Yvonne Rainer performing Convalescent Dance, a version of Trio A presented during Angry Arts Week at the Hunter Playhouse in New York, January 1967. Photo by Peter Moore
© Northwestern University / Peter Moore Photography Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries. Photo: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2006.M.24)
Relax your arms beside your body and then experience their weight as they rotate – one arm, and then the other. The arms are long, they’re weighty, but you don’t accent their movement. They simply revolve around the body. It’s relaxed.
This is the first move of Trio A, a dance I choreographed in 1965. It took six months to make a five-minute dance: a sequence of everyday gestures in which no movement is repeated, and all movements are given equal weight and are articulated fluidly, without pause. Trio A was a response to balletic and modern dance – a counter to dramatic peaks, and the virtuosity of jumps and leaps. It was opposed to spectacle, frontality and display.
The piece was first performed as a trio at the Judson Memorial Church in New York in 1966, but it can be performed solo or in a much larger group. There have been all kinds of versions of it. The dancer Pat Catterson did a reverse Trio A and it was amazing – you’d never seen movement like that before. It’s been done by nude dancers draped in American flags as an anti-war protest, and by total amateurs. There have also been versions where performers deliberately violate all the egalitarian premises – leaping high, making it more rhythmic, maintaining eye contact with the audience. All of these possibilities have been explored, but the original idea remains the foundation. Trio A has always been a source.
One version, called Convalescent Dance, came about after I was released from hospital following serious abdominal surgery. I was on the programme of Angry Arts Week, a festival held in New York in January 1967 to protest the war in Vietnam, and I performed the piece solo in a weakened state wearing all-white clothing and sneakers.
Years have passed and now I have different kinds of physical detriments. There’s no way I can get down and back up off the floor in the fluid way that the original requires. So, since my mid-70s, I have performed a so-called geriatric version in which I talk through it, reflecting – sometimes humorously – on my deficits.
While there is no ideal or perfect version, my best experience of performing it was a rehearsal at the Judson Church gym in the 1990s, not long after I had emerged from one of my hospitalisations. I did not have the capacity for extremes of energy, so the performance had a true sense of uninflected continuity. I remember that vividly.
A filmed version of Trio A, performed by me in Merce Cunningham’s studio in 1978, has become widely circulated, but I don’t encourage people to learn from it. When it was made, I had been focused on filmmaking for years, so had not been performing it often. The dance can only be learned from the small group of ‘transmitters’ who have my permission to teach it.
Trio A changes as the generations go on, but perhaps people don’t realise how tenuous and fragile the main component of it is – that uninflected continuity. It’s the first thing to go, and it’s the hardest thing to learn.
Yvonne Rainer: Trio A, Turbine Hall, 10–11 July. An artist talk with Yvonne Rainer will take place in the Starr Cinema on 11 July. Book your tickets online.
Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. She talked to Enrico Tassi.
Supported by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. With additional support from The Performance Activation Fund. In collaboration with Sadler’s Wells for the supply of studio space and dramaturgy.
