48 Yvonne Rainer. Three Seascapes

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover

DOUGLAS CRIMP

As an epigraph, I quote a quotation of a quotation—Yvonne Rainer/ John Cage/Arnold Schoenberg. Rainer: John Cage’s famous story may be relevant here: After I had been studying with him for two years, Schönberg said, “In order to write music you must have a feeling for harmony.” I then explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.” In my case, lacking a “feeling” for plot and character, the essentials of traditional narrative, I have devoted much of my career to banging my head against that wall— with no expectations, I should add, of gaining entrance to a narrative mainstream, but rather to wrestle with its prescriptions.1 Nearly thirty years after moving from dance to film as her principal medium,2 Yvonne Rainer was asked by Mikhail Baryshnikov to choreograph a piece for his White Oak Dance Project. The resulting work, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2000. It took the form Rainer had developed in the late 1960s that she called, alternately, “performance demonstrations,” “performance fractions,” or “composites,” in which she combined fragments of earlier dances, new dance material, spoken monologues, slide projections, films, and sound tapes.3 One of those works, Rose Fractions (1969), constituted Rainer’s infamous Broadway debut at the Billy Rose Theater. The infamy derives from Rainer’s having shown, on the second evening of the run, a hard-core porn film juxtaposed with her own Trio Film in which dancers Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold, both nude, form a trio with a large white balloon and move methodically around and over the completely white furniture in the completely white Dakota apartment of Virginia Dwan, the dealer in minimal art. All the while, Rainer recited a Lenny Bruce monologue, “On Snot,” delivered with the flat intonation of someone reading a text but not “getting” the joke, or—better—

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 creating a form of wacky humor out of not reading with the expected inflection (which might, after all, be compared with dance phrasing—something Rainer had challenged several years before in what has become her most famous dance, Trio A from The Mind Is a Muscle): I’m going to tell you the dirtiest word you ever heard on stage. It’s just disgusting! I’m not going to look at you when I say it, cause this way we won’t know who said it. I may blame that cat over there. It’s a four-letter word, starts with “s” and ends with “t” . . . and . . . just don’t take me off the stage, just . . . don’t embarrass my Mom. I’ll go quietly. The word is—Oh, I’m going to say it and just get it done with. I’m tired of walking the streets. “Snot!” I can’t look at you, but that’s the word: snot.4 Snot had a precursor appearance, in the Latinate rather than Germanic form of the word, in Performance Demonstration, the first of Rainer’s composite pieces, presented at the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in September 1968. It surfaced in a different sort of routine, a diatribe against the use of music for dance in which the word “music” is consistently mispronounced in variations on Muzak, a term that had recently come into common use to denote canned background music played in elevators, department stores, and other com- mercial spaces.5 One mispronunciation is spelled m-u-c-i-z, “muciz.” Rainer came to call this her “mucus rant.” The monologue begins with a description of Trio Film before the film itself had been made: The most flagrant omission today [in the Lincoln Center Performance Demonstration] is a film that will be shot in a large white living room with two large white sofas and two large white nudes—one male, one female—and one large white balloon about four feet in diameter. The film is neither pornographic nor racist. The nudes never touch. They are either separated by the balloon between them or are apart in space. They walk with the balloon between them in and out of the frame. . . . Many variations on balloon- male-female relationships within a very narrow format. It is not a symbolic film, although obviously these descrip- tions suggest possibilities for metaphorical reading.6 Eventually Rainer comes to the antimusic portion of her monologue: That’s right, I would like to say that I am a music-hater. The only remaining meaningful role for muzeek in relation to dance is to be totally absent or to mock itself. To use “serious” muzach simultaneously with dance is to give a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 glamorous “high art” aura to what is seen. To use “Program” moosick or pop or rock is to generate excitement or col- oration which the dance itself would not otherwise evoke.

The medium in which Rainer sees this bad symbiosis most clearly is, not surprisingly, film: True: mussuck is rarely far (in time) from an above-ground film image, but in this case a hybrid beast has emerged which I shall designate as “movie-museek,” a form that extends the image and merges with it rather than calling attention to its own quality or lack of quality. A conse- quence of this kind of subordination is that the closer movie-moozeek approaches cliché and mediocrity the more clarified its function in successfully interacting with the film image. . . . [M]ediocre music did not reach its zenith until the movies began to exploit the colossal talents of composers such as Dimitri Tiomkin and Henry Mancini. The range and depth of the explorations by these men into the hack- neyed nuances of sound stereotype and feeling-form correlations stagger the imagination. Their work makes all previous work in the same genre seem stunted and unambitious.7 “I am all for one medium at a time,” insists Rainer.8 As she says all this, on tape, she and Becky Arnold perform the section of The Mind Is a Muscle called Mat. The “mucus rant” is, thus, a sound score of sorts for this part of Performance Demonstration, and so the work hardly consists of “one medium at a time.” Rainer is here demonstrating that saying “no” to music for dance is not sufficient. “When dances are performed in silence—and practically everyone has done one at some point in one’s career—they are still considered either dry or revolutionary or both.”9 Rainer would seem to want her dances to solicit more complex reactions than the easy knowingness of that epithet “dry and revolutionary.” In the “mucus rant” Rainer spells and pronounces music correctly in only one context, when she speaks of Erik Satie, and here she also suggests one possibility for her own use of music: “In Satie’s idea of furniture music (although not in the music itself) I see an alternative that has not been followed thru in theater: Meesik-to-sit-and-wait-by. A juxtaposition in time with visual elements rather than a superimposition.”10 Although this suggests something closer to the musical interludes Rainer sometimes used between “fractions” of her composite pieces, Rainer’s dances all employed what she would later come to call “radical juxtapositions”—of bodies, objects, sounds, and images—and music is more often than not a key

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 component. For her first dance, Three Satie Spoons (1961), Rainer applied John Cage’s Fontana Mix to the score of Satie’s own Trois Gymnopédies. She used Satie again in 1962 for Satie for Two, set to his Trois Gnossiennes.11 Three Seascapes, also from 1962, used the final movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in the first Seascape and La Monte Young’s Poem for Tables, Chairs, and Benches in the second; for the third part, Rainer made her own music by throwing a scream- ing tantrum in a pile of tulle—her version of Fokine’s Dying Swan, as I see it. The next year, 1963, in We Shall Run, Rainer had over a dozen people jog in a group, from which one, two, or a few occasionally break away and then eventually rejoin; the music for the piece is the “Tuba mirum” from Berlioz’s Requiem. At My Body’s House (1964) opened with Rainer standing still for three minutes accompanied by very loud organ music by Dietrich Buxtehude. From the beginning of her career as a choreographer, Rainer had combined other sounds with the “dance music.” In Three Satie Spoons she made squeaking noises and repeatedly said, “The grass is greener when the sun is yellower.” For The Bells (1962), Rainer remembers speaking the line “I told you every- thing would be all right, Harry.” Also in 1962, her Ordinary Dance employed an autobiographical spoken monologue. Spoken monologues, whether written by Rainer and autobiographical or taken from an existing text, would play a fundamental role in Rainer’s work throughout her entire career, but for the moment I want to stay with dance music. Perhaps the most radical soundscape Rainer used was for early performances of her best known work, Trio A. The soundscape consisted of wooden Yvonne Rainer. We Shall Run, slats being thrown onto the floor from above “with metronome- 1963. Performed at the Getty, like regularity.”12 We now know Trio A best from Rainer’s per- Los Angeles, May 8–9, 2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. formance of it in the film made by Sally Banes in 1978. The film © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust. is silent, and the dance is performed not as a trio—that is, by

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 three people at once, each with his or her own timing—but as a solo, followed by some repeated “details” of the choreography. But not only was it not performed in silence when ﬁrst done as The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I, in 1966 and in the full evening version of The Mind Is a Muscle performed at the Anderson Theater in New York in 1968, but for Performance Demonstration, Top: Yvonne Rainer. Trio A, also in 1968, Steve Paxton began performing Trio A to the 1966. Performed by Rainer at the Portland Center for Chambers Brothers singing Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Visual Arts, 1973. Hour.” Paxton’s “vernacularization” of the dance—a dance, like Bottom: Yvonne Rainer. Trio A rock and roll, supposedly learnable and performable by any- (Pressured), Facing, 1966–2004. one—was something Rainer would retain, so that when Trio A Performed by Shelley Senter was performed by Baryshnikov’s White Oak Company in 2002 and Linda K. Johnson at the Getty, Los Angeles, May 8–9, as part of its Judson Dance Theater revival program Past Forward, 2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. it was performed “pressured,” to use Rainer’s word; that is, © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust. backward, facing (whereby a second performer moves around the other trying to face her as she executes the dance), and then forward by the full company to “In the Midnight Hour.”13 Ironically, in a work whose essential ambition is to eliminate phrasing from dance, the addition of the rock and roll track almost inevitably puts phrasing back in, or at least tests the performers’ abil- ities not to phrase when the steady rock beat virtually demands it. This might be the point of Rainer’s most sen- sational use of rock and roll music. In 1969 she choreographed a four-minute sequence called “Chair/Pillow” for Continuous Project Altered Daily to Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep Mountain High.” In this case it’s one move for one beat, right on the music—the kind of obvi- ous choreographic practice that Rainer most abhors. But in this case it is so insistent, so sin- gle-minded that it becomes a kind of screwball, repetitive back-up routine to the beat of the music, like the Ikettes doing a furious-paced Swim while Tina Turner belts out the song, except that Rainer’s movements are performed with objects—chairs, pillows—stand up, sit down, sit on the pillow, pull the pillow out from under your seat, throw the pillow on the ﬂoor, stand up, step on the pillow, walk around the chair, stand on the chair, and so forth. I think it should be clear from this brief run- down of her uses of music in her dances that not only does Rainer often make dances to (or in juxtaposition with) music, contrary to what her “mucus rant” might lead us to believe and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 to our sense of the “minimalism” of Judson dance, but also she has a broad, eclectic, and sophisticated knowledge of music. Anyone who has seen the first of the Three Seascapes, We Shall Run, and “Chair/Pillow” will have heard Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, and Ike and Tina Turner very differently as a result of the music’s juxtaposition with Rainer’s dances. My interest in Rainer’s uses of music derives from how thor- oughly overlooked are music’s connotations in the context of Rainer’s ambivalent embrace of narrative when she moved from dance to film in the early 1970s. Rainer writes about this transition in the title chapter of her new memoir Feelings Are Facts: Ignored or denied in the work of my 60s peers, the nuts and bolts of emotional life shaped the unseen (or should I say “unseemly”?) underbelly of high U.S. Minimalism. While we aspired to the lofty and cerebral plane of a quo- tidian materiality, our unconscious lives unraveled with an intensity and melodrama that inversely matched their absence in the boxes, beams, jogging, and standing still of our austere sculptural and choreographic creations.14 Rainer’s change of mediums so that she could take on the repressed melodrama of her own life was multiply determined: by a six-week trip to India during which she followed the tour- ing Kathekali troupe, by reading Shulamith Firestone’s early feminist polemic Dialectics of Sex, by befriending the French Yvonne Rainer. “Chair/Pillow,” (section of Continuous Project cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who had recently moved to Altered Daily), 1970. Performed New York City. But her sense of permission to use film to take at the Getty, Los Angeles, on the melodrama was filtered through her experience of the May 8–9, 2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. © 2005 film avant-garde—she cites particularly Maya Daren, Andy J. Paul Getty Trust. Warhol, and Hollis Frampton. The ambivalence of her approach

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 is captured in the opening shot of Lives of Performers, a type- written title card. Taken from Leo Bersani’s introduction to an edition of Madame Bovary, the text reads, “Cliché is, in a sense, the purest art of intelligibility; it tempts us with the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas, of obscuring the arbitrary nature of imagination with an appearance of necessity.” Lives of Performers is a narrative of the “nuts and bolts of emotional life” “ignored or denied in the work of [Rainer’s] 60s peers” done as a series of clichés, choreographed by the camera, the performers, and text. It culminates in what is announced in a title as “Final Performance: Lulu in 35 shots,” a series of staged tableaux-vivants modeled by the actors and dancers of Lives of Performers on film stills illustrating the script of G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, which had recently been published in the United States.15 Each tableau is held as steady as possible by the performers for twenty seconds, after which they break to form a new tableau; as they begin forming it, there is a cut, and we see the next tableau. This entire section of the film is silent through tableau 28, after which the Rolling Stones’ “No Expectations” is heard in its entirety. This is Lives of Performers’ only music, a striking fact given that the film is full of dance images: rehearsals of Walk, She Said; photographs of Rainer’s first narrative dance work Grand Union Dreams; a choreographed “succession of [three characters’] turnings toward or away from each other”16 in a schematic enactment of a man’s indecisiveness; and, most famously, Valda Setterfield’s solo with a ball—also from Grand Union Dreams, but here photographed at the Whitney Museum—choreographed after Nazimova’s film version of Salome’s dance. The Rolling Stones’ music accom- plishes in Lives of Performers just what the Camera Obscura collective suggests in its interview with Rainer in 1976: Music in your films often plays a seductive role. For example, you show images without any sound, and they have a certain duration. As soon as the music comes in, the sense of time is radically different. You sense that the pacing of the image track will have a coherent relation- ship to the sound track. You (the audience) are no longer responsible (and feel relieved). The time passes faster, as it is marked and now quantifiable. So that you get a very sharp contrast when you are watching a silent image track, a silent screen in motion, and then suddenly emotive and rhythmic music is added. It’s extremely effective in making the audience aware of the concepts of duration and expectation.17 What is missing from this otherwise discerning analysis is that the sense of change of pace wrought by the music is, in fact, the sense of an ending. Of course, in Lives of Performers we already

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 know that the end of the film is immanent because an intertitle has told us that we are watching the “final performance” and that that performance will consist of thirty-five tableaux. Still, the ten minutes of silent tableaux that we experience before the start of “No Expectations” seem long and slow, and “No Expectations” leads us, paradoxically enough given the song’s title, precisely to the expectation of the film’s end. The song is the musical strain that swells up to announce that the film has come to an end. At the time of the Camera Obscura interview, Rainer had completed only one other film, Film About a Woman Who. . . , and it, too, ends with music—twice over, or perhaps even four times over. The end of the film’s narrative of a love affair gone

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 sour is accompanied by the Baja Marimba Band playing “Maria Elena.” A short interlude follows in which two of the actors in the drama share a light-hearted moment with Rainer on the subway. Then comes a three-part coda of dances by James Barth and Epp Kotkas set to three Grieg piano pieces. In the final bars of the third piece, the dance is replaced with a shot of the ocean with superimposed texts returning us to the central drama and the final title: “You could always have an ocean ending.” The ending of the film is itself thus extraordinarily durational, dance-like, ironic in relation to narrative closure, and, signifi- cantly, musical. Music is used in only one other way in Film About a Woman Opposite, top left: Yvonne Who. . . , one that is strikingly overlooked in the commentary Rainer. Lives of Performers, on the film. Rainer alludes to a portion of it in her response to 1972. Valda’s Solo (original the Camera Obscura collective’s comments about her use of music choreography 1971), Valda Setterfield. Production still: to change the audience’s sense of duration. She says, in part, Babette Mangolte. © 1972 Babette Mangolte, all rights I’m not that involved with opera, but this whole spectrum of reproduction reserved. of seeing, hearing, seems really important. Or again, as a Opposite, bottom left: Yvonne means of changing the context, like the aria in Woman Rainer. Lives of Performers, Who. . . that comes on during the intertitle that stays on “Final Performance: Lulu in 35 for a long time: “Oh Christ, now he’ll never screw me again.” Shots,” 1972. Valda Setterfield and John Erdman. Frame First you read the whole thing; then you hear the music, enlargement. which gives it a different flavor, and that goes on and on and Opposite, right: Yvonne Rainer. 18 then the title goes off and you’re just listening to the music. Lives of Performers, “Final Performance: Lulu in 35 Shots,” What Rainer refers to as “the aria” is the opening of the cantabile 1972. Fernando Torm, Shirley section of the first-act finale of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. What Soffer, Valda Setterfield. Rainer does not mention is that, at this point in Film About a Film strip. Woman Who. . . , we have just heard (thus reversing their order Below: Yvonne Rainer. Film About a Woman Who. . . , in Bellini’s score) the cabaletta of that ensemble finale, begin- 1974. Epp Kotkas. Frame ning with the tempo di mezzo, accompanying what is itself a enlargement.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 finale of sorts, shots number 29 through 48 of the film’s famous sequence “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps.” So exemplary is this sequence taken to be, that David James, in his Allegories of Cinema, sees it as demonstrating the relation between Rainer’s minimalist choreographic principles, outlined by her in her famous analysis of Trio A written for Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art anthology, and structuralist cinema: “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps” demonstrates how Rainer’s previous career in minimalist dance initially sup- plied the formal paradigms for her filmmaking and so placed it within structural film’s dominant frame of reference. It may be understood as the performance of a pre- determined set of compositional procedures. Numbered so as to eliminate dramatic inflection of the whole, the steps manifest various possibilities in the combination of words and images: the verbal text may be narrated in either the first or third person, on- or off-screen, with or without lip sync, by a male or female voice; the text may be real- ized in either sound or written words, in white on black or black on white, accompanying or disjunct from actions it refers to. The image track may be blank, or it may contain either text or figures, the latter either silent or speaking and more or less accurately performing the roles described for them. Reminiscent of Hollis Frampton’s cross-referencing of visual and verbal languages, the sequence may be read as either the didactic presentation of the forms of sound Yvonne Rainer. Film About a and image that constitute film language (in Rainer’s own Woman Who. . . , “An Emotional words, “the acting of narrative film, the inter-titles of the Accrection in 48 Steps,” 1974. Renfreu Neff and Dempster silent movie, the sub-titles and dubbing of the foreign Leech. Frame enlargement. language film, the voice-over of the documentary and the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 ﬂashback, and the face-front-to-camera delivery of Godard”) or as the formalist juxtaposition of them, their mutual negation in a self-ironizing paradigm.19

The absence of music from Rainer’s list might be accounted for by the fact that James takes it from her book Work 1961–73, written before Film About a Woman Who. . . was made. The absence of music from James’s analysis of “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps” is harder to explain, but the same absence occurs in every other account of Rainer’s film that I know. This is astonishing because the music is itself so dramatic, even melodramatic. At this point in the opera, its heroine, Amina, the somnambulist, has sleepwalked into the bed cham- ber of Count Rodolfo only to be discovered there by her fiancé, Elvino, and her rival for Elvino’s affections, Lisa. Amina awak- ens to confusion and horror as her fiancé declares, “Non più nozze,” “There’ll be no wedding.” This, indeed, is the first line of the cabaletta that begins at step 29, whose title in Rainer’s film is “They see each other that night in a complicated social situation.” Complicated indeed. I am not suggesting that we are meant to know or understand the lyrics or even the general story line of La Sonnambula here. But neither do I think Rainer’s choice of music is random or without import. The choice of a bel canto opera in a recording with Joan Sutherland in the title role puts a particular pressure on the film’s “formal paradigms” and “compositional procedures,” to use James’s terms. Or rather, Rainer’s choice of the Sonnambula Act I finale, with cantabile and cabaletta reversed, is itself a compositional procedure. Bel canto is, of course, the most conventionally Romantic of operatic forms, so much so that it had gone almost entirely out of favor until it was revived by the partnership of Tulio Sarafin and Maria Callas in the late 1940s. The reinvesting of bel canto with meaning comprehen- sible to the modern ear owed much to Callas’s particular strengths, a near-perfect vocal technique that was a product of her training by the coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, a pro- found musical understanding, and an exceptionally large and dramatic instrument. This meant that Callas could bring to bel canto a dramatic power and emotional significance that made it far more than the vocal fireworks display to which it had all but degenerated. But, Callas is reported to have said of Sutherland, whom we hear in Rainer’s film, “She has put back my work by a hundred years.”20 If the conventions of bel canto are often lost on us, with murderous fury and stark-raving madness con- veyed by the sweetest melodies and most florid vocal orna- mentation in all of opera, the character of Sutherland’s singing only exaggerates the problems. Not only is her voice, unlike Callas’s, exceptionally lovely, but her characteristic drooping

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 portamento and lack of consonant enunciation reduces the vitality of the language, both musical and textual. Thus, to return to Film About a Woman Who. . . and “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps,” Rainer’s schematic depiction of a melodramatic lover’s quarrel is doubled, first by Sonnambula’s Romantic conventions in depicting a lover’s quarrel, and second by Sutherland’s overly schematic rendering of those conventions, at least if compared with the example of Callas.21 But this is not the whole story. To u nderstand the effects that the finale of Act I of La Sonnambula in the 1962 Sutherland/Bonynge recording has on “An Emotional Accretion” (and the ﬁlm’s following sequence), it is necessary to return for a moment to Trio A. I recently showed a DVD of the White Oak Project’s performance of Trio A (Pressured) to my students and in the company of a colleague who was trained as a ballet dancer. Afterward, I commented that what we had just seen, in the portion in which the entire company does the choreography to the accompaniment of “In the Midnight Hour,” was just how difficult it is for a trained dancer not to phrase the movement. Because this elimination of phrasing had been the work’s main goal, it seemed to me necessary to point out that it had been inadequately carried out by this particular group of dancers, talented though they may otherwise be. My students asked me to explain what I meant by phrasing, and, somewhat at a loss, my colleague and I both answered, at once, “It’s like musical phrasing.” This was of little help. But Rainer herself makes it perfectly clear. In her essay on the dance, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” Rainer writes, Within the realm of movement invention . . . the most impressive change has been in the attitude to phrasing, which can be deﬁned as the way in which energy is dis- tributed in the execution of a movement or series of movements. What makes one kind of movement different from another is not so much variations in arrangements of parts of the body as differences in energy distribution. . . . Much of the western dancing we are familiar with can be characterized by a particular distribution of energy: maximal output or “attack” at the beginning of phrase, recovery at the end, with energy often arrested some- where in the middle. This means that one part of the phrase—usually the part that is most still—becomes the focus of attention, registered like a photograph or sus- pended moment of climax. . . . The term phrase can also serve as a metaphor for a longer or total duration containing beginning, middle, and end.22

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 Thus the phrase in dance is both the unit of narrative structure, and, at least metaphorically, narrative structure tout court. Compare this with the following analysis of Sutherland’s singing mannerisms by the music critic J.B. Steane: She has a way . . . of often leaving unsatisfied that most basic of requirements, the need for an even, instrumental tone in the unembellished melodic line. . . . It is partly that she apparently feels the need to give each phrase and each part of each phrase its own mouldings, and this is certainly a sign of non-superficiality: but whatever the gain, there is a loss in one of the basic pleasures of singing, in the sheer flow of sound.23 Sutherland’s tendency is to emphasize the individual phrase at the expense of the shape of overall musical structure. She is an insistent phrase maker, and with her phrasing she makes the bel canto not meaningful, as did Callas, but both schematic, like Rainer’s film sequence, and irresistible, like the inevitability of cliché. Rainer turned to filmmaking to bring the emotional melodrama repressed by minimalism back into artistic representa- tion. But her suspicions about the conventions for doing so— encountered by her at their most intense in her early career in studying Method acting with Lee Grant at Herbert Bergdorf and in Martha Graham’s expressionist technique and choreography— remained, and remained to be interrogated. The “Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps” seems to me only partially understood if we don’t include the musical finale among these conventions. The choice of bel canto opera —which according to Peter Brooks brings Romantic melodrama to its fullest realization24—radically juxtaposes, in Rainer’s phrase to describe her compositional method, one of the most compelling affective forms of dramatic narrative with a drama deconstructed in a numbered sequence. Her critique is thus meant to be understood as only partial, or partially effective. We can become critically aware of the clichéd narratives to which we are subject, but we are also necessarily still subject to them. And music, even music as con- tradictorily dramatically moving as Sutherland’s mannered rendition of Sonnambula, makes this palpable. But it would be unfair to Rainer to leave it there. Because there is, after all, a punch line. In the sequence following “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps,” after we have seen the drama’s characters sit listening to Sonnambula’s cantabile, one woman remarks to the other, “Doesn’t that remind you of a movie?” “Which movie?” asks the other. “2001,” the first replies. “Oh yes, of course.” Rainer’s most recently completed work, the video installation After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002), employs rehearsal footage of her choreography for the White Oak Dance Project from 2000 with still images and crawling texts of fin de

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 siècle Vienna. The fragments of autobiography that had provided much of the source material for Rainer’s feature ﬁlms is here essentially absent, except insofar as a reflection on the relation between avant-garde culture, sexuality, and politics has become virtually synonymous with Rainer’s artistic autobiography and that much of the material being rehearsed for the dance, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, is taken from Rainer’s dance pieces from the 1960s. In addition, there are quotations and photographs from works on the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including quotations from Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities and aphoristic lines from Kokoshka, Loos, Schoenberg, and Wittgenstein. All of these bear on the complex relations between art making, eroticism, and historical crisis. In its initial showing at Rainer’s exhibition in Philadelphia, Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002,25 watching After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid took considerable effort. The video itself requires sustained reading of crawling text, which moves left to right or bottom to top in addition to the reverse, thus requiring reading backward or remembering the end of a sentence as you read its beginning. The viewer must also con- stantly struggle to keep the dancers in view as the text usurps their screen space, pushing them to the margins. As if this were not demanding enough, the video projection moves around the periphery of a small cylindrical room where the viewer sits alone on a swiveling stool with no backrest and on wheels, requiring the viewer to struggle to maintain balance while moving to keep up with the progress of the complexly moving image. Only one element of this work is present, whole and uninterrupted: the music, Arnold Schoenberg’s late-romantic string sextet Verklärte Nacht, which serves essentially as the work’s score. The duration of the tape—thirty minutes—is the duration of the sextet. Yvonne Rainer. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Not only is the Schoenberg work itself heard whole, but it Hybrid, 2002. Video still. also makes Rainer’s Hybrid Swan cohere around the theme of what Carl Schorske, writing about Verklärte Nacht, refers to as erotic affirmation and the dissolution of boundaries.26 The music does this through the video’s reference to both the music’s narrative ori- gin and one of its great narrative destinations. The sextet is program music; it has a literary theme, Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same title from his collection Weib und die Welt. The music follows the poem’s ﬁve sections,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 which sketch the story of a man and a woman walking in a forest. The woman reproaches herself because she is expecting a child by another man—a momentary passion—although she loves the present one. The man comforts the woman and assures her that he will accept the child as his own. Program music such as this carries little more than the structure and mood of its literary source, but Dehmel’s poem is given a later, literal elaboration in one of the most famous ballets of the twentieth century, Anthony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire (1942), set to Verklärte Nacht. Rainer claims not to have thought about Pillar of Fire when she made her Hybrid Swan video, but she also says she vividly remembers seeing the ballet with its original ballerina, Nora Kaye, in the role of Hagar, the pregnant woman. Certainly the narratives implicit in Schoenberg’s music and explicit in Tudor’s ballet pressure, to use Rainer’s word again, her own work. Our historical memory of these narratives is surely as crucial to the work as is the image we see of Baryshnikov performing Valda Setterﬁeld’s solo with a ball from Grand Union Dreams and Lives of Performers, just as Setterﬁeld’s solo itself calls up the memory of Nazimova’s performance of the dance of Salome. As with the music from Sonnambula in the “Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps” in Film About a Woman Who. . . , Verklärte Nacht here reminds us . . . reminds us that we have experi- enced this drama before and that we cannot but experience it again. The hope provided by Rainer’s work is that we can learn to experience it differently next time, to change its meanings, alter its form. Verklärte Nacht was already taken in its own time to have changed radically the musical meaning of the love story: a contemporary famously said of it, “It sounds as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet.”27 Radically, but not beyond recognition. After all, in referring to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Schoenberg’s contemporary rec- ognized that Verklärte Nacht was a melodramatic love story too. Rainer doesn’t mention Schoenberg in her mucus rant, although she comes close enough: I am not trying to make a judgement on serious high art muciz as played at the Philharmonic or New School or in Ann Arbor. In that area whatever dialectic has already been mapped out by dedicated composers I here and now pay all due deference to (without having the slightest interest in listening). I simply don’t want someone else’s high art anywhere near mine. As I said before, I don’t collaborate.28 Now she’s changed her tune (although in fact, as we’ve seen, her art has often been in proximity to others’). Rainer has choreographed a new work, AG Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M., to be premiered at Dance Theater Workshop’s spring

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 2006 Stravinsky Festival;29 it is her reworking of a ballet that she saw for the first time around 1960, George Balanchine’s 1957 modernist masterpiece Agon, set to a score commissioned from Stravinsky. In a classic piece of dance criticism, Edwin Denby describes Agon’s opening: The curtain rises on a stage bare and silent. Upstage four boys are seen with their backs to the public and motion- less. They wear the company’s dance uniform. Lightly they stand in an intent stillness. They whirl, four at once, to face you. The soundless whirl is a downbeat that starts the action. On the upbeat, a fanfare begins, like cars honking a block away; the sound drops lower, changed into a pulse. Against it, and against a squiggle like a bit of wallpaper, you hear—as if by free association—a snatch of “Chinatown, My Chinatown” misremembered on an electric mandolin. The music sounds conﬁdent. Meanwhile the boys’ steps have been exploding like pistol shots. The steps seem to come in tough, brief bursts. Dancing in canon, in unison, in and out of symmetry, the boys might be trying out their speed of waist, their strength of ankle; no lack of aggressiveness. But already two—no eight—girls have replaced them.30 This business of “boys” and “girls,” not surprising for the 1950s, continues to be New York City Ballet’s way of describing the roles in Agon’s opening sections: “Four Boys,” “Eight Girls,” “Four Boys, Eight Girls,” “Pas de trois,” “Sarabande,” and so forth. Rainer’s dance is all women. The opening quartet is performed by four women (Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers), “dancing in canon, in unison, in and out of symmetry.” In Rainer’s “indexical” version there is a lack of aggressiveness. One way—but only one—that the lack is made apparent during this ﬁrst section is by Pat Catterson’s and Emily Coates’s interpolation of a moment of Rainer’s own postmodern movement into Agon’s sharply attacked steps. Close to the beginning of what Denby called a “festive athletic meet,”31 whose subject, according to Frank O’Hara, is pride,32 Rainer inserts a quick mnemonic image of her matter-of-fact, early-1960s dances Three Satie Spoons and Ordinary Dance. Later, the two dancers begin Agon’s branle double with a short interpolation of Trio A’s continuous motion. When, after Agon’s pas de deux, also danced in Rainer’s version by four women, Stravinsky’s fanfare sounds again, the four dancers begin their repetition of the opening quartet, now, of course, as the ballet’s finale. Denby again, on Balanchine’s version:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 Now only the four boys are left, you begin to recognize a return to the start of the ballet, you begin to be anxious, and on the same wrestler’s gesture of “on guard” that closed their initial dance—a gesture now differently directed—the music stops, the boys freeze, and the silence of the beginning returns. . . . To the realization of its power, as the curtain drops, people respond with vehement applause in a large emotion that includes the bril- liant dancers and the gooﬁness of the fun.33

This is the second mention, in Denby’s brief review, of the “vehement applause” that Agon inspired. It is also the second time Denby employs the term goofy to suggest something of Agon’s style. Rainer makes goofiness more emphatic in her version, and one way she does so is with a musical juxtaposition that occurs in the finale. After we hear enough of the repetition of Stravinsky’s opening section to understand that the ballet will end as it began, Rainer substitutes a different soundtrack, the opening of The Pink Panther. It’s hilarious because it’s movie music by Henry Mancini, not ballet music by Igor Stravinsky, and is far indeed from the serial idiom of Stravinsky’s orches- tral suite. The four women “dance in canon, in unison, in and out of symmetry,” just as they had before. Pat Catterson and Emily Coates interpolate the composite picture of Three Satie Spoons and Ordinary Dance, just has they had before. The four women freeze, and we respond with vehement applause. In 1969, Rainer’s Dance Fractions for the West Coast opened with “music to sit and wait by”: Henry Mancini’s The Pink Panther, taken from the film’s opening credits, with all the zany sound effects.34 Student performers lie on the ground and listen. When the music stops, slides of Stairs from The Mind Is a Muscle begin to be projected, three at once in rapid succession left to right, and Rainer begins to recite, “That’s right, I would like to say that I am a music-hater. The only remaining meaningful role for muzeek. . . .”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 Notes This essay was initially written as a contribution to the conference “Kulturen des Erzählens,” organized by Achim Hochdörfer and Ruth Sonderegger at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, May 27–29, 2005. It grew out of a seminar I offered at the University of Rochester in the fall of 2004. I wish to thank my students in that seminar, particularly Aviva Dove-Viebahn, whose seminar paper on Rainer’s use of music for her dances was useful for my discussion here. A conversation that I conducted with Rainer following the screening of her ﬁlms at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester on 18 November 2004 also provided information for this essay. Thanks also for careful read- ings and good suggestions from my friends and colleagues Karen Beckman, Rosalyn Deutsche, Rachel Haidu, Damien Jack, and Juan Suarez.

1. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 2. This transition is not nearly so neat as the phrase “moving from dance to film” implies. Rainer made a number of short films in the 1960s, some of which were used in her dance pieces. In the early 1970s, her live performance works and first feature-length films used much of the same material. Grand Union Dreams, for example, is prominently featured (as photographs) in Lives of Performers. This Is the Story of a Woman Who . . . developed much of the material that would appear in Film About a Woman Who . . . . Moreover, both films include dance pieces—Valda Setterfield’s solo with a ball from Grand Union Dreams, performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in Lives of Performers; and the dances performed by Epp Kotkas and James Barthes at the end of Film About a Woman Who . . . . 3. These works allowed for old material to be taught to and performed by students in workshops as well as for new material to be developed with students. Eventually teaching and rehearsing became part of the performance proper. The indeterminate sequencing of these “fractions,” together with increasing improvisation by Rainer’s dancers—many of whom were fellow choreographers—in Rainer’s Continuous Project Altered Daily of 1970 led ultimately to the collaborative improvisation group the Grand Union. 4. The full text of the taped monologue appears in Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 110–112. 5. The term is a combination of music and Kodak, the best-known brand name at the time the patent for the proprietary system was sought in the 1930s. 6. Rainer, Work, 110. 7. Rainer, Work, 111. 8. Rainer, Work, 112. 9. Rainer, Work, 112. 10. Rainer, Work, 112. 11. Using Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes for dance was hardly revolutionary by the 1960s. Even Frederick Ashton, the choreographer for Britain’s Royal Ballet, used the orchestrated versions of the Satie works for his Monotones 1 and 2, although not until several years after Rainer had used the music. 12. Yvonne Rainer, “Some Non-chronological Recollections of The Mind Is a Muscle,” in Work, 75. 13. Trio A was first performed in this version, as Trio A (Pressured), at Judson Memorial Church by Rainer, Colin Beatty, Pat Catterson, Douglas Dunn, and Steve Paxton, 4 October 1999. 14. Rainer, Feelings Are Facts.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 15. Ladislaus Vajda, Pandora’s Box (Lulu) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). 16. Yvonne Rainer, “Lives of Performers,” in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 67. For the choreography of this sequence, see Rainer, Work, 234. 17. “Interview with the Camera Obscura Collective,” in Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who . . . : Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 163. 18. “Interview with the Camera Obscura Collective,” 163. 19. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 327. 20. J.B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record 1900–1970, 2nd ed. (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 381. 21. I do not assume that Rainer chose the Sutherland recording for the rea- sons I’m suggesting here. Sutherland was at the height of her international career in 1974, when Film About a Woman Who . . . was made. Choosing the Callas recording would have added a dimension not only of greater dramatic intensity but of nostalgia, which was not likely Rainer’s interest. 22. Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” in A Woman Who . . . , 32. 23. Steane, 385. 24. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 75. 25. Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: The University of the Arts), 2003. The exhibition for which this is the accompanying catalogue originated at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, 19 October–30 November 2002, and subsequently traveled to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 5 May– 8 August 2004; Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, 23 September 2004–9 January 2005; and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, 17 March–22 April 2005. 26. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 344–364. 27. See Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975), 3. 28. Rainer, Work, 112. 29. Rainer’s dancers performed a rehearsal run-through of the work on 4 August 2005 at Marymount Manhattan College, where I saw it. 30. Edwin Denby, “Three Sides of ‘Agon’” (1959), in Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 460. 31. Denby, 460. 32. Denby, 463. 33. Denby, 463. 34. Dance Fractions for the West Coast was performed at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Old Los Angeles Conservatory, and Mills College (where it was ﬁlmed for KQED, San Francisco).

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