured) to my students and in the company of a colleaguewho was trained as a ballet dancer. Afterward, I commentedthat what we had just seen, in the portion in which the entirecompany does the choreography to the accompaniment of “Inthe Midnight Hour,” was just how difficult it is for a traineddancer not to phrase the movement. Because this eliminationof phrasing had been the work’s main goal, it seemed to me nec-essary to point out that it had been inadequately carried out bythis particular group of dancers, talented though they may oth-erwise be. My students asked me to explain what I meant byphrasing, and, somewhat at a loss, my colleague and I bothanswered, at once, “It’s like musical phrasing.” This was of little help. But Rainer herself makes it perfectly clear. In heressay on the dance, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity midstthe Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” Rainer writes,

Within the realm of movement invention . . . the mostimpressive change has been in the attitude to phrasing,which can be defined as the way in which energy is dis-tributed in the execution of a movement or series of move-ments. What makes one kind of movement different fromanother is not so much variations in arrangements of partsof the body as differences in energy distribution. . . .

Much of the western dancing we are familiar with canbe characterized by a particular distribution of energy:maximal output or “attack” at the beginning of phrase,recovery at the end, with energy often arrested some-where in the middle. This means that one part of thephrase—usually the part that is most still—becomes thefocus of attention, registered like a photograph or sus-pended moment of climax. . . .

The term phrase can also serve as a metaphor for a longeror total duration containing beginning, middle, and end.22


Thus the phrase in dance is both the unit of narrative structure,and, at least metaphorically, narrative structure tout court.

Compare this with the following analysis of Sutherland’ssinging mannerisms by the music critic J.B. Steane:

She has a way . . . of often leaving unsatisfied that mostbasic of requirements, the need for an even, instrumentaltone in the unembellished melodic line. . . . It is partlythat she apparently feels the need to give each phrase andeach part of each phrase its own mouldings, and this iscertainly a sign of non-superficiality: but whatever thegain, there is a loss in one of the basic pleasures of singing,in the sheer flow of sound.23

Sutherland’s tendency is to emphasize the individual phrase at theexpense of the shape of overall musical structure. She is an insis-tent phrase maker, and with her phrasing she makes the bel cantonot meaningful, as did Callas, but both schematic, like Rainer’sfilm sequence, and irresistible, like the inevitability of cliché.

Rainer turned to filmmaking to bring the emotional melo-drama repressed by minimalism back into artistic representa-tion. But her suspicions about the conventions for doing so—encountered by her at their most intense in her early career instudying Method acting with Lee Grant at Herbert Bergdorf andin Martha Graham’s expressionist technique and choreography—remained, and remained to be interrogated. The “EmotionalAccretion in 48 Steps” seems to me only partially understoodif we don’t include the musical finale among these conventions.The choice of bel canto opera —which according to Peter Brooksbrings Romantic melodrama to its fullest realization24—radi-cally juxtaposes, in Rainer’s phrase to describe her composi-tional method, one of the most compelling affective forms ofdramatic narrative with a drama deconstructed in a numberedsequence. Her critique is thus meant to be understood as onlypartial, or partially effective. We can become critically aware ofthe clichéd narratives to which we are subject, but we are alsonecessarily still subject to them. And music, even music as con-tradictorily dramatically moving as Sutherland’s manneredrendition of Sonnambula, makes this palpable. But it would beunfair to Rainer to leave it there. Because there is, after all, apunch line. In the sequence following “An Emotional Accretionin 48 Steps,” after we have seen the drama’s characters sit lis-tening to Sonnambula’s cantabile, one woman remarks to theother, “Doesn’t that remind you of a movie?” “Which movie?”asks the other. “2001,” the first replies. “Oh yes, of course.”

Rainer’s most recently completed work, the video installationAfter Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002), employsrehearsal footage of her choreography for the White Oak DanceProject from 2000 with still images and crawling texts of fin de

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siècle Vienna. The fragments of autobiography that had pro-vided much of the source material for Rainer’s feature films ishere essentially absent, except insofar as a reflection on therelation between avant-garde culture, sexuality, and politicshas become virtually synonymous with Rainer’s artistic auto-biography and that much of the material being rehearsed for thedance, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, is taken fromRainer’s dance pieces from the 1960s. In addition, there arequotations and photographs from works on the decline of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, including quotations from CarlSchorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and Robert Musil’s Man withoutQualities and aphoristic lines from Kokoshka, Loos, Schoenberg,and Wittgenstein. All of these bear on the complex relationsbetween art making, eroticism, and historical crisis.

In its initial showing at Rainer’s exhibition in Philadelphia,Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002,25 watching After Many aSummer Dies the Swan: Hybrid took considerable effort. Thevideo itself requires sustained reading of crawling text, whichmoves left to right or bottom to top in addition to the reverse,thus requiring reading backward or remembering the end of asentence as you read its beginning. The viewer must also con-stantly struggle to keep the dancers in view as the text usurpstheir screen space, pushing them to the margins. As if this werenot demanding enough, the video projection moves around theperiphery of a small cylindrical room where the viewer sitsalone on a swiveling stool with no backrest and on wheels,requiring the viewer to struggle to maintain balance while moving to keep up with the progress of the complexly movingimage. Only one element of this work is present, whole anduninterrupted: the music, Arnold Schoenberg’s late-romanticstring sextet Verklärte Nacht, which serves essentially as thework’s score. The duration of the tape—thirty minutes—is theduration of the sextet.

Not only is the Schoenberg work itself heard whole, but italso makes Rainer’s Hybrid Swan cohere around the theme of

what Carl Schorske, writing aboutVerklärte Nacht, refers to as eroticaffirmation and the dissolutionof boundaries.26 The music doesthis through the video’s referenceto both the music’s narrative ori-gin and one of its great narrativedestinations. The sextet is programmusic; it has a literary theme,Richard Dehmel’s poem of thesame title from his collectionWeib und die Welt. The musicfollows the poem’s five sections,

Yvonne Rainer. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan:Hybrid, 2002. Video still.


which sketch the story of a man and a woman walking in a forest. The woman reproaches herself because she is expectinga child by another man—a momentary passion—although sheloves the present one. The man comforts the woman and assuresher that he will accept the child as his own. Program musicsuch as this carries little more than the structure and mood ofits literary source, but Dehmel’s poem is given a later, literalelaboration in one of the most famous ballets of the twentiethcentury, Anthony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire (1942), set to VerklärteNacht. Rainer claims not to have thought about Pillar of Firewhen she made her Hybrid Swan video, but she also says shevividly remembers seeing the ballet with its original ballerina,Nora Kaye, in the role of Hagar, the pregnant woman. Certainlythe narratives implicit in Schoenberg’s music and explicit inTudor’s ballet pressure, to use Rainer’s word again, her ownwork. Our historical memory of these narratives is surely ascrucial to the work as is the image we see of Baryshnikov per-forming Valda Setterfield’s solo with a ball from Grand UnionDreams and Lives of Performers, just as Setterfield’s solo itselfcalls up the memory of Nazimova’s performance of the dance ofSalome. As with the music from Sonnambula in the “EmotionalAccretion in 48 Steps” in Film About a Woman Who. . . , VerklärteNacht here reminds us . . . reminds us that we have experi-enced this drama before and that we cannot but experience itagain. The hope provided by Rainer’s work is that we can learnto experience it differently next time, to change its meanings,alter its form. Verklärte Nacht was already taken in its owntime to have changed radically the musical meaning of the lovestory: a contemporary famously said of it, “It sounds as if some-one had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet.”27

Radically, but not beyond recognition. After all, in referring toWagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Schoenberg’s contemporary rec-ognized that Verklärte Nacht was a melodramatic love story too.

Rainer doesn’t mention Schoenberg in her mucus rant,although she comes close enough:

I am not trying to make a judgement on serious high artmuciz as played at the Philharmonic or New School or in Ann Arbor. In that area whatever dialectic has alreadybeen mapped out by dedicated composers I here and nowpay all due deference to (without having the slightestinterest in listening). I simply don’t want someone else’shigh art anywhere near mine. As I said before, I don’t collaborate.28

Now she’s changed her tune (although in fact, as we’ve seen,her art has often been in proximity to others’). Rainer haschoreographed a new work, AG Indexical, with a Little Helpfrom H.M., to be premiered at Dance Theater Workshop’s spring

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2006 Stravinsky Festival;29 it is her reworking of a ballet thatshe saw for the first time around 1960, George Balanchine’s1957 modernist masterpiece Agon, set to a score commissionedfrom Stravinsky. In a classic piece of dance criticism, EdwinDenby describes Agon’s opening:

The curtain rises on a stage bare and silent. Upstage fourboys are seen with their backs to the public and motion-less. They wear the company’s dance uniform. Lightlythey stand in an intent stillness. They whirl, four at once,to face you. The soundless whirl is a downbeat that startsthe action.

On the upbeat, a fanfare begins, like cars honking ablock away; the sound drops lower, changed into a pulse.Against it, and against a squiggle like a bit of wallpaper,you hear—as if by free association—a snatch of “Chinatown,My Chinatown” misremembered on an electric mandolin.The music sounds confident. Meanwhile the boys’ stepshave been exploding like pistol shots. The steps seem to come in tough, brief bursts. Dancing in canon, in uni-son, in and out of symmetry, the boys might be trying outtheir speed of waist, their strength of ankle; no lack ofaggressiveness. But already two—no eight—girls havereplaced them.30

This business of “boys” and “girls,” not surprising for the 1950s,continues to be New York City Ballet’s way of describing theroles in Agon’s opening sections: “Four Boys,” “Eight Girls,”“Four Boys, Eight Girls,” “Pas de trois,” “Sarabande,” and soforth. Rainer’s dance is all women. The opening quartet is per-formed by four women (Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, PatriciaHoffbauer, and Sally Silvers), “dancing in canon, in unison, inand out of symmetry.” In Rainer’s “indexical” version there is alack of aggressiveness. One way—but only one—that the lackis made apparent during this first section is by Pat Catterson’sand Emily Coates’s interpolation of a moment of Rainer’s ownpostmodern movement into Agon’s sharply attacked steps.Close to the beginning of what Denby called a “festive athleticmeet,”31 whose subject, according to Frank O’Hara, is pride,32

Rainer inserts a quick mnemonic image of her matter-of-fact,early-1960s dances Three Satie Spoons and Ordinary Dance.Later, the two dancers begin Agon’s branle double with a shortinterpolation of Trio A’s continuous motion.

When, after Agon’s pas de deux, also danced in Rainer’s version by four women, Stravinsky’s fanfare sounds again, thefour dancers begin their repetition of the opening quartet, now, of course, as the ballet’s finale. Denby again, on Balanchine’sversion:


Now only the four boys are left, you begin to recognize areturn to the start of the ballet, you begin to be anxious,and on the same wrestler’s gesture of “on guard” thatclosed their initial dance—a gesture now differentlydirected—the music stops, the boys freeze, and thesilence of the beginning returns. . . . To the realization ofits power, as the curtain drops, people respond with vehe-ment applause in a large emotion that includes the bril-liant dancers and the goofiness of the fun.33

This is the second mention, in Denby’s brief review, of the“vehement applause” that Agon inspired. It is also the secondtime Denby employs the term goofy to suggest something ofAgon’s style. Rainer makes goofiness more emphatic in her ver-sion, and one way she does so is with a musical juxtapositionthat occurs in the finale. After we hear enough of the repetitionof Stravinsky’s opening section to understand that the balletwill end as it began, Rainer substitutes a different soundtrack,the opening of The Pink Panther. It’s hilarious because it’s moviemusic by Henry Mancini, not ballet music by Igor Stravinsky,and is far indeed from the serial idiom of Stravinsky’s orches-tral suite. The four women “dance in canon, in unison, in andout of symmetry,” just as they had before. Pat Catterson andEmily Coates interpolate the composite picture of Three SatieSpoons and Ordinary Dance, just has they had before. The fourwomen freeze, and we respond with vehement applause.

In 1969, Rainer’s Dance Fractions for the West Coast openedwith “music to sit and wait by”: Henry Mancini’s The PinkPanther, taken from the film’s opening credits, with all the zanysound effects.34 Student performers lie on the ground and listen.When the music stops, slides of Stairs from The Mind Is a Musclebegin to be projected, three at once in rapid succession left toright, and Rainer begins to recite, “That’s right, I would like tosay that I am a music-hater. The only remaining meaningfulrole for muzeek. . . .”

66 Grey Room 22

NotesThis essay was initially written as a contribution to the conference “Kulturendes Erzählens,” organized by Achim Hochdörfer and Ruth Sonderegger at theMuseum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, May 27–29, 2005. It grewout of a seminar I offered at the University of Rochester in the fall of 2004. Iwish to thank my students in that seminar, particularly Aviva Dove-Viebahn,whose seminar paper on Rainer’s use of music for her dances was useful formy discussion here. A conversation that I conducted with Rainer followingthe screening of her films at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester on 18 November2004 also provided information for this essay. Thanks also for careful read-ings and good suggestions from my friends and colleagues Karen Beckman,Rosalyn Deutsche, Rachel Haidu, Damien Jack, and Juan Suarez.

1. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).2. This transition is not nearly so neat as the phrase “moving from dance

to film” implies. Rainer made a number of short films in the 1960s, some ofwhich were used in her dance pieces. In the early 1970s, her live performanceworks and first feature-length films used much of the same material. GrandUnion Dreams, for example, is prominently featured (as photographs) in Livesof Performers. This Is the Story of a Woman Who . . . developed much of thematerial that would appear in Film About a Woman Who . . . . Moreover, bothfilms include dance pieces—Valda Setterfield’s solo with a ball from GrandUnion Dreams, performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, inLives of Performers; and the dances performed by Epp Kotkas and JamesBarthes at the end of Film About a Woman Who . . . .

3. These works allowed for old material to be taught to and performed bystudents in workshops as well as for new material to be developed with stu-dents. Eventually teaching and rehearsing became part of the performanceproper. The indeterminate sequencing of these “fractions,” together withincreasing improvisation by Rainer’s dancers—many of whom were fellowchoreographers—in Rainer’s Continuous Project Altered Daily of 1970 ledultimately to the collaborative improvisation group the Grand Union.

4. The full text of the taped monologue appears in Yvonne Rainer, Work1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,1974), 110–112.

5. The term is a combination of music and Kodak, the best-known brandname at the time the patent for the proprietary system was sought in the 1930s.

6. Rainer, Work, 110.7. Rainer, Work, 111.8. Rainer, Work, 112.9. Rainer, Work, 112.10. Rainer, Work, 112.11. Using Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes for dance was hardly rev-

olutionary by the 1960s. Even Frederick Ashton, the choreographer for Britain’sRoyal Ballet, used the orchestrated versions of the Satie works for his Monotones1 and 2, although not until several years after Rainer had used the music.

12. Yvonne Rainer, “Some Non-chronological Recollections of The MindIs a Muscle,” in Work, 75.

13. Trio A was first performed in this version, as Trio A (Pressured), atJudson Memorial Church by Rainer, Colin Beatty, Pat Catterson, Douglas Dunn,and Steve Paxton, 4 October 1999.

14. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts.


15. Ladislaus Vajda, Pandora’s Box (Lulu) (New York: Simon and Schuster,1971).

16. Yvonne Rainer, “Lives of Performers,” in The Films of Yvonne Rainer(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 67. For the choreography ofthis sequence, see Rainer, Work, 234.

17. “Interview with the Camera Obscura Collective,” in Yvonne Rainer, AWoman Who . . . : Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1999), 163.

18. “Interview with the Camera Obscura Collective,” 163.19. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 327.20. J.B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record

1900–1970, 2nd ed. (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 381.21. I do not assume that Rainer chose the Sutherland recording for the rea-

sons I’m suggesting here. Sutherland was at the height of her internationalcareer in 1974, when Film About a Woman Who . . . was made. Choosing theCallas recording would have added a dimension not only of greater dramaticintensity but of nostalgia, which was not likely Rainer’s interest.

22. Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies inthe Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity midst the Plethora, or an Analysisof Trio A,” in A Woman Who . . . , 32.

23. Steane, 385.24. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,

Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976),75.

25. Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, exh. cat. (Philadelphia:The University of the Arts), 2003. The exhibition for which this is the accom-panying catalogue originated at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The Universityof the Arts, Philadelphia, 19 October–30 November 2002, and subsequentlytraveled to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 5 May–8 August 2004; Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee,23 September 2004–9 January 2005; and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts,Harvard University, Cambridge, 17 March–22 April 2005.

26. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1981), 344–364.

27. See Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975), 3.28. Rainer, Work, 112.29. Rainer’s dancers performed a rehearsal run-through of the work on

4 August 2005 at Marymount Manhattan College, where I saw it.30. Edwin Denby, “Three Sides of ‘Agon’” (1959), in Edwin Denby, Dance

Writings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 460.31. Denby, 460.32. Denby, 463.33. Denby, 463.34. Dance Fractions for the West Coast was performed at the Vancouver

Art Gallery, the Old Los Angeles Conservatory, and Mills College (where itwas filmed for KQED, San Francisco).

Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover

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