Yvonne
Rainer

The dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934 in San Francisco) came to West Berlin in late 1976 as a fellow in the film section of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP). Her participation in the program—she first applied for a BKP Grant Award in 1973—met with initial difficulties, as there was no program for dancers and choreographers at that time, and the newly established film section had been temporarily suspended for financial reasons. Rainer had studied modern dance with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham for ten years in New York, and began choreographing her own pieces in 1960—first of all solo pieces, then larger group choreographies. She introduced everyday movements into dance that were deliberately modeled on 1960s minimalist painting and “Primary Structures”– basic geometric forms. In 1962 Rainer co-founded the Judson Dance Theater; the company’s first performance on July 6, 1962 is regarded as the birth of postmodern dance. In 1966 Rainer began incorporating slides, film sequences, and text fragments into her choreographies—the latter are also found in her films. In 1972 she directed her first feature film, Lives of Performers, which was a continuation of her mixed-media performances. Rainer’s new definition of filmic narrative was contrary to the then dominant avant-garde directorial practice. Her films have a distinctly feminist and political tone: the psychology of political radicality, rituals of progressive and academic discourse, relationship issues, and female sexuality in old age are among the themes that are put up for discussion, and are often presented with an emotional vulnerability bordering on parody.

In September 1976 Yvonne Rainer’s work was included in the film and video section of SoHo – Downtown Manhattan, an exhibition that took place as part of the Berliner Festwochen at the Akademie der Künste (West), and in May 1977, the Arsenal cinema in cooperation with the Artists-in-Berlin Program screened her first three feature films. The script for her fourth—and perhaps most complex—film, Journeys from Berlin/1971, which she completed in 1980, resulted from her stay in Berlin. The film was made in 1979 in New York, Berkeley, London, and Berlin, and the Artists-in-Berlin Program was also involved in its production. One of the four interwoven narrative threads—whereby the textual and visual levels are mainly independent of one another—consists of short texts scrolling over a black background; in note form, they present a history of key political events in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1953, culminating in the death of Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe at Stammheim prison. The famous image of Meinhof with her hands clasped together above her head appears in various places in Rainer’s film—it disappears, for example, into the drawer of a psychotherapist (whose patient, played by Annette Michelson, talks about an attempted suicide in Berlin in 1971), and it also sits on the mantlepiece in the kitchen of a couple (voiced by Amy Taubin and Vito Acconci) who discuss the political motives of nineteenth-century Russian terrorists and the Rote Armee Fraktion while preparing dinner. The streets of Berlin appear in a number of filmed sequences.

Prior to her Berlin stay, Rainer took part in the 1976 Edinburgh Film Festival; that same year, the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach showed a retrospective of her films. Rainer participated in documenta 6 and 12 (1977 and 2007); for the latter edition she created a new dance performance that was presented at the theater in the Fridericianum.

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd