Word: rainer
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After 1968 Rainer became less concerned with perception and, relinquishing her earlier disregard, more concerned with performance. She experimented with displaying the rehearsal process performance and began to use untrained dancers in her company. Then, abandoning these initiatives in the early seventies, she turned her focus to, in her words, "autobiography, fiction, media...
...place of these "obsolete" ideas Rainer suggested "neutral performance," "task-like activity," and "singular action," concepts, embodied in Terrain (1963), Part of Some Sextets (1965), and The Mind is a Muscle (1966). At this time Rainer aimed at a movement style combining "the coordination of a pro and the non-definition of an amateur." She put together large, rambling structures, often according to random game rules, and relying on repetition and interruption. She considered a viewer's comment, "But she walks as though she's in the street," a compliment...
...text for this intellectual manipulation of movement, people and objects was Rainer's preoccupation with perception and her attempt to shock her audience into seeing the "essentials" of dance. Rainer describes her tactics variously...
...Story of Woman Who... (1973), presented changing tableaus of a man and woman in domestic settings. A third observer and projected slides with printed text supplied narration. Alternating with the script were stills from Hitch-cock's Psycho, photos from the performers' family albums, and snaps of familiar landmarks. Rainer included "Trio A" from The Mind is a Muscle along with references from other earlier works--a red ball, books, a gift, mattresses. (She conveniently schematizes these motifs in an appendix, "Etymology of objects, configurations and characters...
...RAINER DESCRIBES IT, she had stumbled onto a new sort of content her old forms could not accomodate--"private experience and the problem of projecting and transforming it." The persona of the performer, rather than the medium of the body, became her starting point. Indeterminate structures gave way to melodramatic narrative. The issue of perception broadened into a concern with media: how to "warp" an audience's view of situations on stage through the choice of medium (printed text, spoken text, film); how to distance blatantly private experience through the interjection of cliche or pop cuture. Work 1961-73 itself...