Skip to main content
Back to search
  • Add to playlist

Trio A

Numeridanse 2023 - Director : Alexander, Robert

Choreographer(s) : Rainer, Yvonne (United States)

Present in collection(s): Numeridanse

en fr

Trio A

Numeridanse 2023 - Director : Alexander, Robert

Choreographer(s) : Rainer, Yvonne (United States)

Present in collection(s): Numeridanse

en fr

Trio A

Trio A, a solo dance by Rainer, was initially performed in 1966 as a trio by Rainer and fellow New York choreographer-dancers David  Gordon and Steve Paxton under the title The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1.  At the premiere, at Manhattan’s Judson Memorial Church, the dancers each  performed the same sequence of movements twice but not in unison,  accompanied by the sound of wooden slats being thrown from the balcony  one by one. Since then it has been presented in various forms, sometimes  integrated into other pieces by Rainer or adapted and interpreted by  other choreographers. This film depicts Rainer’s solo performance of the  work in 1978, several years after she transitioned from choreography to  filmmaking.

Trio A consists of a four-and-a-half-to-five-minute sequence  of discrete movements that, with the exception of walking, are never  repeated. Although it appears effortless, the dance is painstaking to  learn in its precise articulation of hands, arms, shoulders, feet, and  legs. It is a signature work by Rainer, who in the 1960s transposed to  dance the ideas that were then giving shape to the era’s Minimalist  sculpture and painting, abandoning the aesthetics of classical and  modern dance—which were rooted in virtuosic technique and expression—in  favor of an unenhanced physicality and uninflected continuity of motion.  The deceptive “ordinariness” of many of the individual movements in  Trio A had a profound impact on the development of postmodern dance.

Source: Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)

More information: www.moma.org

Rainer, Yvonne

After spending her childhood and adolescence in San Francisco, Yvonne Rainer moved to New York in 1956. Between 1959 and 1960, she studied dance at the Martha Graham School, while learning ballet at Ballet Arts. In the early 1960s, she participated in Ann Halprin’s workshops and studiously attended classes by Merce Cunningham, where she met a number of her future collaborators. In 1962, she became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theatre. Much like other choreographers of her era, Rainer sought to blur the stark line separating dancers from non-dancers. Inspired by John Cage’s indeterminacy notions, she created her performances according to a series of generic tasks that integrated day-to-day gestures into a dance vocabulary (walking, running, lifting, etc.). Rainer created many of the best-known works produced by the Judson, including We Shall Run (1963), Terrain (1963) and Part of a Sextet (1964).
 

While creating At My Body’s House (1963), she asked engineers Billy Klüver and Harold Hodges to modify miniature radio transmitters to amplify the sounds of her breathing. In 1966, she premiered Trio A, the first section of her work The Mind is a Muscle. This sequence prohibits the dancers from looking at the audience while performing an uninterrupted series of complex movements. Trio A later became an independent work and was performed by Rainer and a number of other artists. Although she had integrated projected images into her performance environments since the mid 1960s, Rainer wrote and directed her first medium length film, Lives of Performers, in 1972.
 

In 1975, she began to focus primarily on making medium and full-length films, in which she reinvested narrative codes. Her films then took a distinctly feminist turn, exploring such themes as terrorism (Journeys from Berlin/1971, 1980), social exclusion (Privilege, 1990) and illness (MURDER and murder, 1996). Between 2000 and 2006, she returned to choreography and created two new works: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000), a group performance commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, and AG Indexical, With a Little Help From H.M. (2006). Rainer taught in the Whitney Independent Program from 1974 onward, and since 2005 she has been emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, California, U.S.).


Source : Website Fondation Langlois, Vincent Bonin © 2006 FDL


More information :

www.fondation-langlois.org 

Alexander, Robert

Director.

Trio A

Choreography : Yvonne Rainer

Interpretation : Yvonne Rainer

Duration : 10"21

Our videos suggestions
03:46

La Valse de Vaslav

Tompkins, Mark (France)

  • Add to playlist
04:07

Icons

Tompkins, Mark (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:01

Hard to Be Soft

Doherty, Oona (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:01

Peekaboo

Goecke, Marco (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:07

Skin

Tchouda, Bouba Landrille (France)

  • Add to playlist
01:57

Walk

  • Add to playlist
06:24

Colin Dunne & eRikm Project

Dunne, Colin (France)

  • Add to playlist
05:05

Locus Focus

Tanaka, Min (France)

  • Add to playlist
48:04

Peuplé, dépeuplé

Ben Aïm, Christian & François (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:13

Peuplé, dépeuplé

Ben Aïm, Christian & François (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:17

Ferry

Keller, Jennifer (United States)

  • Add to playlist
02:40

Cartes postales de Chimère

Bédard, Louise (Canada)

  • Add to playlist
08:04

Yellow Towel

Michel, Dana (France)

  • Add to playlist
07:07

Its not a thing

Gaskin, Keyon (France)

  • Add to playlist
06:30

Sorrow Swag

Lewis, Ligia (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:41

Heimat - focus

Brabant, Jérôme (Reunion)

  • Add to playlist
03:37

Couleurs de femmes

Chane, Yun (Reunion)

  • Add to playlist
06:25

Body Without A Brain

Rianto (Indonesia)

  • Add to playlist
03:58

Kafrine - focus

Bulin, Nadjani (Reunion)

  • Add to playlist
00:00:30

Didier Labbé Quartet - DCN 2013

  • Add to playlist
Our themas suggestions

Dance out loud

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

DANCE AND DIGITAL ARTS

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

K. Danse's artistic partners

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Dyptik Company

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Yield Variations on dissuasive urban furniture

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Roots of Diversity in Contemporary Dance

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Noé Soulier Rethinking our movements

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

CHRISTIAN & FRANÇOIS BEN AÏM – VITAL MOMENTUM

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Les Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

LATITUDES CONTEMPORAINES

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

40 years of dance and music

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

[1930-1960]: Neoclassicism in Europe and the United States, entirely in tune with the times


Parcours

fr/en/

Indian dances

Discover Indian dance through choreographic creations which unveil it, evoke it, revisit it or transform it!

Parcours

fr/en/

The “Nouvelle Danse Française” of the 1980s

In France, at the beginning of the 1980s, a generation of young people took possession of the dancing body to sketch out  their unique take on the world. 

Parcours

fr/en/

Body and conflicts

A look on the bonds which appear to emerge between the dancing body and the world considered as a living organism.

Parcours

fr/en/

James Carlès

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Meeting with literature

Collaboration between a choreographer and a writer can lead to the emergence of a large number of combinations. If sometimes the choreographer creates his dance around the work of an author, the writer can also choose dance as the subject of his text.

Parcours

fr/en/

When reality breaks in

How does choreographic works are testimonies of the world? Does the contemporary artist is the product of an era, of its environment, of a culture?

Parcours

fr/en/

Dance and performance

 Here is a sample of extracts illustrating burlesque figures in Performances.

Parcours

fr/en/

Butoh

On 24th May 1959, Tatsumi Hijikata portrayed the character of the "Man" in the first presentation of a play called Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours).
The Ankoku Butoh was born,

Parcours

fr/en/
By accessing the website, you acknowledge and accept the use of cookies to assist you in your browsing.
You can block these cookies by modifying the security parameters of your browser or by clicking onthis link.
I accept Learn more