“You cannot, nor should you seek to know the difference,” says this Performer in that moment of Dance History. One is offered, instead, a spatio-temporal complex of even, successive, uninflected moments/movements or equivalent focal points in which the use of slides, props, sounds, films, and texts abounds. The distance from the mimetic increases as texts are read in neutral “reading” voices, even when involving direct dialogue. Movement is quoted; parody intrudes. Increasingly, the presence and movement of performers is used as one parameter among others. This is the background of the injunction to “expand the focus away from the personal psychological confrontation with the performer.” And finally, in another telling note, “the performer is the residue from an obsolescent art form: theater. How to use the performer as a medium rather than as a persona. Is a ballet méchanique [sic] the only solution?”⁶ It has been, of course, a frequent temptation in the history of this century’s performance, as it begins in the theatrically utopian projects of Gordon Craig and culminates in Meyerhold’s great postrevolutionary productions of The Magnificent Cuckold and Tarelkin’s Death, in Schlemmer’s Bauhaus spectacles.⁷

For an American modernist working in the latter half of this century, the ballet mécanique is, for a variety of reasons, a less urgent temptation. And the dancer is especially disjunct from that wider continuum of productivity which once generated an intensity of shared aspiration. An American modernist will inherit the preoccupation with production, with therapy, with task or problem-solving that derives from a traditional necessity of justification through works. As we have seen, these paradigms of enterprise, dissociated from a larger community of aspiration, generate the formal strategies which produce the new temporality of Dance, destroying then, in turn, the temporal continuum of narration, the order of beginning, middle, and end, in which drama takes shape and the persona functions. Here is a point of origin for the formal dissolution of performer’s persona and the fictional character: deprived of the time in which he can develop or project, he loses the metaphorical space in which he can breathe and function. It is that temporal order as the medium of narrative form which endures as object of a critique which extends across the century and its art forms. Here are two recent reformulations by filmmakers:

Michael Snow: . . . Passages, then, wherein or post facto or in anticipation I may note revelatory unities and disparities. What’s interesting is not codifying, but expanding and understanding the nature of passages from one state to another without acknowledging “beginning” as having any more importance in the incident than “importance” has in this sentence. Or than ending in this . . .⁸

Jean-Luc Godard: Yes, my films do have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.

But here is one much older, invested with revelatory power of poetry, in the concluding lines of Schwitters’ “Anna Blume”:

Anna Blume! Anne, a-n-n-a, I trickle your name. Your name drips like softest tallow. Do you know, Anna, do you already know? You can also be read from the end, and you, you loveliest of all, are from behind just as you are in front: “a-n-n-a.”
Tallow trickles caressingly down my back. Anna Blume, you trickle beast, I love your !⁹

Schwitters here acknowledges the libidinal source of the will to confound beginning and ending. The rejection of directionality, or structural purposiveness is linked with pleasure, and the ambivalence of the name stands as a metaphor for the rejection of an imposed teleology. More importantly, both are subsumed in the delighted insistence on the body as text to be ambivalently read as it is polymorphously enjoyed. Schwitters’ wit, identifying the sexual act with that of intellection suggests a source of energy for the contemporary assault on narrative structure and its esthetic uses: the longing for a gratification freed from the constraints of purposiveness, la promesse de bonheur. One begins to see, as well, the possible source of that antinarcissistic rage which obstinately engineers the dissolution of the time of narrative as the condition for the performer’s confrontation of the audience as “neutral doer.” It is the sense of a displaced surrogate and unresolved sexual commerce, and the break with such a situation for a talent as skilled, a presence as commanding as Rainer’s, cannot have been easy. It required more than resolution: the generation of the many strategies elaborated during the mid-‘60s, of which the averted gaze is one single subtle instance.

I have been considering, in a somewhat general manner, aspects of a development essential to Rainer’s work of the 1960s and to our understanding of it, of the way its grammatical and syntactical innovations are a part of something much larger we can genuinely call a radical aspiration. And this account has not described or chronicled the detail of its variety, of its contradictions, pleasures, or even of its innovations, its continual humor, its density of allusion and reference, of affective resonance. I’ve been concerned, rather, with detecting some of the presuppositions of the radical shifts and breaks which support the early work, and without which the extraordinary and by no means quite unproblematic work of the past three years would not be either so extraordinary or so problematic. It is to this period of performance eventuating in a first film that I now turn.