‘No’ to spectacle…
No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to the involvement of the performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved
Yvonne Rainer
Original source: Tulane Review (1965) 10, 2:178
How depressing! Why is she so negative?
That’s funny, I read it as a positive (and I realize now how odd that is) and as a text which is pro reality, rather than the artificial and made up…
Interesting. I don’t know the context of this text, maybe I just don’t get it.. To me, some of the statements are a bit depressing. For example the last one: “no to moving or being moved”. If we couldn’t move each other, metaphorically speaking, wouldn’t that lead to a rather boring and depressing society? Isn’t all media and culture in some way artificial and made up anyway?
Yvonne Rainer was founding member of the Judson Theatre in NYC in the 60’s where she and her peers (such as Childs, Hay, Brown, Paxton, Dunn and more) took their medium as their subject, and explored what dance is through Happenings, and if I my readings are ‘right’, had a good time with it.
They explored whether dance needed professional executors, whether it needed a story, a stage, music, props etc. They reacted against the stylistic constructs of dance (in modern dance such as Graham, as much as classical ballet). So I believe they did want to move their audience or participants, but not by top-down symbolic expressions, but through experiencing something real and present and unpretentious. Sounds wholesome and serious perhaps, but they drew on Dada as well as phenomenology, and as I said, had fun trying things out for themselves and others.
Pingback: ‘Yes’ to spectacle « Kinetically