{"id":255,"date":"2009-12-15T14:18:02","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T13:18:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lepeuplequimanque.org\/yvonne-rainer.html"},"modified":"2023-11-11T15:57:47","modified_gmt":"2023-11-11T14:57:47","slug":"yvonne-rainer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lepeuplequimanque.org\/en\/2009\/yvonne-rainer\/","title":{"rendered":"An interview with Yvonne Rainer (2008)"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” row_border_radius=”none” row_border_radius_applies=”bg” overflow=”visible” overlay_strength=”0.3″ gradient_direction=”left_to_right” shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”all” column_element_direction_desktop=”default” column_element_spacing=”default” desktop_text_alignment=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_backdrop_filter=”none” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” column_position=”default” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1\/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” animation_type=”default” bg_image_animation=”none” border_type=”simple” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]\n

Nous reprenons ici l’entretien que nous avions publi\u00e9 sur le blog elles@centrepompidou<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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N\u00e9e en 1934, San Francisco (Californie, \u00c9tats-Unis),\u00a0Yvonne Rainer vit\u00a0\u00e0 Los Angeles (Californie, \u00c9tats-Unis).<\/p>\n

Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quiros <\/strong>: Yvonne Rainer, we wanted to ask you about the twofold transformation of your pioneering work as a choreographer within the New York avant-garde. Your work has become increasingly politicized, starting with highly formalist choreographic work and developing into a feminist consciousness in the 70s, culminating in a film like Privilege in 1990, which explores the intertwining relationships between racism and sexism. At the same time, you turned to film, gradually distancing yourself from dance. How did you make the transition from dance to images and film? Finally, how do you see the link between art and politics in your work?<\/p>\n

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Yvonne Rainer, Film about a Woman Who (1974) coll. centre Pompidou<\/p><\/div>\n

Yvonne Rainer<\/strong>\u00a0:<\/p>\n

In the early 70s when I made the shift from dance to film, the reasons were multiple: an aging body, a disinclination to form a dance company with all that entailed, an interest in experimental film, which I had followed from the late 50\u2019s, and wanting to deal with narrative, with fiction and with the feminist issues that were arising, and my experience as a woman. Film, with all its possibilities for combining image, text,\u00a0 and voice, seemed to offer more possibilities than dance, or the kind of dance that I did, which was not narrative, but athletic and abstract. Film just seemed a much more open arena for exploration.<\/p>\n

Some years ago someone asked me \u201cwhy do you always concern yourself with exposing the conditions of production of filmmaking and do you see yourself as progressing beyond it?\u201d This is a very political question, and I responded as though someone had thrown down a gauntlet:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201dThe word \u2018beyond\u201d suggested a failure you have to overcome. The question also implied that one was making films simply for antagonistic or contestational reasons. I was interested in the positive conception of formal playfulness as opposed to the negative connotations of the deconstructive position. There was, of course, a serious justification that had to do with the fluidity of signifiers and disruption of fixed social positions.\u00a0 If narrative structure was an analogue for social hierarchy \u2014 and there had been much theorizing about this \u2014 then the disruption or messing around with narrative coherence had a positive function in pointing toward possibilities for a more fluid and open organization of social relations.\u00a0 This was, of course, an ongoing project, not at all subject to aesthetic fashion, not something I attempted or intended to \u201cget beyond,\u201d or \u201ccross over\u201d from, or rise above. By the early 80\u2019s my own relation to narrative had become increasingly complicated.\u00a0 I saw narrative as an effective \u201cgripping device,\u201d or means of engaging an audience and as such, something that had to be considered and mastered. This meant that situations and characters had to have varying degrees of credibility. It was necessary, however, that the coefficients of time and space be played with – for comic relief, for disruption, for foregrounding \u201cthe apparatus,\u201d for allowing analysis and commentary.\u00a0 I was echoing Brecht and Godard, perhaps, but with regard to Brecht, I wanted more details of everyday life, and regarding Godard, I wanted more psychological truth.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

For awhile I followed and was influenced by the arguments and critiques of feminist writers like Teresa de Lauretis and particularly Laura Mulvey\u2019s famous \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d which construed mainstream cinema as a vehicle for men to overcome female obstacles to their self-discovery and attainment of manhood.\u00a0 These writings described the deployment of female figures in the noir and western genres as the creation of enigmas to be deciphered and controlled or threatening landscapes to be traversed and possessed.\u00a0 And narrative structure, with its development, climax, and d\u00e9noument, was in and of itself implicated.\u00a0 But subsequently I realized that there are all kinds of narratives, histories of marginalized or \u201cdisappeared\u201d people who have not had a fair shot at being represented, and it seemed obvious that narrative structures can be used for both progressive and oppressive ends.\u00a0 As a consequence, it became difficult, for me at least, to sustain a political critique of narrativity.\u00a0 Let me just say that I was interested in creating situations for different kinds of spectator engagement within a given film.\u00a0 And narrative was only one of these.<\/p>\n

Another question arises: Why was it so important for me constantly to remind the audience \u2014 via all kinds of strategies \u2014 that these apparitions on the screen are fabrications?\u00a0 Around 1985 I wrote, \u201c\u2026words are uttered but not possessed by my performers\u2026\u201d\u00a0 When I first started using more than one performer to play a given character\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0 in Film About a Woman Who\u2026<\/span> two women stand in for the \u201cshe\u201d \u2013\u00a0 it was more an aesthetic or formal, rather than political choice; mixing up the referents simply made things more interesting and lively. Later I would say that detaching meaning from the speaking subject was one way of forcing the spectator to deal with issues in a broader social field rather than being vicariously swept away on a tide of simulated individual experience.\u00a0 The visual de-centering of the subject has a philosophical and historical parallel in poststructuralist writing, like Barthe\u2019s \u201cDeath of the Author\u201d, Foucault\u2019s \u201cWhat Is an Author?\u201d and Julia Kristeva\u2019s work, which I was reading around 1980.\u00a0 The romantic notions of unified personhood and stable identity were under attack for the next decade.\u00a0 Kristeva\u2019s \u201csubject-in-process\u201d was especially appealing to feminists who were struggling to get out from under the tyranny of gender masquerade.\u00a0 With the advent of post-colonial writing, however, the focus of discussions shifted from gender to race, and there were wonderful films made about African-American experience, particularly those of Charles Burnett and Julie Dash.\u00a0 The writings of Stuart Hall and Homi Baba have been influential in recasting the debates about identity in terms of cross-cultural hybridity.<\/p>\n

This is all very superficial and sketchy, but it may provide a framework for following my particular path from formal avant-garde to experimental social narrative.\u00a0 Here is an afterthought:\u00a0 From my earliest choreography, I never thought of my chosen medium as a vehicle for \u201cself-expression.\u201d\u00a0 This was partly John Cage\u2019s influence;\u00a0 somewhere in my head I hear either him or Merce Cunningham saying \u201cIf you want to express yourself, take up basket-weaving.\u201d\u00a0 Which in retrospect makes little sense, given Native Am erican traditions and the cultural and social functions of basket weaving.\u00a0 But at the time I interpreted it to mean that of all the things in the world available to the artist, the self, or its integrity, is only one inconsequential element.\u00a0 Of course, in terms of Cage\u2019s practice, disposing of self-expression was key to the elimination of personal choice in art-making via aleatory methods of composition, and was even perhaps an indirect influence on subsequent notions of gender mutability.<\/p>\n

I use the past tense in the above paragraphs because I have not made a feature length film since 1996 (MURDER and murder), when I began to drift back in to choreography. If I do re-enter the film arena, I\u2019m not sure what my modus operandi will be.<\/p>\n

Yvonne Rainer<\/p>\n

1990-2008<\/p>\n

Entretien in\u00e9dit r\u00e9alis\u00e9 en juin 2008 par Kantuta Quir\u00f3s & Aliocha Imhoff \/ le peuple qui manque<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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