Rehearsal Behavior. II: Yvonne Rainer

Join us Saturday, September 19 at 3pm for a screening of Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers (1972). The film will be followed by an in-person conversation with Rainer.

This event is part of Rehearsal Behavior, a screening series guest-curated by Andrea Torres and Charlotte Strange tracing a capacious lineage of choreographic moving-image works: from the dance-for-film pioneers of the 1940s–60s, to experimental video of the late 1970s, '80s, and '90s, to contemporary acts of self-expression through direct camera performance. Featured artists inspire, reference, and collaborate with one another, evidencing the accumulative effect of intergenerational exchange on this hybrid form. 

Rehearsal Behavior takes its title from a phrase of Rainer's own coining as a choreographer in the early ‘70s. The expression juxtaposed the generative looseness of the rehearsal space with the clear hierarchy of directed live performance, as dancers’ spontaneous responses deliberately reshaped the work and, in the process, pushed toward a more democratic social structure. 

The series situates expansive definitions of choreography within a broader filmic tradition, drawing connections across generations of artists who engage the moving body as both subject and form. Films by artists including Chantal Akerman, Shirley Clarke, Amy Greenfield, and Rainer reflect developing feminist perspectives on movement, performance, and cinematography as contested sites of bodily autonomy. These pieces amplify and respond to prominent scholarship of the 1960s and '70s that applied psychoanalytic concepts to the dynamics of spectatorship, self-perception, physical exertion, and erotic labor engendered by film and video.

Where Rainer worked to dissolve the choreographer's authority within a dance, subsequent artists in the series have taken up collaborative and often explicitly queer, feminist frameworks to formally employ the social relationships that usually remain backstage. These practices, separated by decades, share a refusal to let the finished performance eclipse the unruly process that produced it.

Film

Yvonne Rainer, Lives of Performers (1972, 90 minutes)
Rainer's pas de trois: a man is torn between two women. Through this archetypal conceit, Rainer questions how power surfaces and shifts in a relationship, then radically fractures narrative conventions by incorporating changing performers, austere collages of rehearsal footage, still photography, staged tableaux, and scattered spoken and on-screen text throughout the film. Recurring intertitles bookend sequences, drawing from sources including Leo Bersani's writing on cliché and Jung’s on desire, an extension of Rainer’s longtime engagement with early feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory. These self-reflexive devices keep the film's relationship to its own material unsettled, never quite letting the audience rest in immediacy or in critical distance.

With her debut feature, Rainer carried her experimentation with dance into a new medium. In Lives of Performers, she seeks to represent the democratic spontaneity of group rehearsal—something akin to the spirit of the crowd—as a defining element of finished works. Rainer also interrogates her own authority. In her voiceover script, she puzzles over the performer’s actions, a wry deflation of her dual role as director and troupe leader. Central to Lives of Performers' success is Rainer's principal collaborator, cinematographer Babette Mangolte (who was, at the time, also just beginning to work with a then-emerging Chantal Akerman), and whose roving camera movement gives the film a second, quietly poised presence alongside Rainer's own.

Of her transition to film, Rainer said: “Having survived my various physical and psychic traumas and emboldened by the women’s movement, I felt entitled to struggle with an entirely new lexicon. The language of specific emotional experience… promised all the ambivalent pleasures and terrors of the experiences themselves: seduction, passion, rage, betrayal, grief, and joy."

Rehearsal Behavior runs from September 17-20. Two screenings at e-flux are complemented by screenings at Spectacle Theater on September 20 at 7:30pm, and at other venues to be announced.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
 – Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
 – For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave, a garage door, leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
 – e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.