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

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.

When I first saw it as the closing event of a long evening, featuring work by both Yvonne and Deborah Hay at the Billy Rose Theatre,¹ I knew nothing about its ideology. I just saw a dance. Being a dancer and a fledgling choreographer (poised to present my first full evening of work at Judson in late 1970), I saw it differently, perhaps, from someone who was not a dance practitioner. Whenever it is performed, Yvonne typically presents this dance more than once, usually three times in a row, and the Billy Rose show was no exception. First, her main group of five dancers did it, then ten or so nondancers, and lastly she along with all fifteen of them did it again to the Chambers Brothers rendition of "In the Midnight Hour." I remember this experience vividly. I knew I was seeing something new as well as seeing in a new way. This had been true of the whole evening, but this tripled Trio A made the strongest impression of all. In fact, it was thrilling. From the moment it began I was taken by it. It was the look of it, the way it was done, the feel of it, and it was the way all of this resonated for that time and my generation.

Many, including Yvonne, talk about how difficult this dance is to see because—and Yvonne purposely set it up this way to maximize this difficulty—nothing in it repeats. It is one distinctive movement after another for about five minutes, depending on the performer. What Ellen Goodman, my first New York City friend, who accompanied me that evening, and I saw that night emblazoned itself in our memories. It was the uniqueness of the moves themselves that enabled their capture in our minds' eyes, so much so that, on the way back home, we tried to remember everything we could from it, demonstrating these fragments to one another and spurring one another's recall as we walked down the street, waited for the train, and got to her apartment. We wanted to hold onto it, for it spoke to us in some way.

The dance's shaping of the upper body against the lower body and the clarity and complexity of its relationship to space reminded me of Merce's work, but it wasn't from his abstract, technically polished body-land, nor from the fairyland of ballet or the heroic myth-land of Graham. Instead, this was a land I knew. It was accessible but just as beautiful to me as dances from those other lands—perhaps even more so. We saw ourselves in it. I dubbed it "the people's dance."

The late 1960s was a...