Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002

Yvonne Rainer - Radical Juxtapositions 1961 – 2002 is an important retrospective exhibition that reexamines the career this extremely influential artist and great innovator in Minimalism. Rainer has incorporated experimental cinema, choreography and movement, feminism, politics, writing, and visual art into her forty-year practice. Organized by Sid Sachs of Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where the exhibition first appeared in 2002, the exhibition consists of two major new video installations, a reconstruction of a set of an early performance piece, vintage photographs, posters, documents, dance notations, manuscripts, as well as an arrangement of video monitors running Rainer’s five feature length films and early dance documentation.

Yvonne Rainer

Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D'Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, "the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York".

In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEY FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics' Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers' Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).

In the spring of 1997 — to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder – complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.  Rainer's films have been shown extensively in the US and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F., NuArt-L.A, Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her latest book, A Woman Who . . . : Essays, Interviews, Scripts, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999. Her latest dance, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” commissioned by the White Oak Dance Project, had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in June 2000.