How Yvonne Rainer's art shaped new ways of watching as well as performing; how it connected 1960s avant-garde art to politics and activism. In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body—stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin. Without discounting these innovations, Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in Being Watched that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer—or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display. Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s—from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances—Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called “the seeing difficulty.” (As Rainer said: “Dance is hard to see.”) Viewed from this perspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In a spectacle-soaked era, moreover—when images of war played nightly on the television news—Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as a choreographer, but as a sculptor of spectatorship.

If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals--including breakfast--have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading. --from Feelings Are Facts In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts(the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham (and heard Graham declare, "when you accept yourself as a woman, you will have turn-out"--that is, achieve proper ballet position) and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962 (dancing with Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Lucinda Childs), hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and anti-war causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances--including The Mind Is a Muscleand its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan--and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life. The mosaic-like construction of Feelings Are Factsrecalls the composition-by-juxtaposition of Rainer's work in film and dance, displaying prismatic variations from what she calls her "reckless past" for our amazement and appreciation.

The final iteration of Rainer's dance rant A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies, accompanied by texts offering a real-time account of Rainer's creative process. Choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer has long investigated the ways in which movement can be a political act in and of itself—on the stage, on the screen, or at the lectern. In Revisions, Rainer pushes her interest in embodied activism to a new arena: what she calls the “dance rant.” This volume includes the final iteration of Rainer's latest dance rant, entitled A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies. This performance piece evolved in live presentations in Dublin, Stockholm, and New York before being expanded and adapted in written form here. In this now-completed work, Rainer mobilizes her rage and bafflement at contemporary political events through the guise of Apollo, Leader of the Muses. Revisions also includes a compilation of emails and diary entries that provide a real-time account of Rainer's process of creating and workshopping a dance. “Pedagogical Vaudeville 3” reveals Rainer's consistent interest in reworking and reconsidering material across multiple mediums, formats, and contexts, and offers an unique glimpse at the working methods of one of this century's preeminent dance artists. Bookended with an introduction by artist and scholar Gregg Bordowitz and an analysis of Rainer's AG Indexical with a Little Help from H. M. by dance historian Anna Staniczenko, these texts serve not only as a revision of the conventional understanding of five decades of Rainer's production, but also as a timely manual for performance as an act of resistance.

Her work has been the subject of more than a dozen retrospectives, most recently at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and has earned her numerous honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations."--BOOK JACKET. "The latest volume in PAJ's Art + Performance series, A Woman Who ... is a wide-ranging collection of Rainer's interviews, essays, talks, and other writings."--BOOK JACKET.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. When the Body Is the Material -- 1 Hurray for People: Yvonne Rainer -- 2 Concretions: Carolee Schneemann -- 3 Reasons to Move: Vito Acconci -- Coda. Forming the Senses -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z -- Illustration Credits

"To read Rainer's screenplays is to rediscover, even reinvent, the films all over again, but more importantly to realize that images and mise-en-scà ̈ne are as key to how Rainer's films work as is language." -- The Independent "The scripts record the unique structure of [Rainer's] films, the stresses, strains, and crackling of voices layering over and into one another. Their publication is an important moment for feminist film." -- Cineaste "Rainer's films are not highly accessible but are important to the critical imagination as an example of the sustained exploration of political and feminist theory." -- Choice "Rainer's important work in the area of avant-garde filmmaking in the seventies and eighties is amply recorded in this book... " -- Cantrills Filmnotes' The scripts of Rainer's five films, presented here along with essays, an interview, and bibliography, demonstrate the evolution of her political consciousness as well as her creative engagement with the contemporary film and cultural scene. These texts challenge the illusionist and ideological presumptions of mainstream culture and cinema.