Yvonne Rainer
(b 1934, USA)

Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer and filmmaker. In the 1960s she was a leading figure of the Judson Dance Theater, a group of artists and dancers based in Greenwich Village, New York. Rainer  developed a form of choreography incorporating repetitive movement and everyday props, thereby emptying the experience of theatricality or drama. The photographs included in this exhibition show two of Rainer’s best known pieces. The dancers in Parts of Some Sextets (1965) carried out a series of actions involving rope and mattresses. WAR (1970) was performed at New York University at the height of the Vietnam War and was described by Rainer as ‘a huge, sprawling non-competitive game-like piece for 31 people… derived from terms of military tactics found in the Iliad, The Peloponnesian War and various accounts of the Chinese revolution and Vietnam War.’