Reviewing once again my memories and notes of the third and last performance of Continuous Project on April 2, 1970, I find myself recalling first the modalities of learning, teaching, and testing. Instances such as David Gordon and Steve Paxton working as partners, teaching, testing each other; Rainer in a sequence of self-touching, exploring her own body at an accelerating pace that generates a somewhat spastic movement; Gordon working with the entire group, testing the stability of each separate individual, pushing at each, then settling in place with a rocking or rolling movement, facing Rainer and surrounded by the group in a sequence which suggests the development and topology of an encounter situation and a children’s game.

“Body adjuncts” and props were large, odd, intrusive, inflecting movement in ways so unexpected they elicited skill, ingenuity of response, and occasioned collapse as often as they did success. Gordon had a rock-n-roll section in a huge Mexican sombrero, and one female dancer, wearing a stomach-pad, later helped him with that hat, his leg all the while held by Paxton to the ground. Rainer and Barbara Lloyd ran in circles around the group as they did some rock-n-roll, those two rhythms in complete disjunction. Calls for help were repeated, and repeatedly, as one saw reenacted the modes of interaction and performance as “getting by with a little help from my friends,” one saw as well the performance and rehearsal open out into the space of a performer/choreographer’s life.

A conversation between Rainer and Douglas Dunn on the subject of a frame was distanced by Rainer’s extremely conspicuous half turns from microphone, talking into it from alternate sides, like a stand-up comic’s version of a two-sided conversation. It is a variant of a “genre” of performance for which she has a penchant. Conversation touched on art history as Rainer recalled Marjorie Strider’s use of empty stretched canvas, suggesting that she, Rainer, was in a position to have more history than Dunn was, but the reference reached even further for the spectator, to an early piece, Site, by Morris. Other historical precedents invoked: a sequence involving Gordon and Lloyd in which Gordon, reaching for something placed on a very large carton, was held back by Lloyd grasping his leg, so that in the extreme physical tension of that reaching, he reproduced a balletic leg extension. Or again, fragmented recollections of past performance were fleetingly evoked, as when Rainer and Gordon, facing one another with a pillow between them, perform a series of dips of the sort that punctuate erotic ballroom dances such as the tango, thus suggesting a piece I’d known of but have never seen: Waterman Switch.

In addition to pillows, props included the Mexican hat, stomach-pad, cartons, stretched canvas, and both a pair of wings and a tail: angelic and bestial modes of being were lightly evoked as modes of movement, fraught with comedy, somewhat difficult. Parody was almost everywhere present or threatening to appear. After a musical “dance number,” with chairs and pillows, Dunn, tossing a pillow over the chair, draped himself with one arm over its back, with the nonchalance of Fred Astaire. The silent movie actors evoked were Keaton, Betty Blythe, Louise Brooks, among others.

Sound text, props, movement, situations enabled a continual switching from rehearsal to play, to learning, to testing, oscillating between the choreographer’s strict control and the incalculable risks and uncertainties introduced by the challenge of difficult props, the rhythms and tensions of interpersonal exchange. One had a sense of something very different from the effect of game rules or task performance or completed, objectified formalized movement. There was a distinct and constant sense of uncertainty, of the tensions and pathos of testing, failure, recapitulation, abandonment or revision projected in these evenings of extended play. Rainer’s work of the 1960s, always shot through with personal and highly charged references and objects, had been objectified in a number of very self-contained and formal structures. Working now within the delicate dialectic of control and improvisation, she initiates, within the firmly established boundaries of an evening’s performance and its analytic inventories of performance modes, muscular tension, roles, and stylistic options, their gradual and provisional dissolution. The inventories testify to the necessity to admit contingency – but as further subject for analysis, ordering, objectification, and insistence rather like Boulez’ characteristic injunction to “organize frenzy.” Beginning now to work with The Grand Union while at the same time pursuing personal projects, she does indeed begin to work with the performer as medium. Only performer and performance are now questionable notions. As Paxton put it,