Presented on October 15th and 21st 1966, Carriage Discreteness is a choreographic performance by Yvonne Rainer, who juxtaposes a variety of elements offered to the public for interpretation: displacement of objects and people on the stage, gravitation of mobiles at heights, a conversation about a film, and screen projections. 

 This ambitious performance combines the growing interest of the dancer Yvonne Rainer for the cinema and the research carried out by the Judson Dance Theater into everyday gestures. Two planes appear to oppose one another in a complex grid of correspondences and meanings. A profane plane: that of the stage where a group of dancers displace slabs, beams and cubes designed by Carl Andre, just like workers or removal men. As background sounds, the conversation of a man and a woman about a film by Bertolucci. And a heavenly plane: that of objects circulating under the vaulted ceiling of the Arsenal, a rod and a sphere, just like satellites or abstract divinities. Among them, Steve Paxton, an acrobatic angel thrust from the balcony, sweeps through space on a swing until he gradually comes to a standstill above the stage. A reference to circus that we find in the extract from a film by W.C. Fields, followed by a sequence taken from a melodrama with James Cagney. 

Yvonne Rainer, a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, was born in 1934 in San Francisco, California. A key figure in American post-modern dance, she is known for redefining the image of the dancer by rejecting virtuosity and physical expressivity. She was a member of the collectives The Judson Dance Theater and The Grand Union before turning to experimental filmmaking in 1972.

Initially aspiring to become an actress, Yvonne Rainer moved to New York in 1956. Married to abstract expressionist painter Al Held, she was immersed in the visual arts scene and connected with artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alex Hay. In 1957, at the age of 23, she took her first dance classes with Edith Stephen. By 1959, she was studying with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, while also training in classical techniques, and decided to fully dedicate herself to dance.

In 1960, she attended a workshop led by Anna Halprin in California and, upon returning to New York, enrolled in Robert Dunn’s composition class. These experiences proved pivotal in shaping her choreographic approach. Anna Halprin emphasized the concept of tasks and a focus on the process of action, while Robert Dunn explored structuring dance through simple concepts or chance-based processes.

Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Deborah Hay also participated in Robert Dunn’s workshops. These dancers, then in their early twenties, were deeply engaged with the New York avant-garde art scene. Under Dunn’s guidance, they presented some of the works created during the workshops at a dance concert held on July 6, 1962, at the Judson Memorial Church—a seminal event in post-modern dance history.

During this period, Yvonne Rainer also performed for choreographers such as Simone Forti, James Waring, and Aileen Passlof.

Source: Centre national de la danse

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi