In the spring of 1970, Rainer presented Continuous Project – Altered Daily in three successive evenings at the Whitney Museum. Her fellow performers were Becky Arnold, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Barbara Lloyd, Steve Paxton, and they were joined by a few friends who provided, at intervals of their own choosing, readings from assigned texts. The performances took place in three areas, one of which was central for most activity, and involved the use of objects, props, and “body adjuncts,” the projection of film, and sound/music. This enterprise derived its title, as acknowledged in the program notes, from a sculptural work by Robert Morris then on exhibit in the museum, and indeed one now sees their conjunction retrospectively as an interesting, a critical and transitional moment for both artists.¹⁰

The Morris exhibition had, in fact, been open to the public from the first day of its installation. Its maximal use of the museum’s space and structure, publicly demonstrated through the open installation process, also afforded the realization of sculpture as work, of installation as providing a strikingly clear and instructive text in mechanics, large-scaled demonstrations of the use of lever and of pulley. Artisans, museum personnel, and artist worked at the transport of the huge cement, wood, and steel components, converting the elevator into the giant pulley which hoisted them to the level of the exhibition floor where the assembly crew waited to install them, while a mass of visitors, armed with tape recorders, movie and still cameras, recorded their labor under the artist’s direction. The week of installation and the successive modifications of the structures during the exhibition period formed a single Continuous Project – Altered Daily.

Rainer’s work at the Whitney that spring was a new and considerably longer treatment of a collection of material she had previously offered at Pratt Institute in March of the preceding year. These performances, varying each evening, drew upon several inventories, of which the first articulated the modes of activity possible in performance. These modes, listed in the program notes, were rehearsal, teaching, run-through, working out, marking, then surprises, and a general category of spontaneous and unrehearsed or choreographed behavior. A second inventory analyzes levels of performance reality: primary, performing original material in a personal style; secondary, performing someone else’s material in a style approximating the original, or working in a known style or “genre”; and tertiary, performing someone else’s material in a style completely different from and/or inappropriate to, the original. In this performance, as in preceding and successive ones, the preferred levels indicated are B and C, with some priority for C, guaranteeing maximum distance from the mimetic. Professional and amateur gesture and deportment as visible in experienced and inexperienced performers are invoked in the context of the rapidly blurring distinction between the two categories. The elaboration of the program, the way in which it seeks to make explicit the concerns and processes, the contingencies which shape performance, strongly inflects one’s experience and recollection of the work, orders it, and impels one to parse the work. The readings of assigned texts, mostly reminiscences of performers in film’s silent period, superimposed the dimension of reference to past, completed performance upon a present, evolving one. And finally, a list of “roles” and of “metamuscular conditions affecting, whether visible of not, the execution of physical feats” bestowed upon the performance an expansive effect. Here is a brief excerpt from the long list:

adolescent
angel
athlete
autistic child
Annette Michelson
bird
Barbara Streisand
Buster Keaton
anger
convalescence
celibacy
constipation
catatonia
drug-induced state
discipline
diarrhea

Continuous Project contained a great part of the strategies used and transformed in the film to be made in 1972. For instance, the terms of these inventories functioned in a way approaching that of titles or intertitles; their distribution was left, however, to the spectator. Titles, projected or written on stage, will be used increasingly in the 1972 performances at Hofstra University and at the Whitney before assuming a variable structural function in Lives of Performers.

The principal change in performance structure and dynamics made by Continuous Project, however, came through Rainer’s new emphasis on work with and in the group, through the partial relinquishing of certain controls as choreographer and the admission of stimulus and suggestion from her performers. Continuous Project initiates, in fact, a two-year period during which she will pursue one line of improvisational work, of learning situations and group interaction as they culminate in the occasional, entirely improvisational performances with the group known as The Grand Union. In these public performances a sustained behavioral continuity is supported by no preparation but that of the growing and intensifying intimacy and developing capacity for freedom of personal response.