Gareth K Vile writes about the recent Yvonne Rainer production at the Tramway.
Post-modernism has got a pretty bad rep these days, possibly because of the ease with which it was co-opted by late capitalists and academics who love jargon more than clarity. Its pesky habit of refusing the grand narrative appeared to have given way to a moral vacuity. Plucked by ad agencies, it was sold as a commodity, justifying bland consumerism as a sort of immersive democracy. It’s probably post-modernism’s fault that X-Factor is more popular than classic BBC period drama.
Thank God for Yvonne Rainer. Few choreographers could come back after a twenty year detour into film and still fill Tramway for a lecture illustrated only with fragments of a deliberately anti-lyrical dance. Tramway’s retrospective programme included both her cinema – chock-full of box office sure-fires like feminist politics, discursive story-telling and lingering conversations about the nature of art and relationships – and her choreography. On Friday night she gave a lecture on the absence of passion in her dance. Since passion, desire and all that jazz are generally regarded as the essence of dance, Rainer’s insistence on something else is bracing.
One of the founders of the Judson Dance Theatre in New York, Rainer has been working the seam between audience and performer since 1960, one of the first choreographers to break down the traditional theatrical preoccupation with grandeur and putting the mundane on stage. In Charles Atlas’ Rainer Variations, a beautiful and hilarious sequence shows Rainer trying to explain her work to Martha Graham – as performed by Richard Move, who has been dragging Graham into cabaret for years . While Rainer stresses the natural process of her apparently naive steps, Graham explodes into drama, spinning around and converting the “task based” into a version of Medea’s dance of revenge.
This scene gets to the heart of Rainer’s choreography. A combination of intellectual exercise – her Trio A grappled with the problem of the performer’s gaze when directed at the audience – and integration of familiar movements and props, all at a consistent, unemphatic pace, Rainer was interested in what happens when dance is disconnected from its emotional heritage. The contemporary revolution, as represented by Graham, tore away the trappings of ballet only to retain a high art elitism. Rainer savaged that fig-leaf, until her latest works echo Robin Williams’ physical comedy and hip-hop posturing.
Her films are equally challenging: Kristina Taking Pictures may star a lion tamer wandering around New York bohemia, but makes no concessions in its intellectual approach to film-making and serious gender politics. The Story of a Woman Who convinces in her portrayal of the link between sexual dissatisfaction and a broader social outrage. The flatness of the tone, the avoidance of “key scenes” or melodrama – and, for that matter, a clear conclusion – add up to a genuine alternative cinema, far from Hollywood soap cliché.
Taken as a whole, the Rainer retrospective is a powerful argument for post-modernism as a still vibrant force. The lack of any absolute statements, the emphasis on the excluded, the barrier between high and low art not even recognised, the importance of the mundane: there is even a sense in her lecture that she is including the critical process within her art, and not allowing the critics to have all the smart-arse literary fun. And oddly, when her dancers burst into Chair-Pillow, a short routine to High, there is a celebration of how ecstatic the anti-ecstatic can become.
RSS