June 2 to June 4, 2016
512 W 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

What is dust but history settling itself? Yvonne Rainer’s latest permutation of the ongoing project, The Concept of Dust, performed at The Kitchen, began quite literally with the death of an author. The stage was empty save for a white towel, pillow, and grey folding chair. The dancers, as they walked on stage, appeared not serious but devastated. Rainer began to speak: “I have a sad announcement to make tonight. One of our members won’t be here; Pat Catterson died last night.” Before the audience could react, a voice yelled from offstage, “No, what the fuck, Yvonne? What are you trying to do, get rid of me?” The forced farce — Catterson’s response sounded like that of an overly dramatic television actress — triggered first nervous, then genuine laughter from the audience as Catterson and Rainer eyed each other warily in the center of the floor. Though as the dance progressed this beginning increasingly faded from memory, the concept of lost, disembodied, or assumed voices became the spine of the piece.

Catterson soon, again, became the central figure as she began to tap dance, explaining as she danced:

During the voyage from Africa, slaves were occasionally brought up from the ship’s hull and made to dance. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them alive. Imagine what this meant: they did routines that a month or two earlier had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or the expression of their relationship with their grandparents. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of reconciliation built into tap.

With this speech — which was likely found text, as indicated by Rainer in her text on the piece — Catterson turns the once-comic atmosphere shades darker. While some of the dancers’ ensuing movements are intentionally stilted and quotidian, they can no longer be quite as amusing as much of the audience seemed to believe, laughing along. Instead, the movements and voices begin to feel hysterical. As slow violin music plays, a low and incoherent woman’s voice is subtly woven into the soundscape as if it were a subconscious murmur conducting the dancers, who improvisationally iterate small, choreographed passage of movement. Their imperfect coordination conveys informality reminiscent of rehearsal. Combined with the hysterical impulses woven into the choreography, this informality surfaces Rainer’s concern for the elemental chaos within the apparent order of daily life, which also comes through in her chosen texts. Dust is the ultimate mark of quotidian life, for it can only exist among whatever has become so routine as to be neglected.

The informality and familiarity of the dancers’ motions also allows each dancer to communicate their personality; with time, one notices how the same move looks different across bodies. Fifth position arms look best on the dancer who moves most lightly and elegantly. In ballet, the merging of body with gesture may be desirable, but in this choreography Rainer seems more interested in pointing to the citation of movement, paralleling the citation of text. Here, the same move looks best on the body that performs it most unnaturally, thus highlighting the difference between a routine and learned movement. And again, given the forced look of these movements on the dancers’ bodies,Catterson’s mention of being “made to dance” boils to the surface.

Rainer’s quoted texts are compiled in a stapled packet of papers, which she flips through during the performance, first while sitting in a chair at the edge of the stage, and then while running to the side of a dancer to ask them to read an excerpt. Most of them do so willingly, but some run away as Rainer approaches. When she finally catches up, she captures in her microphone only a gasp or guttural sound. But that appears satisfactory, as if “gasp” were part of the text. Though largely disconnected, and from sources including the Metropolitan Museum and New York Times, some texts are identified, such as excerpts from Kingsley Amis and from Maureen N McLane’s My Poets (2012). Rainer may introduce these partly for amusement, but also because they seem to be neglected stories: later in the dance, she reads a story about a young black man who was wrongly arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, beaten up in jail, and later released but with permanently damaged eyes. By blowing the dust off of these stories, one brings them back into the present, calls attention to their contemporary relevance.

Citations are defined by their removal from an original context. Because the performers may rearrange the phrases of the dance as they perform — and presumably Rainer may rearrange the order of the spoken texts — it is not their sequence or trajectory but rather their similarities that reveal Rainer’s intentions. In one phrase of the dance, the lights turn off completely. A voice speaks, that of an invisible narrator. She recites the history of a fossil. As she reads, one can hear that she is reading from a printed text, for she repeats some words and mispronounces others. Stumbling over words and imperfectly miming movements are both acts of citation. They also allow the voices and motions of history to become personalized, no longer omnipotent and objective. History is defined by its belonging to the past; it is made visible only in its residues, its accumulation of context: references, citations and dust.

The post Dust Settling: Yvonne Rainer Choreographs History at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

Rainer has penned a letter to LA MOCA’s already-beleaguered dealer-turned-director Jeffrey Deitch demanding that he  justify what she sees as bizarre, sadistic antics, to be visited Saturday night (November 12) upon a cadre of young LA performers by veteran performance artist Abramovic.

Abramovic forged her reputation for emotionally and politically charged happenings via masochistic feats of physical and mental endurance.  Audiences would be challenged to do anything they liked to her with an array of potentially menacing objects.  Or daggers would be thrust at excruciating speed in proximity to her fingers. The daughter of a Yugoslav general, she courted martyrdom for the twin causes of existential satire and avant garde provocation.

But these days the celebrated performer, getting on in years, delegates the degradation to younger, fitter and presumably desperate (whether financially or for fame) dancers and actors.  At her MoMA retrospective last year, surrogates were enlisted to reenact her classic performances.  Implication: the masochist has turned sadist in her dotage.

The MOCA fundraiser adds a further twist to this dynamic as pointedly humiliating performances are laid on for the specific delectation of big ticket paying party goers in what Rainer compares to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lurid 1975 masterpiece, Salò. The movie is a reworking of the Marquis de Sade’s classic, “120 of Sodom” which the Italian cineaste sets in the last days of Fascist Italy.

At MOCA, performers are to be stationed on a rotating lazy susan under each table for a full three hours (with no pee break) forcing eye contact with each diner—uncomfortable eye contact has become a major theme of Abramovic’s work in a number of recent performances.  As Rainer writers in her letter to Deitch:

Subjecting her performers to public humiliation at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors is yet another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed and Ms Abramovic’s obliviousness to differences in context and some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others. An exhibition is one thing …but titillation for wealthy donor/diners as a means of raising money is another.

Another vignette to be reenacted for the amusement of gala attendees entails performers lying naked, and still, underneath skeletons.  Rainer ascribes the willingness of young actors and dancers to subject themselves to such degradations, “to become decorative table ornaments installed by a celebrity artist” as symptomatic of a desperate need “of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves” as well as working for “sub-minimal wages.“

A volunteer performer, who has chosen to remain anonymous but whose testimony has been circulated with Rainer’s letter, reports that “diners may try to feed us, give us drinks, fondle us under the table, etc but … whatever happens, we are to remain in performance mode and unaffected.”  All this, over a fifteen-hour contract, for $150 “(plus a MOCA one year membership!!!)”

What Rainer does not spell out explicitly, but must nonetheless occur to many readers, is the extraordinary poignancy of making use of young performers in this way against the backdrop of protests by the “99%”.  The Los Angeles art/philanthropy circuit upon which LA MOCA draws its support represents in extremis the kind of concentration of personal wealth resented by the excluded and marginalized in the current economy.   Jeffrey Deitch has already proven himself seriously accident prone in gauging the mood of his adoptive city since assuming MOCA’s directorship, as the case of his ordered destruction of Blu’s anti-war mural illustrated.  This might be an instance of similar tone deafness to the changing social climate.

If, meanwhile, Abramovic’s aim is to represent the divide between haves and have nots in a pointed theater of the absurd, the likes of Eli Broad and David Geffen and other well-heeled diners might not appreciate being cast as the very caricature of the 1%.  The loss of donors would prove more catastrophic to Jeffrey Deitch than that of mere street artists or doyennes of avant garde dance.

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