Yvonne Rainer wrote in her »NO Manifesto« in 1965 that, over and above avoiding the spectacular and magical, the heroic and the anti-heroic, glamour or involvement of the viewer in her dance performances, she also wished to avoid any kind of expression of virtuosity. The weightless body of the classical ballet dancer was once again to acquire weight in her early performances, and at the same time to serve as an emptied »object«, as minimalist artistic raw material, not generating anything illusionary or evocative in its motion.
More than forty years have gone by since then, a period during which she primarily produced films and, like many other feminist artists, also worked with narrative means to oppose the objectification of the female body. Thanks to a request from Mikhail Baryshnikov she found her way back to performance a few years ago, for in 1999 he invited her to work with the members of his dance ensemble on one of her earlier choreographies.
In addition to this specific trigger, it was most likely also the resurgence of interest in performance art in the late 1990s that once again created the right general conditions and interdisciplinary context for her, within which she has staged her (re) performances over the last few years.
In the series »wieder und wider«, a cooperation between Vienna’s MUMOK and Tanzquartier Wien, the 72-year-old artist was in attendance with two of her choreographers, who presented the history of performance art from the perspectives of the past and the present at one and the same time: »Continuous Project – Altered Daily«, a performance in which the work’s nature as a process and the potential for re-performance were inscribed even back in the days of the premiere in 1970, and »AG Indexical, with a little help from H. M.«, a more recent production, in which she offers a new interpretation of the neo-classic ballet »Agon« (1957) by George Balanchine.
An element common to both performances was the repeated rehearsal of (quotidian) movement sequences portrayed on the stage, which pointed to the nature of both learning a dance part and choreographing as ongoing processes, awakening an impression of something not yet entirely complete, which undermined the perfectionist demands of classical forms of dance. Furthermore, by splitting action on the stage into several simultaneous sequences of action, the two productions shared the open structure typical of both her early performances and her films.
Whilst the revival of »Continuous Project – Altered Daily« initiated by Xavier Le Roy and Christopher Wavelet adhered very strictly to the original instructions, complete with casting of young performers, in »AG Indexical« one untrained and two trained dancers aged between thirty and sixty took on the »choreographic« part also portrayed on stage.
In a striking combination that blended her earlier approaches with narrative elements (gender, age etc.), Rainer strung together the dances of the »choreographers« as a succession of scenes, which referenced the classics, with the choreographers in turn »assisting« the ballerina in executing her solo by placing her arms and legs in the correct positions.
It was not so much the ensuing sometimes clown-like air of the movements but rather the choice of Henry Mancini’s famous »Pink Panther« music that introduced an element of parody, something that could be detected repeatedly in the whole series: in the performance »Dan, Martha, Trisha, Frans & Robert«, where Frans Poelstra and Robert Stejin, referencing avant-garde approaches of important performance art pioneers, tried their hand at being dancers themselves, shifting the whole framework to incorporate slapstick-style elements, whilst in »Robin Hood, the Tour« Jennifer Lacey established a safe distance between the piece and the elitist, glamorous aspects of classical dance even in the title of the work.
Pulling high-flying topics and (movement) sequences down a notch in the re-staging also played a decisive role later in MUMOK, where the artists’ collective, Continuous Project, re-enacted the legendary symposium »Politics of Images« from 1990. The marathon lasted over six hours, during which members of the group (including Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton, Seth Price) and with volunteers from the audience read out the proceedings of the star-studded symposium attended inter alia by Jeff Koons, Jan Hoet, Jana Sterbark.
Whilst this »re-enactment« fairly rapidly proved to be a fragile yet somewhat amusing affair, in no small part due to the absence of those art world authorities, other projects, seemingly more faithful to the originals, revealed very different intentions and shifts in focus.
In addition to the »Continuous Project – Altered Daily« project, with a detailed reconstruction drawing not so much on the notion of breaking with the model as on a legitimate, more modern analysis of Yvonne Rainer’s early dance performances, it is also fair to assume that when Slovakian theatre critic Emil Hrvatin, editor of the performance magazine »Maska«, presented a re-staging of a cult production of East European performance history, his prime concern was not to deconstruct the play. In 1969 poets, artists, musicians, professional and non-professional actors presented the world premier of the performance »Pupilija, papa Pupilo pa pupilcki« in the Pubilija Ferkeverk Theatre in Slovenia. A series of scenes mingled fragments of the news of the day, a poetry reading, re-enacted scenes from adverts, folk dances, revolutionary songs and a hen being slaughtered, in the process producing a combination of everyday life and art that was as lively as it was experimental.
The rerun in the Tanzquartier sections used video footage and other means to indicate it was a repetition of the historic performance, yet nonetheless »Pupilija, papa Pupilo pa pupilcki, rekonstrukcija«, like the »Continuous Project – Altered Daily« production, rather than a critical questioning of the perhaps unfulfilled promises made by the piece was more a homage paying tribute to the producers.
In a discussion subsequently Rainer stressed that she preferred the term »re-visioning« when referring to these re-stagings, emphasising her desire to work through the still unresolved questions, whilst Emil Hrvatin had equally valid reasons to prefer to talk of the »reconstructive« version when mentioning his rerun of the eastern European performance, which had largely slipped into oblivion prior to this. He writes in his essay published in »It takes place when it doesn’t. On dance and performance since 1989« that performance discourse in eastern Europe always referred back to performances and theories from western Europe.¹ His re-staging of »Pupilija, papa Pupilo pa pupilcki« thus reconstructed not just an important element of eastern European performance history, but also created a basis for theoretical reflection and in the process an important prerequisite for a better understanding of the socio-historical dynamics that gave rise to the original performance.
It became clear in the course of the series that neither the social and political contexts nor the intentions that brought the pieces back to the stage could be compared with those of the early Rainer pieces in 1960s New York, just as the differences between »performative appropriations« in dance and in the fine arts became apparent: in MUMOK Gerard Byrne presented a »re-installation« of individual minimalist and post-minimalist works from the museum’s collections, Sharon Hayes referred in her »one-person« demonstrations throughout the city of Vienna to recent protests against the previous extreme right/conservative government coalition and Tom Burr turned the focus onto his fear of appearing on stage in his installation »Anxiety«.
At the same time he also formulated a fundamental difference between re-stagings of dance pieces and those in the world of fine arts: for whilst the historically contextualised dance performances still make something of a former »here and now« tangible, a direct comparison shows that the art projects lack this presence. This immediacy, the hallmark of the vitality of the »performative appropriations« in dance, was to a large extent left out of the equation in the essentially much more topical references in MUMOK – thereby also strangely squandering the art form’s actual potential.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

---