Yvonne Rainer is the iconoclastic choreographer who, beginning in the 60s, pioneered the deconstruction of modern dance in a manner closely associated with minimalist art. No Manifesto, published in 1965 (“No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe … no to moving or being moved”) announced a rejection of modern dance’s conventions and cliches, in favour of a vocabulary of movement that prioritised the ordinary, alienating or plain over narrative structure and emotional projection. She turned to film-making when she felt that dance alone couldn’t express what she wanted to say, and produced more than a dozen uncompromising film works over three decades.
“Oh no,” says Rainer, 88, when I bring up No Manifesto, which she later disavowed, during our conversation at her Manhattan apartment. “That was a certain point in art history – the manifesto was a way of asserting yourself publicly. I never meant it to be a doctrine that would govern my decisions.” She moved on from it “almost immediately”.
By the end of the 1960s, Rainer, whose anarchic, boundary-pushing and gloriously weird films are celebrated with an ICA retrospective this month, was looking for a new way to explore the thicket of identity, memory, emotion and politics, particularly her alignment with the feminist movement. “I didn’t feel that the kind of dancing that I did could accommodate those interests,” she says. “That’s when film entered the picture.” It helped that a mutual friend introduced her to the acclaimed French director and cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who taught her the art of film editing.
While her choreography shunned conventional narrative form, Rainer’s 1972 debut feature film, Lives of Performers (subtitled “a melodrama”), experimented with shards of storytelling. It depicts a love triangle between two women and a man, who may or may not be performers seen in a rehearsal. She dipped in and out of styles for her characters’ tangle of emotions: mime, dance, off-camera dialogue rendered teasingly flat, and tableaux vivants of performers in various poses of abjection and desire. “I gave Babette free rein to shoot rehearsal,” she says. “I was very interested in filming people just sitting around talking to each other … in combining the look of ordinary interchanges between people and then dramatic presences.”
A rebellious streak coursed throughout her subsequent films, full of ruptures and strange juxtapositions, or the soundtrack juddering out of sync with the images. She says this disruptive inclination springs from her childhood in San Francisco, as the only daughter of political radicals Jeanette and Joseph. “Nominally, they were anarchists,” she says of her parents. “But they were conservative in a lot of ways,” with strict expectations when it came to her behaviour and boyfriends. “There were these contradictions that I became aware of and used when I was trying to separate myself from my parents,” she says.
The separation came in the shape of a relationship with the abstract expressionist painter Al Held, when she was 20. A year later, she moved with him to New York, to a loft on 21st Street and 5th Avenue, where she immersed herself in the art scene. Enamoured with Held, his painting and a new city, Rainer tried her hand at acting (“I was no good at it”) and then dance classes, with the choreographer Edith Stephen. “I was strong and I loved moving around,” she says, but she was not a classical ballerina: she had short legs and a long torso; in childhood acrobatics classes, she had been ungainly rather than graceful. She studied for a year under the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham at her famed studio, the bastion of modern dance. “Structurally, I was not made for that technique, but I learned a lot,” she says. “I realised very early that I would have to make my own dances if I was to become a professional.”
By the early 60s, Rainer had helped to found a now-legendary experimental collective, the avant garde Judson Dance Theater. It was part of a wave of New York artists dissecting and rejecting the establishment, eschewing affectation and grandness in favour of repetition, indeterminacy, the movements of the mundane and everyday. “We were all running to the windows and looking out at what people on the street were doing, as though we had never examined them before,” she says.
This desire to deconstruct the ordinary things going on around her mutated on screen. Rainer’s films also grew more personal and political. She continued to interrogate the medium with overlapping discordant storylines, or by splitting a character among performers – “leveraging cliche as base to life’s acid”, as the critic Natasha Stagg put it.
Some scenes feature melodramatic recitations, while others play in silence, such as the sequence from Film About a Woman Who … (1974), in which Rainer sits mute before the camera with scraps of her script glued to her face. Her films were collages of melodrama, dream images, documentary, slapstick, archival footage, polemic and loose memoir. Her final feature, Murder and Murder (1996), told the story of a midlife lesbian love affair between two academics with a 10-year age difference, a tuxedo-clad Rainer delivering a darkly comic meditation on ageing, romance and surviving breast cancer.
Rainer, who has lived with the academic Martha Gever for 30 years, said in her 2006 autobiography, Feelings Are Facts, that her films increasingly grappled with “the challenge of representing and fictionalising the inferno of my own passions”. Or, to quote her 1990 artist’s statement: “My films can be described as autobiographical fictions, untrue confessions, undermined narratives, mined documentaries, unscholarly dissertations, dialogic entertainments.”
They also got harder and harder to make. “I wasn’t about to go into traditional Hollywood-type narratives,” she says. By the mid-90s, she found it impossible to finance further experimental features, so she returned to choreography. “I never liked the process of making long films. I’m a technological idiot,” she says. “It was a relief to go back to what I loved, dealing immediately with people.” Her most recent composition, Hellzapoppin’: What About the Bees?, an exploration of racism in the US using movement based on the 1941 musical comedy of the same name, was staged in New York in 2022.
As Rainer approaches 90, she continues to look forward: to a future spin on Trio A, her most famous solo work; at the prospect of returning to a studio. Her view on past work, particularly her films, is clipped and matter-of-fact. “I don’t prescribe,” she says when asked what her work means. “I don’t expect to be on Broadway, or proselytise. I was never interested in being famous. In fact, someone described me as the most famous unknown choreographer around. And that suits me.”
• Yvonne Rainer: A Retrospective runs until 27 August at the ICA, London, with Rainer appearing for a Q&A on 17 August
