In dancing one keeps taking a step and recovering one’s balance. The risk is a part of the rhythm. One steps out of and into balance; one keeps on doing it, and step by step the mass of the body moves about. But the action is more fun and risk increases when the dancers step to a rhythmic beat of music. Then the pulse of the downbeat can lift the dancer as he takes a step; it can carry him through the air for a moment, and the next downbeat can do it again. Such a steady beat to dance on is what a dancer dreams of and lives for. The lightness that music gives is an imaginary or an imaginative lightness. You know it is an illusion, but you see it happen, you enjoy believing it. There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.²

The New Dance of the 1960s, like the newer sculpture, questioned a stylistics of illusion grounded in that notion of risk. It would use the irrationality of fantasy or comedy as materials, but its fundamental impulse in regard to “insanity” was – as might have been predicted – therapeutic. Rational, objectifying in stance and thrust, it set about redefining the spatial and temporal logic of the dance as a grand exercise in the achievement of “concrete reasonableness.”³

The New Dance, then, set out in much the same manner as the new sculpture of the 1960s to contest, point for point, esthetic conventions which had acquired an ontological status, by rehabilitating, installing within the dance fabric, the task, the movement whose quality is determined by its specifically operational character. Instituting games and tasks within the dance structure, it engendered a specific logic of movement, and, of course, the possibility of that logic’s reversal. Using found materials and found or rule-generated movement, using techniques of disjunction, setting movement against sound, sound against music and against speech, operational movement against recorded movement (that of film) and the image of movement in arrest (slides), it distended the arena of organized temporality, installing within the dance situation a real or operational time, redefining choreography as a situation within which an action may take the time it takes to perform that action. Neither self-contained nor engendered by predetermined rhythmic and rhetorical patterns, it was not “synthetic.” The time of the New Dance brought into play, through an initial asceticism which it shared with the advanced sculpture of that period – that of Morris, Judd, Andre – a multiplicity of new possibilities. The vocabulary of movement was revised through a rethinking of the problem of energy release, and the accumulation of new materials generated paratactic structures.

Trio A involves no set tasks, no purposeful movements; its time is not the “real” time of operational movement, but as Rainer stresses, rather “real movement time,” “the time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through prescribed motion. An ordered time is not imposed.”⁴ It was, then, as though the notion of task performance had been radicalized, becoming performance-of-the-business-at-hand. The “real time” of task or operation is redefined as identical with that of dance. Or one might describe them as collapsed into a single, new, and intimately unified sense of time. That collapse is contingent upon the dissolution of the technique of composition by phrase, the rejection of building toward climax and periodic relaxation which had, by then, begun to seem

excessively dramatic and more simply, unnecessary. Artifice of performance has been re-evaluated, in that action or what one does, is more interesting and important than the exhibition of character and attitude. That action can best be focused on through the submerging of the personality; so ideally one is not even one’s self, one is a neutral doer.⁵

One was, in other words, she-who-performs-the-task, doing-the-business-at-hand-in-dancing.

There is, in all of Rainer’s early work, an assault on the conditions of the performer’s exhibitionism, a rage against the narcissism which animates that thrust toward the annihilation of the Self; it is evident in many ways, and many of them are extremely subtle. The particularly closed and seamless quality of Trio A owes much to the fact that the dancer’s gaze is continually averted from the audience. (Valda Setterfield’s eyes focusing upon the ball she holds in solo dances for performances in 1972-73 and Lives of Performers will play a variation upon this.) That averted gaze is an attempt to short-circuit the projection of Self toward audience, to eliminate the conditions of a narcissistic gratification. Its consequence for the spectator is a problem, or a question. For if the dancer is she/he who performs the task in/of dancing, the spectator, confronting that “neutral doer,” that utter submersion of self in that business at hand which is the performance, must ask himself – and the literalness of the question gives us the measure of its freshness and its urgency – “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”