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I Promised Myself I Would Never Let It Leave My Body's Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

Pat Catterson
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Extract

From Jill Johnston to Sally Banes, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, Ramsay Burt, and, most recently, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, dance historians and theorists have extolled the qualities of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and discussed its significance in dance history. My relationship to this dance is unique. I first saw it at the Billy Rose Theatre in New York City in 1969, and in the same year I learned and performed it at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. In November of 1970 I first performed it retrograde, and I first taught it in the summer of 1971. In the forty years since, I have continued to perform and teach it. One of the high points in this odyssey was performing it in a duet with Yvonne at Judson Church in Trio A Pressured, a 1999 piece that marked her return to dance after a twenty-five-year hiatus as a filmmaker.

What is it about this dance, beyond its ideas and groundbreaking methods, that has kept me wanting to perform it and others wanting to see and learn it? And how is the experience of doing it different from that of viewing it? How has it changed for me and across generations over the years? I must go back to that first experience with the dance to begin to answer these questions.

Type
A Dancer Writes: Yvonne Rainer's Trio A Now
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , Winter 2009 , pp. 3 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2009

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References

1. For one week in February 1969 the Billy Rose Theatre was the site of a mini modern dance festival with four programs featuring works by Twyla Tharp, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and Don Redlich. Yvonne's evening on February 6 was called Rose Fractions and included one new work and excerpts from Northeast Passing and The Mind Is a Muscle, along with one work by Deborah Hay.

2. Connecticut Composite took place July 9, 1969, in several sites in the Crozier Williams Building at Connecticut College as part of the American Dance Festival.

3. This essay was first published in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Battock, Gregory (New York: Dutton, 1968).Google Scholar

4. WAR was first performed at Douglas College at Rutgers University on November 6, 1970, and Grand Union Dreams at Emmanuel Midtown YM-YWHA in New York City on May 16, 1971. We who took Yvonne's class became an auxiliary group to the main performers of the Grand Union in these performances.

5. The first was an evening-length work Yvonne created in 2000 called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Later excerpts of it along with a version of Trio A Pressured were part of White Oak's touring Past Forward program.

6. Since 2005 Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sally Silvers, and myself, nicknamed the Raindears, have collaborated with Yvonne in the creation of her newest dance works: AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M.; RoS Indexical; and Spiraling Down.

7. What some European audiences might find innovative Americans might consider déjà vu. From what I have seen, European's take on American 1960s dance is an imitation of a conjectured “style.” There is a self-consciousness in their renditions and in my view they lack the spirit of it.

8. These performances, two of which I saw, took place March 31 to April 2, 1970, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.