The medium is people and what they are doing to and with each other. For the collective head to develop, several years were needed. Grand Union members were influenced as much by their shared past and the particular focus of new developments in collective action as by their own decisions about their future.¹²

In the ensuing era of togetherness, Trio A might seem in its even, self-contained movement and averted gaze a vestige of a solipsistic past; it was ripe for the series of dissolving variations which converted it into a trademark.

*

In the winter of 1970 Rainer traveled in India, observing the performance and teaching of dance. It was, by her account, an experience of unique intensity, of great moment for the development of her work. This in itself was, apparently, surprising to her and one is somewhat surprised by that surprise. Exposure to a specific vocabulary of movement and gesture as such, through full of interest, was less important than the way in which a reconsideration of the nature and function of narrative in dance was forced upon her. The recognition that Indian dance is wholly dependent upon narrative structure, and the experience of the remarkable forms and energies of its articulation as linked to the sense of “the moral and spiritual ambience surrounding these art forms,” impelled a reconsideration of the possibilities of narrative for her own work.

And it became astonishing to me that I have dealt with dramatic elements in my dance but have never fitted them together to make a story. In fact, my whole emphasis has been to avoid any clear continuity. . . . There’s some kind of sleight of hand going on in the way we don’t want to give a clear message; yet by leaving the interpretation of what we do to the audience, we wish to free it, rather than manipulate it. In India the work was meaningful to the audience in a whole other way.¹³

This dimension of meaningfulness was, as pointed out by her interviewer and acknowledged by Rainer, contingent upon another, all-determining factor: the existence of a shared framework of religious and ethical beliefs, as basis of myth and of narrative form. Then continuing the recital of a recent revelation:

The American way is that each person has to carve the possibilities for communication for himself – we have no continuity, we have no traditions, we have no exemplars in myth. We read the Iliad and the Odyssey as fiction, they contain no moral precepts for us. This throws us back on personal experience. . . .

One knows these words and recalls their tone. They restate once again the mythopoeic aspiration which has touched every major poet from Romanticism on, animating the work of Yeats as of Biely, of Eliot as of Auden and of Stevens, of Artaud as of Blake. Rainer, rediscovering, through the sudden and immediate access to a religious culture, the mythopoeic as the ground of narrative form, makes contact with that other basic impulse which traverses the art of our time. With a characteristic lucidity and fidelity to her sense of her own necessary commitments, she sees that impulse as problematic, as requiring an entire reinvention. The vocabulary of gesture and movement of Kathakali dance, though revelatory, will be useless to her; nor can she assent to the myths and rituals of her own culture. Looking for the materials of that narrative, the space of its structure, she is thrown back upon a secular, ironic consciousness and on the realization that “it’s as though my own life contains possibilities for a mythology.” These possibilities were explored and reexplored in the major performances of the next two years, developing toward a complex work, This is the story of a woman who . . . , in a series of recapitulations, variations, and accumulations. They are resynthesized in the film generated by these events, Lives of Performers, in Rainer’s investigation of the modes and forms of the temporality of a possible fiction.

Annette Michelson’s “Yvonne Rainer, Part Two: ‘Lives of Performers,’ ” is available here.

1. These considerations are discussed in detail in my catalogue essay for Robert Morris’ show at the Corcoran Gallery, November-December, 1969, in Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression, Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery, 1969.
2. Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, New York, 1965, p. 165.
3. The reference is to Pierce’s notion of “concrete reasonableness” and its implications for art, a view adumbrated in my account in Artforum, January, 1967, of the “10x10” exhibition at the Dwan Gallery.
4. Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi-Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” in Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1968, p. 270.
5. Ibid.
6. Yvonne Rainer, Unpublished notes for Trio A.
7. It is hardly accidental or surprising that a choreographic development closely linked to the art of the mid- and late ‘60s and, most particularly, to the impulse we know as “Minimalist” should refer us to the historical precedents of Constructivism. As the work of Morris and Andre had impelled us to a fresh consideration of Tatlin and Rodchenko, so, conversely, the sets of the major biomechanical productions anticipate, evoke a corps of dancers tuned to the task performance as the task of performance. In the set for The Magnificent Cuckold, architectural components are placed upon the ground: nothing depends from the flys; costumes are replaced by work clothes; no props nor furniture nor space in which to play out the drama of interiority are offered. Each architectural component solicits an intense, physical, utterly objectified response. And the revolution of a colored disk objectifies, measures, renders visible the passing of time itself.
8. The Meyerholdian style, its biomechanical homogeneity of objectification are supported, however, by a larger, pervasive context, that of the task-oriented society of Socialist Construction in which the abolition of classes was the ground for a total reassessment of art and artifice. In that abolition the boundaries between interior and exterior, sculpture and architecture, leisure and purposeful activity could be reconsidered and given import. It is the largeness and the radicality of the revolutionary enterprise which gives to Tatlin’s Monument its peculiar iconic power, and to Meyerhold’s work the resonance which surrounds us still. The resonance and radicality are rooted in the common aspiration, the immense task of, Socialist Construction and its analytic working processes.
9. Michael Snow, “Passages,” Artforum, September, 1971, p. 63.
10. Schwitters, “Anna Blume,” in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, New York, 1965, p. 141. The translation is reprinted here with some slight modification.
11. See my review of the Morris exhibition, “Three Notes on an Exhibition as a Work,” Artforum, June, 1970, p. 62.
12. Steve Paxton, “The Grand Union,” The Drama Review, September, 1972, p. 131.
13. Yvonne Rainer, “Response to India,” The Drama Review, Spring, 1971. This quotation and following ones are excerpted from this interview.